Aretha Franklin (4 page)

Aretha explains of this period of her life, that from Memphis “we moved to Buffalo, then to Detroit. I was raised in Detroit, the north end. Then we moved to the west side, then further out.”

In spite of his marriage to Barbara Siggers in 1936, Reverend C. L. Franklin had quite a reputation with the women and girls in his church. In 1940 Reverend Franklin caused a scandal when he had an affair with Mildred Jennings, a thirteen-year-old member of his congregation at New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis. She became pregnant by him, and gave birth to a daughter, Carl Ellan Jennings.

In 1948 Barbara suddenly packed her bags and left Detroit, Reverend C. L. Franklin, and the four children they had together: Aretha, Erma, Carolyn, and Cecil. She moved to Buffalo, New York with her oldest son, Vaughn, to whom she had given birth prior to her marriage to C. L. Franklin.

Whatever caused Barbara Franklin to leave her husband and her four youngest children appears to have been too traumatic for anyone to discuss. One is left to guess what might have caused her sudden flight. Was it marital strife? Another man? Another woman? A liquor problem? Was she finally done with his infidelities? The matter remains a tightly-kept family secret to this day.

There are two ways to look at this story. Many sources view what happened as Barbara having “deserted” Aretha and her siblings. However, Aretha later recalled that this was not the case since she, Erma, Carolyn and Cecil would go to Buffalo to see their mother during their summer vacations.

Barbara and Vaughn had moved into Barbara's parents' home in Buffalo and Aretha remembers her summer visits there fondly. Her mother had taken a job as a nurse's aide at Buffalo General Hospital, and Aretha and her siblings recalled riding their bicycles through the streets of Buffalo in the warm summer sun. Aretha was so impressed with her mother's job at the hospital that as a child she contemplated making nursing her life's work. One Christmas Aretha and Carolyn were given little toy nurses kits, and they would prescribe little candy pills to each other as make-believe medicine.

However, the carefree memories of her childhood were soon clouded by tragedy. When Aretha was just ten years old, her mother suffered a massive heart attack and died. Reverend C. L. Franklin called Aretha, Carolyn, Erma and Cecil into the kitchen of their Detroit house one day, and plainly but solemnly delivered the sad news. It was a devastating blow to them. The children all went to their mother's funeral, but Reverend Franklin reportedly did not attend.

What is most recalled about Barbara Siggers Franklin are the widely-spread statements about her
alleged
“desertion” of the family and her sudden death. In Aretha's eyes, her mother never deserted her children, it was her marriage to C. L. Franklin she deserted. Family friends recall that her mother's untimely disappearance from Aretha's life caused the young girl to change from an outgoing, happy youngster to a shy and insecure child. Mahalia Jackson once commented, “After her mama died, the whole family wanted for love.”

Detroit in the years immediately following World War II was the scene of economic expansion and growth. Although racial prejudice existed, compared to Memphis, the Motor City was a liberal land of opportunity. There were jazz clubs, dance halls, theaters, burlesque houses, bars, and a booming nightlife scene. In other words, come the Sabbath, there were plenty of souls in need of Sunday-morning redemption. That's where Reverend C. L. Franklin's oratorical powers came into play.

In Memphis, Reverend Franklin was the pastor of the New Salem Baptist Church. Upon moving to Buffalo, he was called to Friendship Baptist Church. When he took over the New Bethel Baptist Church, at the corner of Linwood and West Pennsylvania in Detroit, he made it clear
that his Sundays spent before the congregations in Memphis and Buffalo were just “dress rehearsals” for his true calling.

When Reverend Franklin began preaching and the choir started rejoicing, enraptured parishioners would stand up and shout a heartfelt “Praise the Lord!” Often, members of the crowd gathered in the 4,500-seat church would become so frantic with their “testifying” that nurses in starched white uniforms had to revive them. On hot summer Sundays, the air would be stirred with complimentary cardboard fans. Mounted on wooden sticks, the handheld cardboard fans were printed with advertisements for local funeral homes. Clearly there were only two realities in Reverend Franklin's church—life and death.

