Aretha Franklin (8 page)

Hearing Aretha sing “Today I Sing the Blues” on the rough demo tape had struck the same chord with him that Billie Holiday did twenty-seven years before—singing “Wouldja for a Big Red Apple?” Like Holiday at seventeen, Aretha at eighteen had also “been scarred by life already.” Hammond called Aretha “an untutored genius—the best voice I've heard since Billie Holiday.”

Signed to a six-year contract at Columbia, Aretha recorded ten different albums and released two “greatest hits” packages. The material from the original ten albums was subsequently repackaged onto over twenty other albums, which shuffled the same series of songs by category—often including “alternate takes” and “previously unreleased” songs from the Columbia vaults. Aretha's recordings from the Columbia years encompassed several different styles: blues, jazz, pop, standards, show tunes, ballads, and R&B. By far the finest testament of Aretha's years at Columbia is the exceedingly impressive compilation album
Aretha Sings the Blues
, released in 1985.

During her years at Columbia, Aretha worked with producers Bob Mersey, Clyde Otis, Billy Jackson, Bob Johnston, Bobby Scott, Al Kasha, and John Hammond. Although each of them produced some brilliant sessions, the bulk of the material failed to find an audience. There were many factors that prevented Aretha from achieving the recognition, fame, and commercial glory she sought. Much of this was the result of Columbia's indecisiveness as to how to market her, the lack of definition of a target audience for her, and her traumatic personal problems during this era.

John Hammond was the first producer to take Aretha into the studios at Columbia. She was his discovery, and he was going to have the first shot at recording her vocal talents. For her debut album on the label, Hammond decided that he would combine two of his new protégés by having Aretha sing with Ray Bryant's jazz combo. The resulting album was originally entitled
Aretha
, and it was released in 1961 (later released as
The Great Aretha Franklin—The First 12 Sides
). Although it is stylistically inconsistent, the album provided Aretha with an effective showcase of jazz, pop standards, blues, and show tunes.

John had first introduced Aretha to Ray Bryant to make sure that they were musically compatible. In the summer of 1960, Hammond threw a party for Aretha at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Reportedly, Aretha and John made the evening an all-night fête, and from 3:30 to 4:00 a.m., Aretha sang on-stage with Bryant, to the delight of the night-owl guests of the famed jazz club on Seventh Avenue South.

Nearly thirty years later, Ray Bryant distinctly remembered that evening. “One night John called me,” he recalls. “It was pretty late at night, maybe nine or ten o'clock, and he said, ‘Could you please come down to the Vanguard?' I said, ‘Why?' and he said, ‘Well, I signed this young girl singer from Detroit; she's coming in tonight, and we're having a little get-together for her. We'd like for you to come down and meet her.' I guess he had the idea for us to make a recording together even then. So, that's when I first met Aretha, at the Village Vanguard. She had come into town with her father, and that's how I met her and her father. There were lots of people there, like a big party. Everybody just got up and did something. I played a little bit, she sang, and it was just sort of a welcome-to-New-York party for Aretha. She was a very nice young lady—sort of shy. But when I heard her sing, I said, ‘This girl can
sing!
' She loved to sing—that was
it!
”

Ray was very impressed with Aretha and her father that evening. “He had come to New York with her,” he explains. “She was only eighteen years old at the time. He seemed to be a very nice guy. Of course I was impressed, because he was a minister, [and] my mother is a minister—a Pentecostal minister. So, Aretha and I really had something in common right there. We had similar musical backgrounds. I guess that this is one of the reasons that convinced John that he should try to get us together.”

John Hammond's intuition proved correct, and Ray Bryant and Aretha hit it off almost immediately. Soon afterward, Aretha's first Columbia recording sessions were set with the Ray Bryant Combo. “Some people know me as the guy who made Aretha's first record with her,” according to Ray in 1989. “That's always a pleasant distinction. In the beginning, I'd see her quite often, because we used to meet for rehearsals and things like that. And, I'll never forget, I had a record that was going pretty good on CBS that was a hit, ‘The Madison Time,' and ‘Little Susie,' so I had a big Cadillac car—a 1960 Cadillac. I was driving her—we were going someplace one day, and she was in the car with some people, and she said, ‘This is such a nice car, maybe someday I'll be able to have a car like this.' And I said, ‘I think you will!'” He laughs. (Who could have suspected that big Cadillacs with tail fins would become an Aretha trademark twenty-five years later, when she recorded “The Freeway of Love?”)

