Aretha Franklin (9 page)

Columbia Records, and John Hammond in particular, have unnecessarily taken a lot of heat for getting Aretha's career off to a false start. If one only looks at the overwhelming success she had at Atlantic Records in the late sixties and early seventies as the “Queen of Soul,” it can be viewed that way. But in reality, Aretha's recording career has been longer and much more involved than that.

When John Hammond visited Jo King's recording studio that fateful day in 1960 to meet Aretha Franklin for the first time, he was very up-front with his vision of her career and Columbia's intentions. Jo King told him that day that Sam Cooke was trying to lure Aretha over to his label, RCA Records, as an R&B singer. Hammond explained to Aretha that he saw her as a gospel-edged jazz singer. When he offered her a recording deal on the spot, Franklin and King accepted the deal with their eyes wide
open. Yet Aretha was later to complain that she was uncomfortable with being marketed as a jazz star.

Was John Hammond successful with the direction that he chose for Aretha with her first Columbia album? His track record with jazz performers, and the way in which the jazz audience accepted Aretha, makes the answer a conclusive “yes.” She was so successful on that level, in fact, that the prestigious jazz magazine
Down Beat
named her as its “New Female Vocal Star of the Year” when it tallied their International Jazz Critics Poll in 1961. Hammond did not turn Aretha into an instant pop star, because that was never his intention. What he did accomplish was to make her an overnight jazz-singing sensation with two Top Ten R&B hits to her credit.

In his mind, he had the new Billie Holiday on his hands. When Billie died in 1959, she was a drug-plagued disaster. Her once-beautiful voice had been ravaged by years of abuse. With Aretha, Hammond knew that he had on his hands a young woman who possessed more expressive vocal power than he had heard since Holiday in the 1930s. Aretha's voice was still fresh, pure, and unravaged by years of abuse.

When Aretha embarked on her debut jazz tour in 1961, she was billed in clubs as “The
New
Queen of the Blues.” So, when it came time to return to the recording studio with Franklin, Hammond chose songs that would befit the successor to Billie Holiday's crown. Hammond wasn't aiming this album at the youth market at all, it was directed straight at hard-core jazz fans.

When Aretha and John commenced work on her second Columbia album,
The Electrifying Aretha Franklin
, instead of showing off her voice in another simple jazz setting, this time Hammond would give her the full treatment. For many of the songs, he chose to set her in the middle of a 1940s-style big band, complete with horns and strings. Oddly enough, this was the album that provided Aretha with the only Top Forty pop single of her entire Columbia career: “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.”

The Electrifying Aretha Franklin
was a continuation of the jazz exploration from the
Aretha
album. Not only is the instrumental accompaniment a bit different, but her vocals ring with a new sense of
confidence. Aretha's singing on the standard “You Made Me Love You” is a mesmerizing example of the emotional vocal control she possessed in the early 1960s. Singing to a horn section worthy of the Glenn Miller Orchestra on “I Told You So,” one can imagine Aretha as a big-band songstress of another era. This was obviously the vision that struck John Hammond.

Other standards on this album included “Exactly Like You,” “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” Like her debut album on the label, there were also several straightforward blues numbers out of the jazz mold: “Blue Holiday,” “Nobody Like You,” and “Just For You.”

There were two musical arrangers who worked on
The Electrifying Aretha Franklin
. The majority of the songs were arranged by Richard Wess, but on two of the cuts (“Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” and “I Surrender, Dear,”) Robert Mersey was the arranger. Mersey was fascinated by Aretha's voice, and he was later to play an important role in her recording career.

Again, on this album there were subtle references to Bible characters— just to include a touch of church on the LP to remind people of Aretha's gospel roots. In the lyrics of Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen's “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” she sang about Noah's Ark and Jonah inside the whale.

The album, which was released in early 1962, actually contained three hit singles. Not only did “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby” become a Top Forty pop hit, but a subsequent single containing “I Surrender, Dear” on one side and “Rough Lover” on the other became a two-sided hit, with both cuts charting: at Number Eighty-seven and Number Ninety-four respectively.

