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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
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Four of the Franklin children -- Erma, Cecil, Aretha and Carolyn -- made the same middle-adolescence passage from Hutchins Intermediate School to Central High that I survived during Detroit's booming years.
Among youthful black dwellers of that bustling city-universe, Big D divided up into jazz people and rhythm & blues people. Since Aretha Franklin's musical upbringing and training didn't happen in Vernacular Music 369, or on National Public Radio, but in an actual, physical community where music, live music, was plentiful and accessible, this division is crucial to recall. In 1952, jazz people were cool; R&B people were not. Gospel people were otherworldly. Blues people like B.B. King and Lowell Fulsom usually popped up at the bottom of the Graystone Ballroom posters for an upcoming dance. Your country aunts and uncles went out to catch their stuff.
Like school cafeteria servings, pop music still got plopped onto your plate in one big clump. FM radio was just getting off the ground. Perry Como, Doris Day, Kay Starr, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, George Shearing, the Weavers, Stan Kenton, Arthur Godfrey, Billy Eckstine, Spike Jones and His City Slickers, the Mills Brothers, Pearl Bailey, collaborations between Frank Sinatra and Dagmar (TV's non-singing, busty blond bombshell), the tweetie strings of Mantovani -- all of this oozed down into your psyche unlabeled.
When it came to Negro gospel music, the general public knew little about it once you got beyond the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Mahalia Jackson. Many regarded Marian Anderson as a gospel singer. And if people knew anything about Paul Robeson and his concert stage repertoire of Negro spirituals, they weren't talking. At the height of the McCarthy era, it was uncool to even bring up the man's name.
Among church-going working people, black or white, things were different. Gospel music mattered. I grew up with the Pilgrim Travelers, the Five Blind Boys, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones, Clara Ward, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and those early Staple Singers recordings on Chess. Now, we're so used to the voices of Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, Queen Latifah, June and Bonnie Pointer, Deniece Williams, Gladys Knight, Irma Thomas, Etta James, Mariah Carey, Anita Baker and others who have absorbed and adapted the churchified sound, that it's easy to forget that, back when those first astonishing recordings appeared on Atlantic, there was really was no one quite like Aretha Franklin.
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Erma Franklin, Aretha's older sister, is the one I'd always thought was going to be the star. She later made records and TV appearances, too. Even though I was jazz-struck, and thought rhythm & blues people were uncool, in my book -- which was still largely blank -- Erma was undeniably cool. When I learned that it was she and sister Carolyn who came up with the idea of injecting the phrase "Sock it to me!" into the backup vocal they provided for Aretha's fiery "Respect," I almost died.
Two grades ahead of me, Erma performed at an assembly in the Hutchins Intermediate School auditorium. Listening and watching closely while she sang Buddy Johnson's R&B anthem "Since I Fell for You," I got a rush that turned into a crush. With her pretty brown eyes, her soft hip moves, her smile the River Nile, Erma Franklin put the whammy on me. She had a grownup way about her that frightened and thrilled. It also made me the perfect listening admirer. I thought Erma was just the best.
"Be the best." That was what our parents, our teachers, our preachers urged. "Be the best at whatever you do." This advice was so widespread among African-Americans at the time that it would become a riff in the moving sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The Franklin children's father was a minister, too. But it helps to understand that C.L. Franklin wasn't just any minister. My personal interest in Reverend Franklin rested in part on the baffling possibility that he and my mother were going to marry. They had an affair while I was entering my teens, but their talk about marriage soon died away completely. When I asked Mother why, she smiled and said, "I'll tell you all about it when you get old enough to understand."
Still, while that possibility glittered, it tickled and confused me to imagine and think about what it would be like to have Erma Franklin as a stepsister. It was after he'd begun to prosper as a preacher in Memphis and Buffalo that C.L. Franklin, a Mississippi farm boy, moved his family to Detroit. By then he had become an evangelical sensation known as "The Man with the Golden Voice." Mid-20th century Detroit was renowned for its powerful black ministers, among them Bishop Robinson, pastor of Alpha and Omega Church, and the flamboyant Prophet Jones (whose ghostly robes and extravagant headgear might have influenced the wardrobe and costume choices of the late, space-fixated musician Sun Ra).
Prophet Jones' live Sunday-night TV broadcast, which didn't start until 11 p.m., kept many of us up so late that we'd have to drag ourselves into school Monday mornings. When I went out on my paper route to deliver the Detroit Free Press, members of Prophet Jones' all-night congregation would just be emerging from the converted movie theater on Linwood Ave. that had become their place of worship. C.L. Franklin founded the sumptuous New Bethel Baptist Church, whose membership was veering toward 5000. African-Americans talked and gossiped about churches and ministers and their congregations the way many Americans now worship at the altar of celebrity. Like many another enterprise, churches measured their popularity and success in numbers.
So the Memphis-born Aretha, the second of six Franklin children, had grown up comfortably in success-blessed settings. Like her controversial, life-loving father -- each of whose blood-
Two of gospel music's giants -- James Cleveland and singer and hymn composer Clara Ward -- were frequent, sometimes live-in visitors at the Franklin home in Detroit on stately LaSalle Boulevard. Both Cleveland and Ward encouraged and inspired Aretha in her singing as well as her piano playing, which continues to be underrated. Moreover, Reverend Franklin, no stranger to the secular world, enjoyed personal friendships with illustrious on-stage and off-stage showbiz notables and political officials.