Word spread fast and people traveled from great distances to hear the gospel according to Reverend C. L. Franklin. Eventually a glowing blue neon crucifix was installed over the altar to match the electricity of his oratory delivery.

Reverend Franklin became so famous for his sermons at the New Bethel Baptist Church that he was often asked to make guest appearances across the country. When he was called away from Detroit on business, his four children were left in the care of a series of housekeepers and family friends. For a while, Aretha's grandmother, Rachel, moved in and took care of her and her siblings. The children called her “Big Mama,” and she was their father's mother. She had a reputation for being a strong disciplinarian if any of the children did anything wrong. Big Mama was one of the women who taught Aretha how to cook, along with the Franklin family's regular housekeeper, Katherine. Another household guest was Lola Moore, whom Aretha referred to as “Daddy's special friend.” Three of the most frequent visitors who took care of the Franklin children were Frances Steadman and Marion Williams, who were both gospel vocalists with the Clara Ward Singers, and Mahalia Jackson.

Mahalia Jackson was already a singing legend when she came to visit the Franklin home. She was to become a lifelong inspiration for Aretha. In her own opinion, Mahalia felt that she was “ordained to sing the gospel.”

Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans in 1911, the daughter of a stevedore / barber / preacher and his wife. Her mother died when she was
four years old, and she was raised by her aunts. By the time she was twelve, Mahalia had vowed to spread the gospel. According to her, “Ever since that day, I promised the Lord that I'd dedicate my life to song.”

When Mahalia was sixteen, she went to Chicago to live with another aunt. It was there that her professional singing career took off. For seven years she was a member of the gospel quintet, The Johnson Singers, and in 1941 she became a soloist. Four years later, she recorded “Move On Up a Little Higher.” The inspirational record sold eight million copies and made her a star. She continued to record hit after hit with “Upper Room,” “Even Me,” and “Silent Night.”

In 1954, Mahalia debuted her nationally broadcast CBS radio show, becoming the first gospel performer to have a regular network program. While her recording career flourished, she also appeared in several movies, including
Imitation of Life
with Lana Turner (1959) and
The Best Man
with Henry Fonda (1964).

It was Mahalia's clear and strong contralto voice that made her such a huge success. Her singing was emotion-charged, and everyone who heard her was genuinely touched by her inspiring strength and spiritual fire. Her faith in God was unwavering, and everything she sang was deeply felt. This was a trait that young Aretha gleaned from Mahalia and applied to her own music.

Although she had become the most famous singer in gospel music, Mahalia never lost her down-home sincerity. She once described herself as “just a strong Louisiana woman who can cook rice so every grain stands by itself.” Aretha has fond memories of Mahalia—in church and in the kitchen.

There were times when the Franklin house buzzed with music and excitement. “There was always music in our house,” Aretha recalls. “The radio was going in one room, the record player in another, the piano banging away in the living room. During my upbringing, people like Art Tatum, Arthur Prysock, Dinah Washington, Lionel Hampton, Sam Cooke, James Cleveland, and Clara Ward used to come to our house. So I was accustomed to being around famous people. Mahalia would come in, put a pot of greens on the stove, sit around and talk and eat, and maybe somebody would start toying with the piano and something would start up.”

It is easy to see how young Aretha and her sisters, growing up in a household that played host to a virtual
Who's Who
of popular black music, all gravitated toward singing and playing the piano. When she was “about eight or nine,” Aretha began playing around with the piano while listening to Eddie Heywood on the record player. She recalls that she was “just banging, not playing, but finding a little something here and there.” Her father encouraged her daughter's interest in the piano and hired a teacher to give her lessons. However, playing the piano became too much like school, and Aretha rebelled. “I used to run and hide when she came,” she recalls of her teacher. “She was going along too slowly for me. Too much ‘Chopsticks.' She stopped coming because every time she did, I wasn't there.”

Eventually, without the help of formal instruction, Aretha taught herself how to play the piano and also discovered that she could sing.

Instead of being influenced by the many negative aspects of inner-city life, the Franklin children seemed to stay away from trouble, and they learned to channel themselves in positive directions. Their house was shaded by trees and there was a grassy lawn. In spite of cockroaches in the kitchen and an occasional rat in the basement, they had it better than several of the children with whom they played and attended school.

