I had moved to New York,” said Erma Franklin, “when my first single on Epic—‘Hello Again’—came out. There was a flurry of activity, a good review in Billboard, and some prestigious gigs, including Small’s Paradise Lounge in Harlem, where I often enjoyed the company of Bettye LaVette, a wonderful singer from Detroit, and Esther Phillips, who was going through her heavy drug period. Drugs, of course, was part of those times, especially in the world of rhythm and blues. I indulged. In fact, all the Franklin children indulged. But, as a problem, that didn’t really enter the picture till later in the sixties.
“It was still the early sixties when Aretha was downtown while I was playing uptown. That’s maybe only ten miles but it might have been ten thousand. We would see each other, but when we did, there was a bit of a chill. Some of our friends—like Mary Wells or Smokey—had enjoyed big hits. And because Aretha still had not put out what could be considered a smash, she worried that I might have one before her.”
On February 20, 1962, Aretha appeared at the Village Gate, a jazz club, where she shared the bill with fellow Columbia artist Thelonious Monk. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Monk’s superb biographer, almost five hundred people crowded into the small club. Monk’s young nieces and nephews were there, as excited to see Aretha as they were to see their uncle.
“I was there,” said Erma. “Cecil also came into the city that night because Monk was one of his heroes. In the company of the great master, Aretha more than held her own.”
“I’m a jazz freak,” Cecil told me, “and if I had to name my three favorite pianists they’d be Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonious Monk. I wasn’t gonna miss seeing Monk on the same bill as Ree. It was an amazing night. Monk had just signed with Columbia—I guess that’s why he and Ree were costarring—and he had his man Charlie Rouse on tenor. I don’t know if he had started recording that first album he did for Columbia—Monk’s Dream—but I know he played ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘Just a Gigolo,’ songs that turned up on that record—a record I listened to over a hundred times.
“‘You seem more interested in hearing Monk than me,’ Ree said before the show.
“‘I’m excited to see you both, sis. Excited to see you with him.’
“Because of Monk’s presence, I think Aretha directed more of her show toward jazz. She wanted to show the jazz crowd that she was one of them—and she was. I believe that’s one of the first times she sang ‘Skylark,’ a song she’d soon cut for Columbia. Same thing for ‘Just for a Thrill’ and ‘God Bless the Child.’ We all heard Ray Charles do ‘Just for a Thrill’ on his Genius album, and we’d been hearing Billie Holiday’s ‘Child’ ever since we were children. She smashed them both. Monk had his fans, and Monk got his respect that night. But Sister Ree, who had learned how to tear down a church, tore down that club. We knew she was on the verge of having that monster breakthrough hit we’d all been waiting for.”
The monster hit didn’t arrive then—and wouldn’t for five more years. Meanwhile, Bob Mersey took over Aretha’s recording career.
“Mersey was a pure product of the Columbia culture,” said Bobby Scott, who, in another year, would become a major music figure in Aretha’s life. “I worked with Bob a long time. We were both producers and arrangers, but with much different backgrounds. Goddard Lieberson, who ran the company, saw Mersey as the Pasha of Pop. The great pasha before him was Mitch Miller, the man who defined fifties pop music, and he made a fortune for the label and set the tone for Columbia for years to follow. Mitch was a first-class musician and superb oboist—he played oboe on the famous Charlie Parker with Strings session—but his thing was sales. If you wanna sell music, dumb it down. He was all about Rosemary Clooney doing ‘Come On-a My House’ and Sinatra singing ‘Mama Will Bark’ with Dagmar. Lieberson had made a fortune for the label with the soundtrack of My Fair Lady, and Lieberson had put Bob Mersey with Andy Williams, another moneymaking move. When it became clear that Aretha was not happy with Hammond, Mersey was Lieberson’s logical go-to guy. If she wouldn’t sell as an R-and-B artist, turn her pop. But because she had established some solid credentials as a jazz artist, the label felt she couldn’t abandon jazz entirely. That’s where I came in. I’m a jazz piano player. I was Lester Young’s piano when I was still a teenager. I can also play gospel and blues when I wanna. I’m also a writer—the Beatles covered my ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the Hollies and Neil Diamond had hits with my ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.’ For years I worked as Bobby Darin’s musical director. Back when I first met Aretha, though, I was seen as a jazzy auxiliary to Mersey. Mersey became her main man. I was on the set, but, metaphorically speaking, I was an intermission pianist. Goddard pinned all his hopes on Mersey, and if you listen to those albums he did with her, you’d have to think that Goddard had the right idea.”
