Aretha Franklin (7 page)

In July of 1958, along with Benny Goodman, Joe Turner, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonius Monk, and George Shearing, Dinah was one of the headliners at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival, held annually in Newport, Rhode Island. Although she had a strong jazz following, Mercury Records wanted to market her in a way that would appeal to a more mainstream audience. To accomplish this, they teamed her with their new A&R director, Clyde Otis, who became her producer.

Dinah was reluctant at first to sing the songs Clyde had chosen for her, in the style he wanted her to sing them. She eventually complied, and with their first recording sessions together, she created the greatest solo commercial smashes of her illustrious career.

“Well, how that came about is, in early ‘59 Mercury asked me to add Dinah to my roster,” Otis remembers. “Up until then, Dinah had recorded either straight blues songs or big-band numbers. In our first session together, we made ‘What a Diff'rence a Day Makes.' That was the first time she ever sang to strings in that manner. But the point was, I said, ‘Honey, put your heart in the song.' Once she realized that I wasn't trying to prostitute her talent, she just went ahead from that point on.”

“What a Diff'rence a Day Makes” became Dinah's first solo Top Ten pop hit. From there she went on to score a string of Top Forty smashes, including “Unforgettable” (1959) and the poignant Clyde Otis composition “This Bitter Earth” (1960). Not only did Aretha fall in love with these songs, but she was later to record all three of them. Ultimately, she would record with Clyde Otis as well. Clyde was also responsible for pairing Dinah Washington with Brook Benton, and he produced their two Top Ten pop duets of 1960: “Baby (You've Got What It Takes)” and “A Rockin' Good Way (to Mess Around and Fall in Love).”

In 1958, 1959, and 1960, while the teenaged Aretha was sitting at home tending to her babies, she decided that the person after whom she most wanted to fashion her life was Dinah Washington. When Dinah came to Detroit, she would perform at either the Flame Show Bar, or the Frolic Show Bar; the latter was located at the intersection of John R. and Garfield Streets. Whenever she rolled into town, Dinah was treated like visiting royalty.

Dinah Washington became a very important catalyst in Aretha's life. Not only was Dinah her idol, but it was through her that Aretha met several of the people who would become important figures in her adult life.

Ted White, Aretha's first husband, says his earliest memory involving Aretha was of a visit he made to the Franklin home with Dinah. According to him, “I first saw Aretha when Dinah and I were guests in her father's home. She was a teenager then. I didn't meet her, we just saw her, she was standing on the steps—she wanted to meet Dinah.”

“I knew Dinah through friends back in the fifties, and she worked Detroit continuously,” says White. “At the time, I owned some music boxes—we were in the jukebox business—and some mutual associates kind of flung us together. We used to hang out quite a bit. She was a character, a loveable person, a very strong personality, and a great performer. And she's the only individual I ever knew who
loved
to sing—I mean, just
loved
to sing! She wouldn't care if it was just two guys standing on the corner at a bus stop, she'd stop and sing. She didn't care—she just loved to sing. It was always fun to go into a club with her. You know—some third-rate act is on-stage, and all of a sudden Dinah walks up the aisle and quietly lifts the mike out of their hand and just tears the house up. She was super!”

According to Aretha, “My dad loved giving parties. The great jazz, soul and gospel artists of the day performed in our living room. On this occasion Dinah was there. I was too young to go downstairs, so I'd sit at the top of the staircase and sneak a peek. That's when I first spotted Dinah. She had one too many [drinks] that night and the man who carried her out was Ted White, who I wound up marrying.”

Billy Davis remembers meeting Dinah around the same time he got to know Aretha. “Aretha worshipped Dinah Washington,” he recalls. “Her
father used to know Dinah, and Dinah used to come in and stay at their home. As a result, she became very good friends with Dinah Washington. As I listened to Dinah Washington [records], I think Aretha was largely inspired by Dinah.”

“Dinah was a character,” Davis continues. “She was another one that didn't take anything from anybody, and was definitely totally independent and flamboyant. She was pretty difficult at times to get along with. But she was a star and she knew it. She acted the part in every sense. But beneath all of that, and behind all of that, she was a decent human being.”