According to Aretha's brother Cecil Franklin, “The people that you saw who had any measure of success were the pimp and the hustler, the numbers man, and the dope man. Aretha knew what they were all about without having to meet them personally.”

“We were very good kids,” Aretha recalls. “We roller-skated, sat on the back porch—some people would call it a stoop—and told a lot of jokes late into the midnight hours. I had a piano right off the back porch, and sometimes I'd sing … all day, every day, with my sisters and my friends. Mostly what we heard on the radio—the Drifters, LaVern Baker, Ruth Brown. Oh, it was real nice. Of course in the end we'd argue, because they were tired. And I wanted to sing all through the night.”

She was especially encouraged by the household of visiting celebrities. One of her first mentors was James Cleveland, who taught her how to reach notes she didn't realize were in her range. “He showed me some real nice chords,” she remembers, “and I liked his deep, deep sound. There's a whole lot of earthiness in the way he sings and what he was feeling. I was
feeling but I just didn't know how to put it across. The more I watched him, the more I got out of it.”

Another one of Aretha's prime influences was Clara Ward. When one of Aretha's aunts died, Ward sang at the funeral. Caught up in the fervor of the song “Peace in the Valley,” Ward grabbed the hat off her head and hurled it to the ground. “Clara knocked me out!” Aretha recalls of the emotional gesture. “From then on I knew what I wanted to do—sing!” The spirit and the stirring emotion of that afternoon stayed with her for a long time.

At the age of twelve, Aretha sang her first solo in church. “I stood up on a little chair and sang,” she recalls. She and her sister, Erma, also joined a gospel quartet directed by Reverend James Cleveland. At times Aretha played piano for the choir, and she eventually became one of the church's three featured soloists. After her first solo performance, several parishioners flocked around Reverend Franklin and exclaimed, “Oh, that child sure can sing!”

She was regularly highlighted in the choir after that, and was quite taken by the attention that she received. Since her role model was Clara Ward, who also played the piano, Aretha decided she wanted to play just like Ward did. “I liked all of Miss Ward's records,” Franklin remembers, “and I learned how to play them because I thought one day she might decide she didn't want to play [in church] and I'd be ready.”

Aretha has several fond memories of her school days. According to her, she enjoyed most of her courses. “My favorite classes were health, science, art, and lunch!” she recalls with a laugh. “I was a good student. A's, B's, some C's. Maybe one D here and there. I used to get called from my classes a lot because the auditorium teacher would need me to entertain the kids. They'd be throwing spitballs or fighting and I'd have to play the piano to entertain. She'd always call me when I was in Phys. Ed. and I'd have to walk in wearing my gym suit, with the shorts and the blouse that you had to sew your name on. I hated that. I really wanted to get down with the kids and do a little screaming myself, but I had to sing. That was my first experience with a tough audience.”

Two of Aretha's favorite pastimes, in addition to singing, were roller-skating and watching boxing matches on television. When she was singing
with her choir as a soloist, she was paid fifteen dollars a week for her services. Little by little, she saved her earnings to purchase one of her most prized possessions: her own pair of roller skates. “I bought my first pair of roller skates with Raybestos wheels. They were about thirty dollars a wheel, so I had to really save for those skates,” she recalls.

As amazing as it seems, Raybestos skate wheels were that expensive, and were only manufactured for a short period of time. The Raybestos Company was famous at the time for making superior auto brake linings for Cadillacs and other high-profile cars. If Aretha was going to have skates that would make her the envy of the entire neighborhood, then she had to have top-of-the-line Raybestos wheels!

The hot spot for roller skating was the nearby Arcadia Roller Rink on Woodward Avenue. All of the area kids would hang out there, skating for hours to the latest hit records. “I lived in the roller rink!” Aretha exclaims.

Her lifelong interest in boxing began when she was a kid. She used to sit for hours with her father in front of the television, eating ice cream and watching the fights. She explains, “I've loved boxers since I was a little girl. I kept up with Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Johnny Bratton, Kid Gavilan, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier. I met Ray Robinson at the Hollywood Bowl once. That was a real treat. When I was a child I used to think he was so handsome.”