Mersey contributed three seminal albums to the Franklin oeuvre: The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, from 1962; Laughing on the Outside, from 1963; and Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, in 1964. Each has moments of singular grace and even immortality.
For Aretha, the highlight of her Mersey association came on The Tender with “Without the One You Love,” her own song. It was the first time she had fashioned a melody, written a lyric, and watched it all transform into a huge string orchestration.
The blues ballad, modeled after “The Masquerade Is Over,” was a harbinger of even bolder Aretha compositions to come. There was no doubt that she had the compositional gift. (A stringless and far more moving version of the song would be recorded live, with Aretha herself on piano, on her 1965 Yeah!!! album.)
There are missteps on The Tender—a mediocre Berry Gordy song, “I’m Wandering”; a heavy-handed cover of Billy Eckstine’s 1949 hit “I Apologize”; a cheesy chart of “Look for the Silver Lining”—but Aretha redeems it all with her otherworldly reading of three songs: “God Bless the Child,” “Just for a Thrill,” and “Try a Little Tenderness.” According to Jerry Wexler, Aretha’s version of “Tenderness” inspired Otis Redding to record it in his singular style. (Redding’s biographer Scott Freeman suggests it was Phil Walden, Otis’s manager, who urged him to sing it, but when I spoke with Walden in the nineties, he confirmed Wexler’s story.)
“Otis had Aretha’s Columbia album where she sings ‘Tenderness’ and ‘God Bless the Child,’” Walden told me. “No doubt that Otis’s take on ‘Tenderness’ became iconic because of the double-time transition. But I know he was trying to channel Aretha. He also wanted to cut ‘God Bless the Child’ but never got the chance. It was Aretha, along with Sam Cooke, that got Otis Redding into standards, which is ironic since it was Aretha’s redo of his ‘Respect’ that turned his little R-and-B tune into an enduring standard.”
The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin was recorded in April and May of 1962. In July, she appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival on the same bill as her father’s friends Clara Ward and Oscar Peterson. The lineup also included Sonny Rollins, Count Basie, Basie’s former blues belter Jimmy Rushing, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington.
Jazz critic Jack Maher wrote the Billboard review: “During the Ellington time on stand, Thelonious Monk showed off his unique abilities as composer and soloist in a performance of ‘Monk’s Dream,’ especially written for the band. Duke conducted. Also a show stopper with Ellington was the appearance of Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-like vocals brought screams of ‘more’ from the crowd.”
Later that same month Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for participating in an Albany, Georgia, demonstration.
“I remember Daddy telling me about how he and Martin were talking about working up a demonstration in Detroit,” said Cecil. “They spoke often, and Dr. King knew he could count on my father. I’d say they were twin souls with the same mission.”
In August, Billboard reviewed “Just for a Thrill” and “Try a Little Tenderness,” saying, “Here are a pair of the best sides that Aretha ever cut and that’s saying a lot. She shows off some of her best vocal work yet on the two standards, and either or both could turn into her biggest seller to date.”
On August 2, Aretha appeared on American Bandstand for the second time. She sang “Don’t Cry, Baby” as well as “Try a Little Tenderness.” But neither song made the charts.
“We all were listening to Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing,’” said Erma. “It was a hit, and we loved it. We loved Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ and Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’ and Ray Charles’s ‘Unchain My Heart.’ They were all hits, they were all great, but were they any greater than the songs Aretha was singing at Columbia? I don’t think so. Ree felt like there was water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”
On September 27, the United States Department of Justice filed suit to end public segregation. Three days later, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett blocked James Meredith from enrolling at the state university.
In mid-October, the Cuban missile crisis traumatized the nation for two weeks. Aretha had little memory of the crisis but specific memories of the comics who opened for her. She spoke about Buddy Hackett and his Chinese-waiter routine, and Professor Irwin Corey, with his frizzled hair and crazy expertise on everything and nothing. She had special regard for the intellectual Dick Gregory, with whom she worked at the Playboy Club in Chicago.
The gigs got bigger, to the point where Aretha was ready to make a management change. In November, Jet reported that “Aretha Franklin’s split with her manager, Jo King, may end up in court because the rising young star wants out of their contract and the manager wants to settle for $9,000.”
