We’re coming up on blues melody day in aural skills class. I always like to do some close listening to Aretha Franklin for that session, especially her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I haven’t done any analysis of it; we just listen and let it speak for itself. But I thought, this semester, I want to be more ambitious and get into the details.
First, let’s refresh your memory of the original Simon and Garfunkel recording, released in 1970.
I don’t love the production and arrangement. The Phil-Spector-esque reverb and schmaltzy strings get on my nerves. That’s okay, the song cuts through.
Paul Simon explains his writing process on the Dick Cavett show. Let’s ignore his unfortunate haircut.
To his credit, Simon is transparent about his sources. One of them is “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”, the Bach chorale that was also the basis for “American Tune.” Simon got the title and some of the chords from the Swan Silvertones‘ recording of “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”. Listen at 2:09.
This recording is also the obvious source of “Loves Me Like a Rock“; the similarity is so close as to be legally actionable.
Paul Simon’s appropriation of Black music is not unusual. In this case, though, Black musicians promptly appropriated their music right back. Within months of the release of the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” single in 1970, Quincy Jones, King Curtis, the Jackson 5, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder had all released covers. Aretha recorded her version in 1970 as well, though it wasn’t released until later.
Paul Simon was delighted that Aretha liked the song enough to want to sing it, though he complained that she changed some of the words. He also disputes the widespread belief that the song was lacking something until she improved it. Sorry Paul, but she most certainly did improve it.
Aretha debuted her cover on March 5, 1971 at the Fillmore West to an audience of white hippies. Her performance from two nights later appears on the album Aretha Live at Fillmore West. I recommend it.
Aretha is backed by an incredible band, including King Curtis on saxophone, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Jerry Jemmott on bass and Bernard Purdie on drums. Billy Preston is the guest organist. There’s video of the performance, though the sound is pretty rough.
You can also hear this band play the song faster and with less grit at the Grammys a couple of weeks later.
Aretha always remakes melodies to suit her own style, and she rewrites “Bridge Over Troubled Water” completely. She starts by playing the first verse, prechorus and chorus on electric piano, while Billy Preston answers her phrases on organ. (At 0:12, you can hear her say, “Play it Billy.”) Then the backup singers enter with some lyrics that Aretha added: “Don’t trouble the water…” This sounds like an interpolation from a gospel tune or a Bible quote, but if it is, I don’t know the source.
Here’s my transcription of the second verse, the first one that Aretha sings, starting at 1:56 in the recording. I included Art Garfunkel’s version for comparison, transposed to be in the same key.
Bridge Over Troubled Water – Aretha Franklin Live at the Fillmore
Transcribing a performance like this always requires some simplifying of nuance to make the chart readable. I kept things at the sixteenth note level, though I could easily have gone smaller.
Let’s go line by line through the lyrics.
- “When you’re down and out” – Art Garfunkel puts the word “down” on the downbeat. Aretha doesn’t even start the line until a beat and a half later, and doesn’t get to “down” until half a beat before the next bar.
- “When you’re on the street” – Art puts the word “street” on the downbeat. Aretha once again delays the entire line until the “and” of two, and adds a lot of syllables: “When you look up and see yourself on the street.” The phrase “up and see yourself” is a sixteenth note quintuplet!
- “When evening falls so hard” – Art puts “falls” on the downbeat, anticipating a little. He puts “hard” on the next downbeat. Aretha rushes rather than drags the beginning of this line, putting the first syllable of “evening” on the downbeat. However, she then goes back to dragging on “so hard”, putting “hard” a beat later than Art. The word “so” is is her first scream in the song, the first of many.
- “I will comfort you” – Art sings “comfort” on the downbeat, delayed expressively. Aretha sings “I’ll be there to comfort you”, putting “there” on the downbeat and running an extraordinary melisma through “comfort” that manages to touch both the major and minor thirds as well as a clear blue note in between them. Aretha also skips the extra bars that are appended to the verse in the original song.
Next, the prechorus:
- “I’ll take your part” – Art puts “part” on the downbeat. Aretha puts it a beat and a half later, and ends it significantly earlier than Art does.
- “when darkness comes” – Garfunkel puts “comes” on the downbeat, anticipated a little. Aretha moves the phrase earlier, putting “when” on the downbeat. She adds yet more syllables: “take it when darkness falls.”
- “and pain is all around” – This line is end-accented. Art starts it on beat two and accents “round”, putting it on the next the downbeat. Aretha once again delays the beginning of the line a beat and a half. She sings “pain” in her most intense scream yet, and her voice breaks at the end. She ends “around” in the same place as Art does, though it has been a very different journey getting there.