According to Davis, “Dinah respected Aretha's talent, and she met her through Reverend Franklin, who was a friend of hers. She took a liking to Aretha, and Aretha liked and respected her as a vocalist as well.”

It was after one of Dinah's performances during this same era that Clyde Otis first met Aretha. He had never heard of the young singer. In fact, he recalls that when he first met her, Aretha was an awestruck teenager gushing with adoration for Dinah.

“During that time, when I was working with Dinah, we did on occasion run into Aretha. Dinah was one of Aretha's idols,” Otis explains. Of his initial introduction to her, he claims, “I didn't have an impression, because she was just like a groupie. Aretha came on like a groupie! I didn't even know who she was, frankly. And I didn't hear her sing, it was just that she introduced, because she was there to see Dinah and to pay homage.”

On the one hand, it is amazing to think of Aretha Franklin as an enraptured teen, waiting backstage in a grimy hallway for the chance to say “hello” to her favorite singing star. On the other hand, it is quite easy to envision young Aretha being mesmerized by the self-confident and flamboyant Dinah Washington. Dinah was exactly what Aretha longed to become—a magical songstress who could mesmerize audiences with her emotional blues singing, and who seemed to be in total control of her personal life.

In those final two years of the 1950s, Aretha defined what she wanted to do with her life, and she found someone to model herself after. She began to plan how she was going to leave her family, and to try to succeed on her own. She decided to leave Detroit, to head for New York City, and to become a successful blues singer like Dinah Washington.

“The transition from gospel to blues was very nice,” Aretha remembers. “I was encouraged by my father to do what I would like to do, and I began choreography classes with Cholly Atkins. It was very exciting, new, and nice.” Although her father encouraged her to branch out into other forms of music, several sources claim he was not too keen on the idea of her leaving Detroit to seek her fortune in New York City.

Eventually, Aretha convinced her father she should shift from gospel music to secular singing. According to Aretha, “I gained a lot of experience on the road with him, and then I decided I wanted to change fields, so I let him know, and he felt that if this was what I wanted to do, this was what I should do.” Another problem arose when several of her father's parishioners complained that Aretha's pop-and-jazz aspirations were nothing short of blasphemy. Reverend Franklin believed that Aretha should share her singing with the world. He would explain things to his congregation.

Sensing that she was despondent about her personal life and her unexpected role as a teenage mother, several family friends encouraged her to immerse herself in her music and to turn her natural talent into a successful career. One person who was most supportive in her progression to the next step was musician Major “Mule” Holly, who was the bass player for jazz pianist Teddy Wilson.

With Holly's help, in early 1960, at the age of eighteen, Aretha packed her suitcases. Leaving her young boys, Clarence and Edward, in the care of family and friends, Aretha left Detroit and headed for New York City. Mule Holly took Aretha into a recording studio and produced a demo of her singing a blues song. Aretha's first residence in Manhattan was the YWCA on East 38th Street, and when she arrived in town, one of the first people she met was a woman named Jo King, for whom Aretha auditioned. King was later to recall of that initial audition: “Aretha did everything wrong, but it came out right. She had something—a concept of her own about music that needed no gimmickry. She was a completely honest musician.”

As Aretha recalls, “Mule Holly is the person responsible for my getting to Columbia [Records]. He used to be a friend of my dad's, and he kind of set me up for that. I did stay at the Y for a couple of days, and then I moved in with my manager. Her name was Jo King, and she was working for Broadway Recordings then. She lived in the East Seventies.”

According to John Hammond, who, at the time, was working for Columbia Records, his first introduction to Aretha Franklin's singing was through the demo she recorded, which Mule Holly produced for her. As Hammond later wrote in his memoirs,
Hammond on Record
, published in 1977, a black composer named Curtis Lewis came to his office one day with four demos of songs he had written. He played the first three and Hammond wasn't very impressed. However, the fourth one really caught his attention. It wasn't the song, but the singer. The song was called “Today I Sing the Blues,” and it was performed by a woman playing the piano and singing. Upon hearing the rudimentary demo, Hammond exclaimed, “This is the best voice I've heard in twenty years!”

