100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Chain of Fools

02 Money Won’t Change You

03 People Get Ready

04 Niki Hoeky

05 (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman

06 (Sweet, Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone

07 Good to Me as I Am to You

08 Come Back Baby

09 Groovin’

10 Ain’t No Way

Lady Soul was Aretha Franklin’s third album with Atlantic, who had signed the prodigiously talented vocalist after she parted ways with Columbia – a label that had identified her talent but didn’t know quite what to do with it. Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler did. ‘We’re going to put her back in church,’ he announced, and the move paid off on 1967’s double bill of I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and Aretha Arrives. Those two albums, especially the former, made it clear that the gospel-fuelled depths of Franklin’s voice were bound for the pop charts, and on Lady Soul the then 25-year-old announced herself as the Queen of Soul.

Put simply, Aretha Franklin does things with her voice on this album that changed the very perceptions of pop music, finding a union between passion and technique that still sounds transcendent. Listen to ‘Good to Me as I Am to You’, where the singer launches herself off the cushion of the slow, defiant groove and makes her demand for satisfaction sound like an unholy alliance of pleasure and need (with the assistance of Eric Clapton on guitar). Franklin is near the top of her register for much of the track, but then at the close she lets out two staggering whoops, at once celebratory and a reminder that she could go further if she wanted.

The songs on Lady Soul are a collection of original pieces, commissioned compositions and covers, but whether the writers were James Brown (‘Money Won’t Change You’) or Ray Charles (‘Come Back Baby’), or Franklin and her husband/manager Ted White (‘(Sweet, Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone’), with whom she shared a fractious union, the recordings were held in sway by Franklin’s voice, which could roll with earthy delight or soar with emotional testimony. As if it needed it, the record had inspired backing vocalists, whether it was Franklin’s sisters or the Sweet Inspirations, who transferred their collective strength to the principal.

1968 would be a tumultuous year, and while Franklin turned Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready’ into a pulpit-raising promise, on much of Lady Soul the personal would be political. Franklin had already had a hit the year prior with her electrifying remake of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’, but here she searches for a balance between personal deliverance and shared love. The friction between the two is a source of much of the energy on the album. ‘Ain’t no way for me to love you/If you won’t let me,’ begins the closing track. But instead of surrendering, the lament becomes a final plea that grows steadily more arresting.

Wexler had some of his favourite – and the South’s best – musicians play on these tracks, and their contributions are important. The American Sound Studios house band rhythm section of bassist Tommy Cogbill and drummer Gene Chrisman supply most of the bottom end. They’re on the beat from the opening ‘Chain of Fools’, where Franklin castigates a former lover and, subtly, herself, for what has transpired. Elsewhere Atlantic house producer and arranger Arif Mardin supplies a scintillating horn part for ‘Come Back Baby’, which matches the fiery blues to the first stirrings of psychedelic pop.

But the focus is always Aretha Franklin, and it’s clear why with cuts such as ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, a song penned by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, which summed up the great but never complete divide in black music between the spiritual and the physical. The way Franklin sings the ballad, the two halves are brought together as one. ‘Oh baby, what you’ve done to me’ asks Aretha, and by the chorus she’s making it clear that she already knows the answer.