Rock Steady

I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance.

The musicians on this track represent the gold standard of R&B session players: Donny Hathaway on organ, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Robert Popwell and Dr John on percussion. The backing vocals are by Pat Smith and Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma. Aretha herself played a scratch piano part for everyone to follow, but it doesn’t sound like it made it into the final mix. According to an interview with Chuck Rainey, the musicians recorded several takes, but they ended up choosing the very first one as the released version. The Memphis Horns (Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor sax) were overdubbed later.

Here’s an alternate mix from before the horns were added. It’s fun to hear how it gently grinds to a halt at the end.

Here’s a live performance on the Flip Wilson show from 1971.

I transcribed the intro and first verse.

This tune is a classic example of blues tonality. It’s mainly in A Dorian, but there are several conspicuous C-sharps in the instrumental backing. Let’s zoom in on Cornell Dupree’s guitar part. It consists of four gestures:

• The A minor pentatonic riffing that you hear under most of the tune.
• The strummed Am7 chord first heard in measure 6.
• The high strummed A9 chord first heard in measure 10.
• The walk from a low B up to C-sharp first heard in measure 17.

So that’s two guitar figures implying minor and two implying major. You might think they’d conflict with each other, but no, they sound great. That’s the blues for you.

The bassline is on the first two beats of the bar, and then on each eighth note in the second half of the bar. Bernard Purdie’s drums mostly accent the quarters and eighth note offbeats, but rather than playing a kick on beat three, he anticipates it by a sixteenth note. That is enough rhythmic friction to keep your attention locked in. The Chuck Rainey interview goes into more depth on the internal structure.

The track begins with Purdie’s pickup into four bars of hi-hat and organ. Underneath, Rainey does percussive slides up the G string, often mistaken for organ or percussion. Chuck explains, “It’s something I did on a lot of records. They put some echo on it.” The groove enters in bar 5, where Rainey reveals his sub-hook. He recalls, “It’s something that just came to me from what Bernard was playing, and Cornell knew us so well, he jumped right in with a complementary part. I probably wasn’t completely conscious of this in the moment, but my concept seemed to be that the back half of the one-bar phrase—beats three and four—would be the repeated-motif part of the line, and the first two beats would be more loosely improvised.”

Another key is that Chuck patted the part to give it a weightier, broader sound. “Patting was something I was using on many dates back then, but this being a hit record, it stood out more. I started doing it in 1962, when I first came to New York and I was working with [legendary rock organist] Bill Doggett. Patting was a way to simulate his left-hand pats on the Hammond organ through the Leslie speaker, on tunes like ‘Honky Tonk.’” He continues, “I would hold my right arm straight down toward the floor and hit the heel of my hand on the top rounded edge of the bass; my fingers would recoil and I would catch the E string with my index and middle fingers. It was like a [drummer’s] flam—I’d feel the groove in the heel and the fingers would follow on the string an instant later. I also used a lot of hammer-ons to give the part a gritty, grunting sound.”

As the first verse enters, Rainey continues to vary the patted phrase. It’s not until the third measure of B (bar 19) that two significant developments occur. Most obvious is that Chuck plays one of his trademark upper-register fills (though not one of his usual double-stops). “Whenever I had an open string, I was reaching up and doing that, like on Roberta Flack’s ‘Reverend Lee’ [from Chapter Two, Atlantic, 1970]. Here, what’s interesting is I normally would have played the fill at the end of the bar—as I do once in bar 30—but I had to play it at the beginning of the bar in order to leave the motif in place.” Less apparent is that Rainey sets up what becomes the phrase’s tension-and-release, when he plays on the upbeat before beat three. From there on, note how he mixes up landing right on beat three and anticipating it.

(Update: I learned from pdbass that Chuck Rainey also played bass on Steely Dan’s “Peg”, among many other classics.)

Like any good dance song, the lyrics of “Rock Steady” are about dancing, but they are also about the song itself.

Rock steady, baby, that’s what I feel now
Let’s call this song exactly what it is

I mean, it’s accurate! The song does rock steadily. All the rest of the lyrics are about the feeling you get from dancing to the song.

Step and move your hips with a feeling from side to side
Sit yourself down in your car and take a ride
And while you’re moving rock steady
Rock steady, baby
Let’s call this song exactly what it is
(What it is, what it is, what it is)
It’s a funky and low down feeling (What it is)
In my hips from left to right (What it is)
What it is is I might be doing (What it is)
This funky dance all night
Oh (Wave your hands up in the air)
Oh (Got the feeling and ain’t got a care)
Oh (What fun to take this ride)
(Rock steady will only slide)

My only complaint about this magnificent groove is that it’s too short. Chuck Rainey says that when he played “Rock Steady” with Aretha in concerts, they would extend the drum break, and they probably stretched the ending groove out too. If I were a DJ and I wanted to play the studio version, I would definitely want to extend the whole thing substantially. I’m not the only person to have had this thought; the internet is full of “Rock Steady” dance remixes of various lengths. Some of them are okay, but I haven’t heard one that I loved. I don’t want to hear any other stuff layered on top, I just want the existing parts looped and extended. It seems like the song was made for that purpose. Verse two is an exact repetition of the second half of verse one; why not repeat the whole thing several more times?

Several jazz musicians have recorded “Rock Steady.” My favorite version is by Johnny Hammond, which also features drums by Bernard Purdie.

Joel Frahm and Bruce Katz give the tune a nice downtempo vibe.

There are tons of faithful R&B covers too. I think the best one is by Prince, with lead vocals by Beverley Knight.

I also love this Jill Scott performance at the White House in 2014. Check out Janelle Monae getting down at 3:00.

Aretha’s original recording has been sampled in many rap songs, mainly the word “rock” at the beginning of the drum break. This EPMD classic bucks the trend and uses the main groove instead.

Aretha’s tune is hardly the first or only song to use the title “Rock Steady.” There’s also this Bad Company song, this No Doubt song, this Bonnie Raitt and Bryan Adams song, this Sting song, this acid track, and an entire genre of Jamaican music, as exemplified by this Alton Ellis song.

Aside from Aretha’s, my favorite song called “Rock Steady” is the 80s classic by the Whispers.

The phrase “rock steady” is an intriguing contradiction. The music is constantly moving, yet staying still, fluid yet solid. “Rock” was a Black American sexual slang term for decades before it was a music genre.

in a sexual/musical context, the phrase goes back to at least the 1920s – you can hear it in clara smith's blues My Daddy Rocks Me: "my daddy rocks me / with one steady roll / lord there ain't no slipping / when he once takes hold".

(implying rock steady = rock & roll)

— מנא מנא תקל ופרסין rosza magpie (@roszarosza) June 22, 2023

Here’s the tune that Rosza is talking about; it’s a good one, and it features Sidney Bechet.

In her article “The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady:” A Case Study in DJ Scholarship“, DJ Lynnée Denise  describes Young, Gifted and Black (Aretha’s album that includes “Rock Steady”) as “secular gospel.” Like the phrase “rock steady,” “secular gospel” would appear to be a contradiction in terms, but maybe it isn’t. Aretha brings a gospel flavor to everything she does, but this is a funk song, and while it might not be quite as sexually charged as “My Daddy Rocks Me”, it’s close. Is this a transgression against Aretha’s religious upbringing? I don’t know enough about the Black church to say, but in my limited experience of it, they do not seem to disapprove of human sexuality nearly as much as, for example, my white Christian friends and family do. We could do with some more of that matter-of-fact frankness.