Aretha Franklin (6 page)

After appearing at Reverend Franklin's church, Sam would come over to the Franklin house and socialize with Aretha and her sisters. He was very handsome and charming and Aretha developed a huge crush on him. She loved hearing him sing, and she even kept a Sam Cooke scrapbook.

“Oh, I loved that man,” Aretha sighs at the mention of his name. “I was a great Sam Cooke fan. I had a little book of everything on him, down
to his Kent cigarettes. I had a pack of those. He was young, handsome, and quite dashing. He was a very down-to-earth and beautiful person.” Aretha was so in love with Sam that for years to come she saved that crumpled cigarette package he had left behind. She cherished it because it was his.

When Sam made the move from gospel singing to pop, he recorded two singles for the Soul Stirrers' gospel label, Specialty Records. When the staff at Specialty Records couldn't seem to market the two songs “I'll Come Running Back to You” and “Forever,” in 1957 he switched to Keen Records.

As Sam's career grew, instead of coming to Detroit to perform at New Bethel Baptist Church, he would instead headline at the hottest club in town, The Flame Show Bar. Unhappily, Aretha was too young to be admitted when Sam played there, and she longed desperately to see his new act. “The Flame!” Aretha exclaims. “Oh, how I died to get into The Flame. Everybody who was anybody in soul played there, and for a couple years I was just underage. When I finally got in, I played with Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Ben E. King—everybody. Yeah, those were wild times!”

Right before his debut single on Keen Records was released, Sam came over to the Franklin home and gave Aretha a special preview. “I learned a lot from Sam Cooke,” she recalls. “He did so many things with his voice—so gentle one minute, so swinging the next, then electrifying, always doing something else. Sam brought his dub recording of ‘You Send Me' to our house for us to hear when he was still singing with the Soul Stirrers. The song became a hit and Sam went pop.”

When Sam's song, “You Send Me,” became a huge Number One pop and R&B smash, it left a lasting impression on Aretha. According to her, “When he made the change [from gospel to soul], I said, ‘I'd sure like to sing that too.'”

With this new goal in mind, Aretha decided she wanted to branch out with her vocalizing. Now all she needed was the right opportunity and she would try her hand at singing contemporary songs. She wasn't the only one who saw potential in her singing. Through her performances in her father's church on Sundays, she had already gained a reputation
around Detroit as a legend in the making. Two of the people who regularly came to New Bethel Baptist Church to hear Aretha sing were a pair of young songwriters from the area. The duo longed to get involved in record producing. Their names were Berry Gordy, Jr. and his partner Billy Davis.

Eventually, Gordy went on to establish the company that put Detroit on the musical map—Motown Records. But in 1956 and 1957 he was just beginning his career in the recording business, and he had his first streak of luck as a songwriter. At the time, Billy Davis had assumed the pen name of Tyran Carlo. As the writing team of Gordy and Carlo, the pair helped to launch the solo career of a local Detroit singer named Jackie Wilson.

Wilson had been singing with the Dominos since 1953, when he replaced Clyde McPhatter as the lead singer of the group. McPhatter went on to form another group which brought him international fame: the Drifters. Jackie Wilson stayed with the Dominos for four years. Although the original group had scored a number of hits with McPhatter singing lead, Jackie at the helm of the quintet found itself mainly coasting on the fame of their former hits “Do Something for Me” (1951), “Sixty Minute Man” (1951), and “Have Mercy Baby” (1952). Although they performed in Las Vegas and at New York City's famed Copacabana, their songs were not making the charts. When their 1956 single “St. Therese of the Roses” hit the charts, Wilson took that as his signal to spring off onto a solo recording contract.

A solo engagement at Detroit's premier club, The Flame Show Bar, brought Jackie Wilson the career package that he needed: a recording contract and a hot songwriting team. Signed to Brunswick Records, Jackie Wilson began carving out his own unique place in music history by recording seven consecutive songs penned by the writing team of Gordy and Carlo. Those hits included “Reet Petite (the Finest Girl You Ever Want to Meet)” (1957), “To Be Loved” (1958), “Lonely Teardrops” (1958), “That's Why (I Love You So)” (1959), and “I'll Be Satisfied” (1959). [Note: Berry's sister Gwen is credited as co-writer on all of the above Jackie Wilson hits except for “Reet Petite.”]

Berry Gordy and Billy “Tyran Carlo” Davis were having such luck with Jackie Wilson's career, they decided that what they needed next
was a female R&B singer to perform their songs. Billy Davis had several contacts at Chess Records, the same company that released Reverend Franklin's sermons and Aretha's gospel album. Gordy and Davis came up with a plan: they would sign Aretha Franklin to a production deal, and she would record their songs for Chess.

To this day, Davis still remembers the first time he heard teenage Aretha singing in her father's church. “The impression that I had,” he recalls, “was that she was a child genius. Everything that she sang was with such emotion that you felt every word. She had just terrific control over her expressions. So, as far as I was concerned, she
was
a young genius.”

“This was actually about 1958,” Davis explains. “This was prior to Motown, when Berry and I were first starting—just recording and signing acts. The Motown concept came out of our frustration in dealing with the late Nat Tarnopol who was Jackie Wilson's manager. I was working with Chess Records independently. I had an association with Chess because I had a couple of hits on other artists of theirs—the Moonglows and the Flamingos. And I was working with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.”

Impressed by Aretha Franklin's voice, Davis and Gordy decided to sign her to an immediate recording deal. According to their plan, Aretha would become a teenage R&B star, singing Gordy and Carlo compositions. However, Aretha's father was opposed to the idea of his young daughter entering the music business at such an early age. “That's why he wouldn't let her record,” says Davis. “He was opposed to it initially—because he felt she was too young, as opposed to not liking that style of music. He just didn't want her getting into the music business at that age.”

