Aretha’s “Tree of Life” (see below) has a new poignancy since her death. No need for me to break down her funky, Pan-African, pantheist promesse de bonne heure, just press play (please).
Another fine track on Rare and Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign has a new currency as well. Aretha gets off a line that cuts against the grain of tributes paid her since her death in her piano-first cover of Bobby Womack’s “That’s the Way I Feel About Cha,” (which beats the good version produced by Quincy Jones on Hey Now Hey (The Other Side Of The Sky)). Three minutes in, Aretha pushes the feeling on—
“Please baby when you hear my love knocking on your door,
Open up for me baby
Cos the world don’t give a fuck no more”
It was late 1973—the 60s were truly over. Aretha seems to have sensed her Golden Reign had come to an end and she was in for another time of waiting like the stretch that preceded her coming out on Atlantic Records. (The rest of the 70s weren’t a total bust for Aretha, but in a year or two, she’d be reduced to doing an uninspired knock-off of “Rock the Boat”—the first disco hit—on her album You—as in, “don’t blame me”?)
Aretha’s use of the f-word is striking but there’s nothing intentionally provocative about it. The shock of that “fuck” is just one more signifier of Aretha’s irrepressible will to voice facts of felt life. She was one of those 60s avatars who taught us to ask for something more than Mind in America.
Not that she lacked wit. She liked to clock her people’s latest tricks with language. Claude McKay’s musing on the speech of a band of brothers seems right on when thinking on sock-it-to-me Ree’s way with words:
There were no dots and dashes in their conversation—nothing that could not be frankly said and therefore decently—no act or fact of life for which they could not find a simple passable word. He gained from them finer nuances of the necromancy of language and the wisdom that any word may be right and magical in its proper setting.
In an era of Trumpery, though, it’s hard to talk up raw talk. Stuck between Trump’s DC “goddammit” and his “shit-holes,” it’s nearly impossible to evoke the magic of the demotic. A discourse of propriety may be what we need most right now.
Which brings us to the n-word. In a conversation about an out-take of The Apprentice where Trump is rumored to have said it, a pundit suggested that term is probably in Trump’s lexicon since he’s given to using another pigheaded—though much less inflammatory—phrase: “the blacks.” I get the link, but the commentator was probably making too much of this connection. I’ve known more than a few New Yorkers of Trump’s generation who have been in the habit of invoking “the blacks,” though they’d never use the n-word.
A line in Todd Gitlin’s memoir, The 60s: Years of Hope, Days of Rage is on point here. And since Aretha’s in the equation, maybe I can justify this aside…
Gitlin had recalled how he’d slipped past a picket line which his parents and sister would have honored as members of the UFT during the Ocean Hill Brownsville strike. Given his familial loyalties, that conflict between the largely white teachers’ union and black parents was one he wished to avoid. And he didn’t offer a fresh angle on it in The 60s, which may be why only one parenthetical bit of his “pleasant day” inside Bronx School of Science really registered with me. After Gitlin nodded to teachers and students who were conducting “liberation classes” in his alma mater, he noted decorum had been maintained: “(though Aretha Franklin records were playing for the blacks in study hall).”
Of course it wasn’t just Gitlin’s tin ear, which he shares with any number of old New Leftists, that was memorably clunky—how could a sixties vet fail to grasp Aretha’s classic hits crossed over? Black kids weren’t the only ones in that Bronx School of Science study hall grooving to her records. (Wasn’t there, but I have that on good authority! When my middle school girlfriend kicked me to the curb in my prepubescence since all I wanted was to hold her hand, I leaned on Aretha’s “Prove It.”
“Prove, that I don’t want to die.
Now, That you say, ‘It’s Goodbye’,
Baby! Prove it
Baby!
Let me see you
Prove it
Prove it, Prove it, Prove it, Prove it to me”
I played Aretha over and over again on the shitty stereo in my room and it still hurts to recall how no-one could prove it to me.)
Aretha sang for the Black Nation, but when she became Queen of Soul, she ruled over little white boys and little white girls and every American who could hear. (Gitlin, apparently, wasn’t one of them. The 60s: Years of Hope, Days of Rage proves he didn’t give a fuck. That reference to Aretha and “the blacks” above is the only mention of her in the book.)
