RIP Aretha Franklin

I don’t have much to add to what everyone else is saying, except that I really love her music, more than just about anything.

Something I read about her singing, though I can’t remember where: she’s so great because she combines the seemingly contradictory qualities of power and relaxation. On the one hand, her voice is loud and commanding. Usually when someone sings that way, they’re audibly expending a lot of effort to do so, like opera singers or metal screamers. But Aretha sounds casual, relaxed, and even bored. The ability to completely command a song without seeming to raise her pulse is the thing that really sets her apart.

Like most Gen X white kids, I got my main early exposure to Aretha from the Big Chill soundtrack and the Blues Brothers.

I got to see her live once in the early 90s, and she was devastatingly great. I had no idea that she played piano until I saw her do it onstage, and she killed on that too.

Beyond pure enjoyment, I’ve learned a lot about music from her. “Chain of Fools” is my go-to example when I want to demonstrate how unnecessary it is to have a chord progression (much less cadences) in a piece of Western music.

Philip Tagg coined the term “one chord changes” for the harmony in “Chain of Fools.” It sits on C minor the entire time, but it isn’t a drone or a minimalist conceptual piece. The song moves and shifts; it just uses rhythm and texture to create musical interest rather than harmonic movement.

Last year I wrote a post for Musicto about her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which is in my regular lullaby rotation for my kids.

I’m a white guy, so I sing this song more like Art Garfunkel . Everyone loves that Simon and Garfunkel recording, and it was a hit for them when it was released, but have you listened to it lately? The sound hasn’t aged well. Phil Spector produced it, and the reverb makes it sound like the music is coming from the bottom of a well in the middle of a cathedral. The strings are a bit much too. Art Garfunkel sings his heart out, but the whole thing is too far away from the gospel that Paul Simon had in his mind when he was writing. No, Aretha’s version is the canonical one as far as I’m concerned.

The history of American popular music is mostly a story of white musicians knocking off black music with varying degrees of fidelity. Sometimes black musicians appropriate their music back. The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded a gorgeous version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and they wrote a new intro for it too.  Aretha took the Blind Boys arrangement and recorded it slower, funkier, and smoother.  Then, when she started playing it live, she took it even slower, even funkier, and way more intense. She was backed by an incredible band on the Fillmore version, including Cornell Dupree on guitar, Jerry Jemmott on bass, Billy Preston on organ, and Bernard Purdie on drums. The result is so far transformed from Simon and Garfunkel as to scarcely even be the same piece of music anymore. Aretha always remakes melodies to suit her own style, but here she pretty much rewrites it from the ground up. If I had to explain to an alien what the blues was, I might just play them Art Garfunkel and Aretha back to back and have them compare the two.

I tried singing the song Aretha’s way, but that didn’t last long. I could imagine her standing there saying, “No, Ethan, the point isn’t to imitate me, the point is to sing it how you sing it.” Besides, at the Fillmore, she was whipping a rock audience into a state of ecstatic transport, not putting a baby to sleep. So I’ve taken some of her feel and swing and applied it back to my less adventurous, more Garfunkel-esque interpretation. It’s good to have Aretha in the back of my head, though.

Here’s the performance that brought Barack Obama to tears:

In The New Yorker, he explains what he was feeling:

Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.

I could not have said it any better. Thank you, Aretha Franklin, for being America’s best music teacher.