After she recorded
The Electrifying Aretha Franklin
, her business relationship with John Hammond ended. As Hammond was later to explain, when the album was completed in late 1961, he and his wife Esmé left for a European vacation. When they returned to the States, he was informed that the company had decided to turn Aretha over to other staff producers. They told him he couldn't produce hits.

The executives at Columbia explained to Hammond that while he was more than qualified as a jazz album producer, he had no concept of how to deliver a hit single. In his absence, Aretha went into the recording
studio with a staff producer named Al Kasha, and recorded a single called “Operation Heartbreak.” Released in September 1961, the song became Aretha's third consecutive Top Ten R&B single. However, it did not cross over to the pop charts.

John Hammond had gotten along well with Aretha on their two albums together, and he was surprised he wouldn't be working with her any longer. Reflecting about this in his autobiography, Hammond claimed that he suspected the reason for his being removed from the Aretha Franklin project was related to factors other than just his abilities as a producer. According to him, Columbia's sales and promotion staff were so impressed with Aretha's singing that they encouraged Columbia's subsidiary label, Epic Records, to do something that inadvertently incensed Aretha. Dave Kapralik, of Epic's A&R (Artists & Repertoire) department, signed Erma Franklin to a recording deal, which meant that Aretha's own sister had become in-house competition for her. Although Hammond denied having anything to do with Erma's signing, he suspected that Aretha somehow blamed him and had requested another producer.

“I think I made some very good records with Aretha at Columbia,” Hammond argued. “I wanted to keep her to a degree as a jazz singer, but Columbia wanted to make a big pop star out of her, which I thought would ruin her integrity.”

Bob Altshuler was the director of press and public affairs at CBS Records in the 1960s, and he was a friend of John Hammond's. According to Altshuler, “I don't know what caused the separation. Whether it was Aretha who said, ‘Let's try something else,' or the company who said, ‘Let's try something else.' John Hammond's great strength has always been his ability to recognize a great talent at a very early stage—long before most other people could even recognize that this artist had such enormous potential, in terms of audience support. That was true of Dylan, it was true of Springsteen, it certainly was true of Aretha. It was true of all of the jazz discoveries, whether it was Billie Holiday, or the Count Basie Orchestra, or the work that he did in establishing the sound of the Benny Goodman Orchestra. He always had that ability to recognize what could be the future of such a talent, very early on, during an embryonic stage in its career. And he certainly recognized that in Aretha.”

“However,” Altshuler concludes, “that was his great strength. If he possessed the same astuteness as a record producer that he had in recognizing talent at a very early stage, I think the Aretha Franklin story would have been an all-Columbia story rather than an Atlantic story.”

In 1961, Aretha Franklin made two more changes in her life. Not only did she end her relationship with John Hammond, but also her relationship with her manager, Jo King. Aretha had met a man in Detroit with whom she had fallen in love and ultimately married. His name was Ted White, and she not only made him her husband, but her manager as well. According to people who worked with Aretha during this period, Ted White had no prior management experience before becoming her manager. She was to spend most of the decade in the middle of a tug-ofwar between Columbia Records and her husband.

To this day, Aretha refuses to discuss any aspect of her relationship with Ted White. She also refuses to speak to him. They have had only two conversations since their divorce in 1969.

In 1961, Aretha traveled back and forth between New York City and her father's home in Detroit. It was during one of her trips to Detroit that she was introduced to Ted White, and she immediately became infatuated with him. “I was introduced to her by Della Reese,” White recalls, “at a club in Detroit—The 20 Grand.” Six months later they were married. White had remembered seeing Aretha on the steps at her father's home, when he visited in 1959 with Dinah Washington. This time it was more than a casual meeting—it was love.