Not long afterward, Jo King telephoned Hammond and said, “I know you're interested in Aretha Franklin. If want you want to meet her, she'll be in my studio today.”

John Hammond went over to 1697 Broadway, to the small recording studio Jo owned, and he met the eighteen-year-old singer who, he was convinced, was the future of the blues. If anyone should have been qualified to make that judgment, it was John Hammond, who had discovered Billie Holiday when she was just seventeen years old, in the 1930s. There was no question—Hammond wanted to sign Aretha Franklin to an immediate recording contract at Columbia Records.

To fully appreciate the historic significance of Aretha's being “discovered,” signed, and produced by John Hammond, one first has to have a knowledge of Hammond's relationship with Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Teddy Harris, and Columbia Records. A relative of the affluent Vanderbilts, John Hammond was born into a wealthy Manhattan family in 1910. He was in an ideal position to choose his life's work because of his love for it and not out of financial necessity. His passion was music—particularly jazz. Having dropped out of Yale in 1931, he chose his combined interest in jazz and journalism over his college degree. His first writing assignments were as a jazz critic for the British publications
Melody Maker
and
Gramophone
.

His first record production came in September 1931, when he financed the recording of a pianist named Garland Wilson. The session produced two songs that were never released, but it brought him the
experience he needed, and provided him with a production demo that he used to get himself a job with a record company. In 1933 he received his big break, producing American jazz records for the European market, to be released by Columbia, Parlophone, Decca, and Okeh.

In the autumn of that year he recorded two historic sessions by the two most phenomenal female blues singers of the Twentieth Century: Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. On November 24 he produced Bessie Smith's last four recordings: “Do Your Duty,” “Gimme a Pigfoot,” “I'm Down in the Dumps,” and “Take Me for a Buggy Ride.” Only three days later, Hammond was back in the studio, producing Billie Holiday's very first recording: “Your Mother's Son-in-Law” which she sang with Benny Goodman's orchestra. Bessie's career was just ending, as Billie's was just beginning, and it was John Hammond who captured both historic events on 78 rpm discs the very same week.

Hammond discovered Billie Holiday in a dingy little jazz spot on 133rd Street in Harlem: Monette Moore's Club. Generally, Monette was the headliner, but since she had landed a role in a Broadway play, she had Holiday fill in at the club for her. According to John, “She was seventeen, and she'd been scarred by life already. But she was the first girl singer I'd come across who sang like an improvising jazz genius.” The first song he heard her sing was a Johnny Mercer tune called “Woudja for a Big Red Apple?”

In 1935, Hammond teamed Holiday with Teddy Wilson and they recorded the classic “I Wished on the Moon.” It was a fascinating twist of fate that twenty-five years later Aretha Franklin would make her first blues recording with Teddy Wilson's bass player, and that the recording would bring her to Hammond's attention.

Over the years, Hammond made dozens of jazz recordings for several different record labels. Another one of his monumental signings was big band leader Count Basie, whom Hammond had heard on a late-night radio station in Kansas City. Trumpet player Harry James, and vocalists Helen Hurnes, Alberta Hunter, Paul Robeson, and Joe Williams were all among the recording stars he produced in his long career, for several labels including Vanguard, Mercury, Okeh, Vocalion, and Victor.

In 1959 Hammond returned to Columbia Records, where he was to remain on staff until his death came in 1987. His last major discovery for
Columbia was in 1972 when he supervised the signing of an unproven guitarist / songwriter who he believed had potential. The artist's name was Bruce Springsteen. At the time of his death, Hammond was supervising the release of several compact discs comprising material from Columbia's vaults, including Billie Holliday's classic
Lady in Satin
.

When he had rejoined Columbia in 1959, his responsibilities included choosing which 78s from Columbia's vaults should be re-released as LPs. His other task was signing new talent to the label. His first five signings were jazz pianist Ray Bryant, the legendary folk balladeer Pete Seeger, a folk singer from Texas named Carolyn Hester, a young social-commentary folksinger / songwriter named Bob Dylan, and his jazz / blues discovery— Aretha Franklin.