Finally, the chorus:
- “Like a bridge over troubled water” – Garfunkel sings “bridge” on the downbeat. Aretha sings “Just like a bridge over troubled water”, and the downbeat comes in the middle of the extended “just”. She sings “over” a beat later than Art does, “troubled” almost two beats later, and “water” a beat later.
- “I will lay me down” – Another end-accented phrase. Garfunkel starts it on beat two and anticipates the next downbeat with “down.” Aretha sings “I’ll be there to lay me down”, and even though she starts it two beats later than Art, she ends with “down” in pretty much the same place he does.
- “Like a bridge over troubled water” – Garfunkel sings this the same as the first time. Aretha sings “Just like a bridge over troubled and stormy waters.” She puts “bridge” only half a beat later than Art does, but places “water” two entire beats later thanks to all the extra syllables.
- “I will lay me down” – Garfunkel sings this with the same rhythm as the first time but slightly different pitches. His last note goes over a descending chromatic line that Aretha omits. She once again sings “I’ll be there to lay me down”, and while Art sings “down” on the downbeat of the next section, Aretha puts “there” on that beat and doesn’t get to “down” until a beat later.
Now let’s compare the pitches used in each version. Paul Simon’s melody is almost all diatonic, aside from a single flat seventh in each verse – it’s on the word “evening” in verse two. Aretha mostly sings on the major pentatonic scale plus the flat third. She sings scale degree four a few times, always briefly and on the way somewhere else. She sings a couple of conspicuous flat sevenths, like on “evening” where that’s the written melody. She bends around it on the word “over” in the chorus. You could consider this all to add up to a combination of Mixolydian and Dorian mode, I guess, but that framing fails to recognize the lesser weight given to the fourth and flat seventh compared to the other pitches. As in most of her performances, Aretha completely avoids the leading tone, unless you count bending in its direction briefly from flat seven.
All this technical music stuff may seem beside the point. The main difference between Aretha and Art is in the basic sound of their voices. Art has conventionally “pure” vocal technique with crisp diction. Aretha sounds more conversational, and she rasps and screams, though always with tight control. Art’s performance has plenty of feeling, but Aretha brings in a wider range of emotions that he doesn’t, including anger. There’s an interesting inversion of gender stereotypes here: Art sounds soft and “girly”, while Aretha sounds tough and “manly”.
Daphne Brooks wrote an article for NPR about Aretha’s cover:
Aretha’s vocals radiate with the effulgent heat and the ethereal energy of the gospel tradition as she worries lines, improvises impassioned moans and carefully, elegantly puts to use a thing called the melisma, the artful, spiritually-rooted technique of stringing a series of notes together in one syllable so as to stretch out one’s vocal phrasing.
Hanging on words, pulling out phrases and turning them over and over so as to wring them for multiple meanings, Aretha here lets us know, without breaking a sweat, that she is still the innovator who birthed a brand of soul music that made spectacularly audible existential and spiritual self-discovery and affirmation, all at the site of her virtuosic vocalization. The philosophical intelligence of her musical phrasing and narrative interpretation set a new standard of excellence in pop music.
Brooks draws a connection to Paul Simon’s source of inspiration when she points out that in 1972, Aretha also released a devastating version of “Mary Don’t You Weep”.
Brooks sees a larger meaning of all the cross-connections:
In Aretha’s stunning performance of “Mary,” alone, we hear Motor City black Baptist royalty meeting New York City Jewish folkie Simon, and we hear Simon meeting Kentucky-born coal miner turned gospel great [Claude] Jeter. We hear her carrying both men back to Alabama gospel role model Inez Andrews in song, melding together the spiritual and the worldly, Old and New Testament tales of perseverance and faith. We hear her responding to the call made by Miriam, summoning those old school Biblical women’s sonic circuits of energy, and channeling and translating Inez and Paul and Claude.
As a half-Jewish mutt myself, I love these kinds of crossovers, with all their tensions and contradictions. It’s what my inner life is like.
There are about a billion more covers of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. My favorite white version is by Willie Nelson.
I also want to point you to Linda Clifford’s unhinged disco version, and, more seriously, Kings Return’s smooth a capella version.
I’ll close by bringing all of this back around to my teaching life. It is so gratifying to me to be teaching in a program that has blues on the syllabus. Aretha Franklin’s blues-based R&B is absolutely everywhere in Anglo-American music. Music majors need to understand how it works as a matter of cultural competence, and institutions need to recognize its importance as a matter of social justice. A day or two of blues in a theory or aural skills class is not enough to hold back the American government’s atavistic racial beliefs, but it’s a start.