“When Ted took over,” said Erma, “the man took over. He had a scorched-earth policy. Jo King was history. Anyone in Jo’s circle was history. Anyone who had previously been involved with Aretha’s career—including her own father—was marginalized. Ted demanded and got total control.”
“Why would Aretha permit that?” I asked Erma.
“I think she was more frightened of the outside world than the rest of us,” Erma answered. “I think she felt the need for protection. Our father had been extremely protective of Aretha. Maybe even overprotective. He led her to the world of show business, but then he had to return to his church world. He could no longer play the role he had been playing since she had begun traveling with him. He could no longer be her day-to-day protector. When that became clear, she looked for a substitute protector. I know it sounds far-fetched, but Ted White had many of our father’s attributes—he was self-assured, he was charismatic, definitely a woman’s man, highly intelligent, highly organized, and able to deal with the cold cruel world effectively. Daddy helped Aretha attain fame in sacred music. Aretha looked to Ted to do exactly that in secular music. You don’t need a PhD in psychology to realize that there’s a reason why we gals often call our lovers and husbands ‘Daddy.’”
For Aretha’s biological daddy, 1963 was a milestone. Reverend C. L. Franklin had watched as, a few years earlier, an urban renewal project had torn down Hastings Street—the bars, the clubs, and the New Bethel Baptist Church—for what would become the Chrysler Freeway. Franklin’s congregation found temporary quarters elsewhere, while the minister spent increased time on the road. According to his biographer Nick Salvatore, this was a period when Los Angeles became his home away from home. His guest sermons in churches around the country increased, along with his involvement in local Detroit politics. C.L. became founding president of the Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action. As a progressive politician, his time had come. His sermons stressing ethnic pride and self-worth, long his signature message, had become touchstones as the national civil rights movement gained strength and wider exposure.
On March 10, he gained a new and more prominent pulpit when the new New Bethel opened its doors on Linwood and Philadelphia. Once a theater, the building had been transformed into a twenty-five-hundred-seat sanctuary by—as C.L. was quick to tell people—an all-black construction company. The minister pointed out that this was not reverse racism. He said it was proof of what “as a race we can do for ourselves if we take advantage of opportunities to qualify ourselves.”
By May, Franklin was in the final stages of formulating his plan to hold a massive freedom march in Detroit with his close friend Dr. King as the main speaker. The conservative/establishment Baptist Ministerial Alliance opposed the march—or at least a march led by Franklin. C.L.’s national stature had excited jealousy among many of his peers. When he came to the Alliance meeting to argue his case and was told by the organization’s president that he couldn’t speak because his Alliance fees were in arrears, C.L. exploded and went after his adversary. Franklin’s colleagues held him back, and the physical fight was averted. In the end, C.L. prevailed because of his close relationship to Dr. King. If Franklin could get King to lead a Detroit freedom march, that march would go forward, no matter how vehement the opposition to Franklin’s involvement.
On May 27, Mahalia Jackson sponsored a fund-raising rally for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference at McCormick Place in Chicago. The Freedom Fund Festival featured Al Hibbler, Mayor Richard Daley, Dick Gregory, Eartha Kitt, and Aretha Franklin. Jet reported that “gospel-turned-blues singer Aretha Franklin came on last in a tough spot after all the preachers and big stars at Mahalia Jackson’s benefit for Martin Luther King and literally broke up the show by sending the crowd home shouting when she closed with a back home rendition of ‘Precious Lord.’ The daughter of Detroit’s Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha then plunked down four $100 bills in Mahalia’s hands for being on the show.”
“The other area where Daddy still held sway over Aretha,” said Cecil, “was performing her civic duty. He drummed that into all of us. Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,’ she’d drop everything and do just that. I don’t think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King’s cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.’ But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.’ She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely.”
Shortly after returning from Chicago, Aretha went into the studio and recorded what could be considered her greatest performance on Columbia.
“I’d say it was her best performance ever,” said Etta James. “Everyone loves her shit on Atlantic, and no doubt they’re classics, but when I heard her sing ‘Skylark,’ I told Esther Phillips, my running buddy back then, ‘That girl pissed all over that song.’ It came at a time when we were all looking to cross over by singing standards. I had ‘Sunday Kind of Love’ and ‘Trust in Me,’ and Sam Cooke was doing ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘When I Fall in Love’ at the Copa. We were all trying to be so middle class. It was the beginning of the bougie black thing. I truly believe Aretha had a head start on us since she was the daughter of a rich preacher and grew up bougie. But, hell, the reasons don’t matter. She took ‘Skylark’ to a whole ’nother place. When she goes back and sings the chorus the second time and jumps an octave—I mean, she’s screaming—I had to scratch my head and ask myself, How the fuck did that bitch do that? I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?’ I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn’t you?’ Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I’m never singing that song again.’”