On August 1, 1960, John Hammond, Ray Bryant, and Aretha Franklin went into the CBS 30th Street recording studio and began working on the album. Aretha recalls, “Some of the best musicians in the business were on my very first sessions. Mr. Hammond surrounded me with the very best.”

That first recording date was an evening session, which, John Hammond was later to claim, ranked among the three or four most exciting sessions of his entire career in the music business. He felt that of all of Aretha's material on Columbia, this first album was the one that most strongly carried the feeling of improvisational jazz that so intensely appealed to him.

The musicians on the initial session included Ray Bryant on the piano, Lord Westbrook playing guitar, Bill Lee on the bass, Osie Johnson on drums, and Tyree Glenn on the trombone. On one of the songs (“Right Now,”) Skeeter Best was heard on guitar.

As with his historic Bessie Smith session in 1933, Hammond decided that they would cut four songs that first evening. He knew precisely how he wanted to record Aretha's first album. Although Aretha wanted to follow Sam Cooke's footsteps and go directly after an R&B audience, neither Hammond nor Columbia was interested in pursuing that segment of the market. What Hammond wanted to do was select material that
would catch the attention of jazz devotees, while retaining as much of the natural gospel delivery in Aretha's voice as possible. At Aretha's insistence, one of the songs she recorded in that first session was the Judy Garland signature song, “Over the Rainbow.” The other three songs were John Hammond's selections: “Today I Sing the Blues,” “Right Now,” and “Love Is the Only Thing.”

The first song they tackled that evening was the tune that was responsible for bringing Aretha to Columbia: “Today I Sing the Blues.” Every one of the cuts on the album were recorded live in the studio to maintain that intimate improvisational feeling. There was no overdubbing, no stereo rechanneling, and no additional tinkering with the sound.

The rest of the album was recorded in four additional sessions, with minor changes in the lineup of the musicians. In fact, Aretha herself played the piano on several of the cuts, in place of Ray Bryant. As a matter of historic interest, the additional sessions, which took place from November 1960 to January 1961, unfolded as follows:

November 17, 1960:
“By Myself” and “All Night Long” (Ray Bryant, piano; Bill Lee, bass; Lord Westbrook, guitar; Sticks Evans, drums; Al Sears, tenor sax; Quentin Jackson, trombone).

November 29, 1960:
“Sweet Lover” and “Won't Be Long” (Ray Bryant, piano; Bill Lee, bass; Belton Evans, drums; Aretha Franklin, piano [on “Won't Be Long” only]).

December 19, 1960:
“Ain't Necessarily So” (Ray Bryant, piano; Warren Luckey, tenor sax; Lord Westbrook, guitar; Bill Lee, bass; Belton Evans, drums).

January 10, 1961:
“Are You Sure,” “Maybe I'm a Fool,” and “Who Needs You?” (Aretha Franklin, piano; Al Sears, tenor sax; Lord Westbrook, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; Sticks Evans, drums).

True to Hammond's established forté, the slow-paced, lamenting blues numbers on the album were the most successful cuts. “(Blue) By Myself,” “Maybe I'm a Fool,” “All Night Long,” and “Today I Sing the Blues” are all four-star classics of that genre. On those cuts, the clarity and purity of Aretha's voice is remarkable to hear, especially in contrast to her later
“soulful” work at Atlantic Records. On this particular album, the blues songs were all excellently executed. While Aretha immediately found an audience in the R&B market, it was not necessarily the type of music that was selling in a big way to the mainstream pop market at the time. In the record business, the bottom line is always the chart position,
and
the sales figures.

“Today I Sing the Blues” was the natural choice as Aretha's debut single on Columbia Records. Based on record sales and radio airplay, it shot up the R&B charts and became her first Top Ten recording. Although “Today I Sing the Blues,” released in October 1960, did not cross over to the pop chart, her strong support from the black radio stations was an encouraging sign to the record company that they were on the right track. “Won't Be Long,” the upbeat Johnny McFarland tune, was released in February 1961 as the second single from her debut Columbia album. It became her second Top Ten R&B hit, peaking at Number Seven on that chart and it crossed over to the pop chart for three weeks, peaking at Number Seventy-six. The
Aretha
album was released on February 27, 1961, and it immediately drew strong reviews in the music trade papers.
Billboard
Magazine was especially impressed by Aretha's performance on the LP, noting at the time that “she brings a true and strong gospel accent into a fine full-blown blues.” While the album never made the pop LP charts, Aretha became an instant hit with the jazz audience.