There was nothing exclusive about Aretha’s reign. Anyone could belong to her country. I’ll allow, though, I had a little help getting there in 1967. My dad came back home from West Point, Mississippi—where he’d participated in a summer tutorial program for black youngsters who were going to enter integrated schools for the first time in the fall—with Aretha’s first Atlantic album. I remember him telling us how he’d heard “I Never Loved a Man”’s piano chords crash the night on the campus of Tougaloo College. He’d called up to the second floor window of a dormitory—“Who’s that?!” And got a one-word response: “ARETHA!”
My dad wrote an essay about his southern trip, “Mississippi Learning”—and, though he’d found his way as a teacher by then, he knew he was the one who’d done most of the learning. History, as he’d recall late in his life, spoke loudest to him on his first summer evening out and about in the segregated south—“No war, death, passing of a baton, interview with greatness at the White House, afternoon in a hushed library with a volume of Shakespeare marked up by John Keats—nothing ever homed me in so directly on the weight of the past.”
I’m going to return to his attempt to measure up to that moment because I think it brings home how powerful—and scary/thrilling—Aretha must’ve sounded “inside the iceberg.” (Per the phrase of the great SNCC organizer Bob Moses.) I’ll allow, though, this Northern soul can’t quite imagine a sequence of emotion that takes in—over just a couple days—my dad’s first real encounter with the frozen south and Aretha’s undeniable arrival.
My dad was careful not to amp up what happened when he bumped up against history—it was “not dramatic or overwhelming.” Just a few seconds during his first evening in Mississippi where, as the new arrival from the North, he was the night’s beer man who headed out with his bunk-mate in the project station wagon…
I see beer signs but, says my bunkmate, we don’t hack around there. I understand naturally. As Yankee visitors we’re not well-regarded by local people and anyway going to Blacktown is a gesture of solidarity with the people we’re trying to help. Who needs this explained? We turn from a paved road to a dirt one, one-story frame buildings, stores, tin roofs extended over the walks – a gallery effect, sort of. We slip up to the curb, diagonal parking. A black man and woman – his wife? – a woman with a baby in her arms – they’re standing outside the beer parlor. No, they’re looking in the window – they’re watching the TV inside. Not there for the beer, just for the program, baby awake for a bit. They’re pretty involved in the show. I wait a half-second, smiling at storefront communal TV. I climb out, shut the door. The sound surprises them. The black man looks at me. Instantly he steps off the walk into the gutter, pulling the woman’s elbow. She’s with him. – This way of talking about it doesn’t communicate the fact. It splits the act up as though there were stages or a moment of choice or a decision but no, there wasn’t any. This was a single moment of human response or recognition – the black man turns, sees us, moves himself and his wife and child from our path, though they are not in our path. They don’t look up. I feel locked into the deed of moving past them. I’d like to say something. Well look…I’m from out of town, it’s your town, it’s your section. You shouldn’t – You shouldn’t move like that. Nothing to be afraid of. They are merely there, waiting for me to go by. It comes out of the man, a strong projecting abasing current, that they have a sense of themselves as trespassers, guilty, dangerously guilty because a white man has parked his car close to them, a strange white advancing past them toward – really past them? – toward the beer parlor door. Or does he want their place at the window watching a Carol Burnett summer repeat? No turf on this earth is theirs, they are automatically cowed. They have no right to stand or to look. They can’t even inquire – in the honored way people inquire glancingly and deprecatingly about strangers. “Who’s that over there? I wonder who that is?” Not for them to know. This elementary primitive freedom – it’s not there. The child in the mother’s arms – could he or she feel the quick movement, the guilty instinctive fearful motion of retreat? Soak it right into the bones before they’re old enough to utter a word?
Word.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. was the answer. Aretha sang against that “strong, projecting abasing current.”
Let me end by shouting out to Charles O’Brien who caught all of Aretha’s black Atlantic waves of emotion in his 1989 piece on politics in 60s pop music (and what was missing from Paul Simon’s Graceland). (You can read that piece here.) It’s been a trip to see how O’Brien’s once-unprecedented clarity about, say, Aretha’s cry “Freedom!” in “Think” has become part of the culture’s settled wisdom.[1] It’s too late to stop now, Charlie…
Note
1 Not that the anonymous authors of the following take on “Think” in the Times‘ “Aretha Franklin’s Twenty Essential Songs” knew they were following O’Brien over that bridge:
“Ms. Franklin helped write one of her most fast and furious recordings. Its brisk piano chords and buoyant beats created a kind of trampoline for the star to bounce off refrains of Olympic skill. The secret weapon came in the middle when, lifted ably by her backup singers, she soared the word “freedom” straight to the sky.”