The record on which “Skylark” appears, Laughing on the Outside, was recorded during the spring and summer of 1963 and is the most consistent and satisfying of the Robert Mersey/Aretha Franklin albums. It is among her most memorable interpretations of any song in any genre.
“When I heard ‘Skylark,’” said Jerry Wexler, “I called John Hammond to congratulate him. I thought he was still her main producer. It was stunningly good. But John told me he had nothing to do with it. Aretha was angry at him because she thought he had signed Erma, and Columbia was looking to put her with Bob Mersey, a mainstream pop guy. Say what you want about those guys, but sometimes even the corniest of them—like my good friend Mitch Miller—can do brilliant things. When it came to Aretha, Mersey served her well. Give the guy credit. His charts were gorgeous.
“Later in the sixties when I met Donny Hathaway and he started talking about singing standards, he pointed to that Laughing on the Outside album. He had it memorized. He wanted to do ‘For All We Know’ in the Aretha vein. If you listen to his version, which is bone-chillingly beautiful, you’ll hear him channeling Aretha.”
Aretha spoke often of her regard for Frank Sinatra and favorably compared her version of “Where Are You?” from her Laughing album to his.
“There are two sides to my sister,” said Cecil when I mentioned to him her bold comparison of herself to Sinatra. “She’s always been confident about her singing. She always knew she had the gift—a gift that big can’t be denied, even by an insecure person. She’d been told by every blood-washed believer who’d heard her sing in church that she was phenomenal. But even though she knew just how good she was—that at age twenty-one, she could sing a ballad with the depth of a Frank Sinatra or a Billie Holiday—another part of her was super-insecure. Her insecurity wasn’t about her talent but about her ability to get over and be a star in show business. That’s why she was willing to try anything to get over—pop, blues, ballads, R-and-B, you name it. That’s also why she was willing to let a tough guy like Ted White lead the way. She thought she needed a bull to break down the doors for her. She never thought she could do it herself—and she was right.”
The songs say as much—Duke Ellington’s lonely “Solitude,” Lerner and Loewe’s “If Ever I Would Leave You,” Johnny Mercer’s “I Wanna Be Around.” The title track, “Laughing on the Outside,” makes the same point—that beneath the veneer, behind the klieg lights of the cover shot and the glamour of Aretha’s glittering gown, there is a reservoir of deep feelings that transcend time and space. She laughs on the outside and weeps on the inside.
She also sang a song Ray Charles had recorded in Los Angeles only months before. Aretha’s New York session took place on June 12. The song—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River”—is one of the great warhorses of American music. It contains an essential metaphor: time is a river, time keeps rolling along, time is indifferent to pain, if only we could disappear into the anonymity of time and leave the burdens of this world behind. It is also a dramatic vehicle written by white men, designed to be sung by blacks. Paul Robeson’s version is perhaps the most iconic. Ray Charles sang it at the height of his addiction to heroin. His producer Sid Feller told me, “Ray nodded out at the keyboard. At first I was afraid he’d died of a heart attack but I soon saw it was the effects of drugs. When he awoke, as if nothing had happened, he began singing the most stirring version of the song that I have ever heard. It’s hard to fathom how deep he gets. He’s literally crying.”
Aretha took the song in another direction—lighthearted and whimsical, with a jazz rhythm section swinging behind her. She declined to seek out the dark suffering but instead kept it on the surface.
“They said it was supposed to be sung by a man,” she said, “but I sang it anyway. It was written for a Broadway musical and I wanted to give it a jazzy Broadway feeling.”
Not so with Irving Berlin’s “Say It Isn’t So.”
“That’s the other item I remember from that record,” said Etta James. “My mother used to play the tune by Billie and Dinah, but it wasn’t until I heard Aretha sing ‘Say It Isn’t So’ that I understood it as a sure-enough soul song. After she’s sung it through once, she comes back and bites the song in the ass. She spits out that ‘Say everything is still okay’ in a way that you know she’s been listening to Ray. We were all listening to Ray, but Aretha was every bit as bad as he was. She could fuck up a standard so completely, with such funk and fire, you’d never want to hear it straight again. It took me forty years to approach that song—that’s how much I revered Aretha’s version. And when I finally did do it, on an album called Heart of a Woman, I put a Latin beat behind it and sped up the tempo and damned if I wasn’t still singing those same Aretha licks that had been buried inside my head for all those years.”