“But,” Davis explains, “he had consented to our recording Erma Franklin, her older sister. Erma is a terrific singer as well. We rehearsed her and wrote songs for her, two of which later became hits. Aretha played the piano when we were rehearsing Erma, preparing her to record. Her father wasn't going to let her sing, but she was a hell of a player as well, so she actually played the piano. Of course, we had to pay her. I forgot what it was—probably something equivalent to movie money or something like that—a couple of bucks. But she was phenomenal even then. But how it turned out is that Erma turned to jazz. Erma preferred to sing jazz over R&B and rock music, so we never recorded either one of them.”

Had the timing been just a little different, Aretha and Erma might have both gone on to become Motown Records' first two female stars. But that was not to be. Ultimately, the two songs Billy Davis and Berry Gordy wrote with Erma Franklin in mind went on to become hits for other people. “You've Got What It Takes” became a Top Ten pop smash for Marv Johnson in 1959, and Etta James scored her first Top Forty hit with “All I Could Do Was Cry.”

Billy Davis still remembers those rehearsal sessions with teenage Aretha Franklin playing piano for her older sister. According to him, she was very strong-willed and not the sad, insecure, and withdrawn adult that so many people claim she later became. “I don't think she was shy,” says Davis. “She was a little introverted. I would never describe her as shy. She was a strong individual and had a mind of her own, there's no doubt about it. Aretha wasn't anyone that you walked over or pushed around or manipulated too easily, even at that age.”

That particular character sketch makes what happened to Aretha later that year even more devastating. At the age of fourteen she was a talented piano player and a teenage gospel singing sensation, and she was just beginning to get over her childhood disappointments and the loss of her mother. She became pregnant. Suddenly she was forced to face a highly emotional adult problem. She dropped out of high school to await the birth of her first child. Although she was technically just a child herself, this marked the sudden end of her carefree adolescence and the beginning of her troubled adulthood.

Unfortunately for so many young girls growing up in inner-city Detroit in the 1950s, being unmarried and pregnant was nothing unusual. “That was not uncommon in our environment,” Mary Wilson recalls. “Many of the neighborhood girls had babies when they were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old. That was the bad part about being in the projects, because that kind of thing was happening all around us. So many people living in such close proximity has a lot to do with it. I grew up in a strong family environment and my parents would have killed me! The Franklin children were there without a mother and in the care of housekeepers, so it was not a normal household.”

Over fifty years after the birth of her first son, Aretha still refuses to explain the circumstances surrounding her teenage pregnancy. When questioned about the subject, she answers firmly, “Well, that's very, very personal, and nothing I care to discuss.”

The unanswered question of who is the father of her first child, has left the door wide open to rumors and conjecture. Under what circumstances could the daughter of such a prominent and highly visible minister have gotten herself into such a situation? Was the pregnancy the result of an affair with someone on one of the chaperoned gospel tours? Or was it a rape or a teenage romance? Was it a stranger, a relative, or did someone she knew and trusted take advantage of her? All that is known for certain is that Aretha gave birth to a son that year, and that she named him Clarence Franklin—after her father.

What exact information is known about the first child born to Aretha in the mid-1950s? The documented birth records for that time remain confidentially filed in Michigan. Although birth certificates from 1893 to the present are stored in the City County Building in Detroit, the certificates for all illegitimate births are stored in the state capital, Lansing. The only people who are legally allowed to request copies of them are the subjects and the subjects' mothers. So, to this day, the father's identity remains a secret. Only Aretha knows the facts.

Additionally, Aretha became pregnant again not long afterward, and gave birth to her second son when she was just sixteen years old. She named him Edward Franklin. She has never revealed the name of Edward's father either.

What happened to Aretha as a teenager, set a pattern of victimization by the men in her life. If it is true that an adult is the product of his or her experiences as a child, then this traumatic situation must have affected the emotional makeup of her later life. With such a promising career already in the making and her whole life ahead of her, she somehow endured this trauma. Having given birth to two children by the age of sixteen, Aretha Franklin had already earned her right to sing to the blues.

H
aving dropped out of high school to have her first baby, Aretha spent a lot of her time at home listening to music and playing the piano. Although she had grown up immersed in the world of gospel music, in the mid-fifties she began expanding her musical horizons. Not only was she interested in the popular R&B music she heard on the radio, but she was also introduced to the melancholy and heartfelt sound of the blues. Mahalia Jackson once said, “Anybody that sings the blues is in a deep pit, yelling for help.” In Aretha's case, this certainly applied.

It wasn't just the blues in general that fascinated Aretha; it was the music of one particular blues singer: Dinah Washington. There were a lot of similarities between Aretha and the famous blues singer. At her birth, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Dinah Washington's name was Ruth Jones. Her family moved north to Chicago in the mid-1930s, and as a teenager she played piano in a Baptist church. Like Aretha, she had begun to establish a name for herself locally by the age of fifteen. This came about for Dinah by winning several Chicago-area talent contests. When she was eighteen she changed her name to Dinah Washington and embarked on a career of awe-inspiring proportions.

From 1943 to 1945 she was the featured vocalist with the Lionel Hampton band, where she received her first taste of national fame. After leaving the Hampton band, she embarked on her career as a solo jazz singer.

In 1949 she signed a contract with Mercury Records, where she was destined to find her greatest success. Her first single release that
year, “Baby Get Lost,” marked the beginning of a long and harmonious relationship with Mercury. From 1949 to 1958 Dinah joined the ranks of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the most popular blues and jazz singers of all time. Her string of jazz hits from this era included “Long John Blues” (1949), “I Wanna Be Loved” (1950), “Cold, Cold Heart” (1951), “Wheel of Fortune” (1952), “Trouble in Mind” (1952), and “Make Me a Present of You” (1958).