During the months between Aretha's signing of her Columbia recording contract and the release of her first non-gospel album, she had begun to take piano lessons. According to the press biography that Columbia sent out to newspapers in early 1961, “An expert pianist, Aretha accompanies herself on records and in nightclubs. She was self-taught musically until the summer of 1960, when she began studying with Leora Carter, a coach she considers without peer. Aretha is an expert swimmer, likes skating and horseback riding, Miami, her puppy, French couture, Chopin, Duke Ellington and ‘making people happy.' ‘If I have any advice to give,' Aretha says, ‘it's to work hard and have faith in the guidance of God.'”

There was conspicuously no mention of the fact that teenage Aretha had two small children living in Detroit at the time. Her personal life as
a single mother was completely glossed over and would not be revealed to the public for several years to come. At that time, the focus was on the fact that she was a normal, talented eighteen-year-old, with a budding musical career, and an incredible voice.

Under the tutelage of Jo King, Aretha also took several courses to round out her education. “I took lots of classes,” she recalls. “This was all in the CBS building on 54th and Broadway, where the Ed Sullivan Theater is. That building had all kinds of classes going on in it—dancing, ballet, you name it. I'd spend a couple of hours with my vocal coach Lenora Carter, and then if there was somebody hot at the Apollo, I'd go there. I saw the Supremes when they were still singing in little black skirts and white blouses. They weren't starring yet, but they were on the show. And I saw a lot of gospel artists there too.”

Although the
Aretha
album didn't exactly set fire to the record charts, it gave the talented eighteen-year-old a solid foundation in the recording business. On the album, Hammond had obviously chosen songs like George and Ira Gershwin's “It Ain't Necessarily So” for its references to Bible characters like David and Goliath, Jonah, and Methuselah to highlight her roots in gospel. The inclusion of Billie Holiday's “Who Needs You?” presented her in a blues context and was a nod to Hammond's own association with “Lady Day.” The album worked as a cohesive package because of the crisp sound of the recording and the emotion that Aretha brought to it.

According to Ray Bryant, “I always figured that Aretha just sang ‘Aretha,' not pop or jazz. She had her own sound and her own feeling, which she would carry to whatever they decided to call the finished product. Of course the album that she did with me was sort of jazz oriented. I recall that as more of a pure jazz album than some of the ones she did afterwards, possibly because John made sure that it had all of the pure jazz guys on it with her. Even though, some of the things she was singing were more or less pop, like ‘Over the Rainbow.' ‘Won't Be Long' sounds like more of a pure gospel. It was more or less just Aretha's sound, and it was just a matter of putting a different sort of background to it. In our case, we leaned more towards a jazz background, because we were jazzmen.”

After the album was completed, on a couple of occasions Aretha performed with the Ray Bryant Combo. “We shared the bill once in New
York in a club,” says Ray. “I had my group, and she was playing opposite me, on the other part of the bill, at a place called the Jazz Gallery.” Not long afterward, Ray and Aretha went off in separate directions. “I'm sorry that we sort of lost contact as the years went by,” he recalls, “but she got married, and shortly after I just stopped seeing her at all.”

Following the release of her debut Columbia album, Aretha spent a large portion of 1961 touring the country, playing a series of small, smoke-filled jazz clubs. With her sincerely sung blues songs, her expressive voice, and her expertly interpretive piano-playing, she became a big hit with the small and selective segment of the record-buying audience who followed jazz singers.

Aretha had just turned nineteen when she went out on the road, making the rounds of the jazz circuit. Unlike the Sunday performances at her father's church, singing in small jazz clubs where people were drinking and smoking and talking, was a new experience for her. Instead of being up before an altar with dozens of choir members behind her for support, she found herself seated at a piano with a spotlight on her, in a small, dimly lit room. Instead of the camaraderie of having a huge assembly of choir members behind her for support, she suddenly felt alone on-stage with just a handful of musicians accompanying her. Occasionally she would experience stage fright. She remembers how she felt at first: “I was afraid. I sang to the floor a lot.”