On Sunday, June 23, 1963, ten days after Aretha’s final session for Laughing on the Outside, over a hundred thousand people took to the streets of Detroit in the freedom march led by Reverends C. L. Franklin and Martin Luther King. The start time was 4:00 p.m., but as soon as the church services ended, the crowd began to swell. C.L. was certain two hundred thousand people participated; more conservative estimates said one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Either way, it would prove to be a landmark event in the history of the great industrial city, and it would never have happened were it not for the tenacity and power of C. L. Franklin. A reporter for the Michigan Chronicle wrote, “Negroes of all classes—street walkers, doctors, senior citizens, drunks, clergymen and their congregations, etc.—came from near and far to ‘walk for freedom.’” Biographer Nick Salvatore wrote, “The joyous marchers took possession of the streets in the city’s main shopping and entertainment district where, until recently, they had been denied equal service. Significantly, the march was a black affair. White marchers never appeared in appreciable numbers… Some black unionists expressed disappointment at the noticeable absence of most of their white coworkers.”
The march ended at Cobo Hall, where C.L. had arranged for Dr. King to speak. Before the address, though, there was entertainment—jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis; C.L.’s close friend and Queen of the Blues, Dinah Washington; jazz organist Jimmy McGriff; the Four Tops; and Erma Franklin. Aretha did not attend.
“I believe I sang a gospel song,” said Erma, “but I can’t say for sure. What I do remember is the excitement. It was one of those moments when, as Daddy would say, ‘The presence of God was everywhere.’ There was a unity among our people I had never felt before—a pride, and a sense of purpose. Given the open-minded attitude of my dad and Dr. King, it was perfectly appropriate that there were jazz artists and blues artists along with a mass choir that sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ President Kennedy sent his congratulations and so did Walter Reuther, the union leader. I can’t tell you how proud I was of my father and what he had accomplished. Dr. King called him ‘his good friend’ and gave a stirring speech. We left Cobo Hall believing that the tide had turned and that a brighter new world was around the bend. For me it was the brightest moment of the sixties.”
The occasion is also notable for Dr. King’s famous line in his address: “This afternoon I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” King was, in fact, previewing the speech that two months later he would deliver at the Lincoln Memorial, a seminal moment in the long fight for civil rights. Berry Gordy issued the speech in LP form and called it The Great March to Freedom.
In September, Aretha went back into the Columbia studios in New York, where she met Bobby Scott, the brilliant pianist/arranger/composer who had been hired by Bob Mersey to do a number of jazz-oriented sessions.
“My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn’t look at me when I spoke,” Scott told me. “She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me. I wasn’t shy about telling her my accomplishments, and it wasn’t until I rattled off my credits that I felt like I had caught her attention. What knocked me out the most, though, was when I told her I’d been Lester Young’s accompanist. ‘You play for the President?’ Only the hippest jazz aficionados knew that Lester was nicknamed ‘Pres,’ for President. That told me that she was much more than a church girl. Of course, I’d heard the stuff she’d done with Mersey. ‘Skylark’ floored me. Having done that, Mersey looked to me to put her more in a jazz bag. The truth, though, is that Aretha’s musicality knew no boundaries. The only other singer I worked with who had her feeling was Marvin Gaye.”
Later in the sixties, Scott did a remarkable ballad session with Marvin, released posthumously, titled Vulnerable. I asked Bobby what he saw as the common link between Marvin and Aretha.
“They each sculpted and improved any song they sang. They each came out of that holy place that breeds genius. Strange, but when I started working with Marvin, he had enjoyed a string of hits and didn’t care about commerce. He was going for art. But in that first meeting in which she called me Mr. Scott and asked that I call her Miss Franklin, Aretha did say something I’ll never forget. For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.’”
The Aretha/Scott sessions took place over three days in October 1963. Instead of the jazz-oriented sessions that Mersey had originally envisioned, the final repertoire, like most everything Aretha sang on Columbia, seemed to be moving in many directions at once. “Aretha wanted to sing ‘Harbor Lights,’ a song she knew from the Platters,” said Scott. “She said she thought that, in the post-doo-wop era of the early sixties, it could be a hit again. I’d been listening to the song ever since I was a kid. Everyone from Guy Lombardo to Bing Crosby had covered it. I saw the possibility of its reinvention, especially in the hands of a great blues balladeer. So we went all out. Aretha helped me arrange the female backup vocal arrangements—she was great at that—I worked up a horn chart, found a righteous groove, and thought we’d hit the charts. We didn’t.
“As a songwriter, I’m always hustling singers to do my stuff, and I was no different with Aretha. I presented her with a lot of jazz tunes, but she wasn’t partial to any of them. Instead she was drawn to ballads—‘Tiny Sparrow,’ one of the more spiritual-metaphorical things I wrote. She said it reminded her of church. She sang my ‘Johnny,’ a motif I wrote in a Rodgers and Hammerstein vein. When I played her ‘Looking Through a Tear,’ something I also wrote in a Broadway bag, she went for it. Suddenly the notion of a jazz album went out the window. She brought in something by Sam Cooke’s brother L.C. called ‘Once in a While.’ She thought it could be an R-and-B hit; I didn’t; we cut it, and it wasn’t. Felt lame to me. I had the same reaction to ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.’ I love Jimmy Durante doing it, but Aretha Franklin? ‘I hear it with a Count Basie big-band sound behind it,’ she told me. ‘I can do that,’ I said. ‘I can write an Ernie Wilkins–Count Basie chart.’ I do admit that she sang it soulfully, but it felt like a nightclub routine to me, not suitable for an artist of Aretha’s caliber.
“By then, in terms of theme or cohesion of style, we had lost our way. But Aretha and her husband, Ted, didn’t seem concerned. They were both so knocked out by her singing that they were certain that every song we cut—even ‘Moon River’ or ‘I May Never Get to Heaven’—was gonna be a hit. I understood their enthusiasm, and I shared it, but there was no communication between the studio and sales forces. When the sales guys heard what we’d done, they said, ‘What are we supposed to do with this stuff?’ It was great, but it was neither fish nor fowl. Listening to it decades later, it still sounds strong. Aretha is always Aretha. She got on top of the chart I wrote for ‘I Won’t Cry Anymore’ and absolutely crushed it. Tony Bennett had sung it. So had Charles Brown and Big Maybelle and Dinah Washington and Joe Williams. But Aretha owned it in a way I never thought anyone could approach it again. It wasn’t until I rewrote the chart, added strings, and gave it to Marvin Gaye that I saw I was wrong. When it came to melodic reinvention and fearless interpretation, Marvin and Aretha were locked in a dead heat. It killed me that they never sang together.”
On November 22, 1963, Aretha was seven months pregnant with her third son and in the Broadway Market in Detroit, a gourmet-food outlet, when she heard news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In her book, she recalls that among her strongest memories of that day were the powerful smells of hanging hams, salamis, and cheeses. On other occasions, she reflected that, in the aftermath of the president’s death, she found comfort in the presence of her father.
“My father was a rock,” Erma said. “Especially in the sixties, when changes were happening so quickly and great leaders began to fall, he held steadfast. He taught us all to stay the course. He believed in a future where wrong would be righted and the love of almighty God would prevail. He raised us, he nurtured us, and he comforted us in times of trouble.
“Ted White was a highly possessive husband and could be a scary character. But when the world felt shaky and fears were unloosed, Aretha lost her fear of him and went home to Daddy. No matter how deep our past disagreements, we always reconciled with our father. Our bond with him was stronger than our bond with anyone else.”
A month later, another sudden death had a more immediate impact on the Franklin family. On December 14, Detroiters, along with the rest of the country, were shocked to learn that in their city Dinah Washington had died of a toxic combination of drugs—secobarbital and amobarbital—at age thirty-nine. Married to her seventh husband, Detroit Lions All-Pro defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, Dinah had appeared to be at the top of her game; in the words of her biographer Nadine Cohodas, “It was as though Dinah had been snatched from [her friends] in the fullness of life.”
“Ted and Aretha were in New York and rushed home to Detroit,” Cecil remembered. “More than anyone, Daddy was distraught. He and Dinah had been tight for years. I remember Aretha looking afraid—as though death was coming too close to all of us. Ted’s attitude was ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. Aretha is the new queen.’”