Reportedly, Reverend Franklin was not at all happy about Aretha's sudden marriage. He and Ted were to become bitter enemies, and Aretha was torn between her relationship with her father and her love for Ted. As soon as they took their vows, Ted took over the reins of Aretha's career.

Ted White readily takes credit for getting John Hammond out of the picture. “I came in and kind of upset the apple cart by not wanting John Hammond to produce another one of those Al Jolson-type albums, so he didn't carry a lot of good blessings [towards me],” he claims.

There was no question that during this period in her career, Aretha Franklin was the new darling of the jazz set. To make this point even clearer, in July 1962 she was one of the headliners of the Newport Jazz Festival,
like Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington before her. The other jazz stars at the festival that summer included Carmen McRae, Duke Ellington, the Charles Mingus Sextet, the Max Roach Quartet, the Clara Ward Gospel Singers, the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Thelonius Monk Quartet, and the trio of Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan. It was a three-day festival held July 6, 7, and 8, 1962, and Aretha performed on the evening of the third day, accompanied by her rhythm section. To illustrate her stature in the jazz community at that time, Aretha and her jazz combo followed Duke Ellington and his orchestra, and preceded the Thelonius Monk Quartet.

There were two “panel discussions” at the festival, on the subject of jazz. On the afternoon of July 7, the discussion topic dealt with “The Economics of the Jazz Community.” Charles Mingus, Joe Williams, and John Hammond were on the panel.

Ted White distinctly remembers Aretha playing at the Newport Jazz Festival that year. “That was when we had just started putting her career into some shape,” he recalls. “We had some arrangements that were written by some arrangers that she liked, and it was just starting to happen. It was enjoyable to have the security of knowing, ‘Hey, I don't have to go up there and hope these guys can read my music.' You know, they've got a trombone part to this one, and a piano part to that one. It just started falling into place. It was like a heavyweight situation, ‘cause it was like Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and all the heavyweights of the day were there. So it was great to compete in that atmosphere.”

According to him, Aretha was so hot on-stage during this era, that as the opening act she would often intimidate the headliner. Often, the star of the show would think of some excuse to cancel his or her set, afraid that they couldn't match the intensity of Aretha's singing as the opening act. As Ted explains, “The strangest thing about those years—every time we had the opportunity to work with the ‘biggies,' there was always a lull afterwards. Somebody got sick, or the amps went out, and nobody wanted to go on the stage [after] her. I mean—seriously! We were working in Chicago with Otis Redding the first time, and always,” he laughs, “every time she would finish—and this was early on, when she was not the ‘closer'—something always happened when she went on-stage. Nobody would dare get up there after she sang. That audience would be on fire.”

Ted was busy booking Aretha in small jazz lounges across the country. Among those dates she played was the famous Flame Show Bar in Detroit, the Thunderbird Lounge in Las Vegas, and several clubs in the Caribbean.

White was not popular with the brass at Columbia Records, but he was headstrong and determined to prove himself as a manager. “Columbia had not been dictated to before,” he explains, “and they didn't have a great relationship with Aretha, because she had missed a few scheduled recording sessions. There wasn't a lot of good blood between them, but we came in and healed that. We did some very good work and we got some good product out there.”

In mid-1962, Aretha Franklin began working with her new record producer, Robert Mersey. He had been the musical arranger on the
Electrifying
album, and now he was given complete control of her next release. Together, Aretha and Robert would record three albums, including the brilliant
Unforgettable
.

Since Ted White claims that he was responsible for getting John Hammond out of the picture, was Mersey his personal choice as her next producer? “Not particularly,” says White, “but he was the one that was available at the time. He did some great things with [Barbra] Streisand [after his association with Aretha], and he was producing for Andy Williams, and we wanted to try her in a different area. So we tried him.”

Aretha's first album with Mersey at the helm was
The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin
, which was released in August 1962. Although there were plenty of strings used on this particular album, Mersey moved away from the horn-laden big-band sound of Aretha's second Hammond-produced album. With the exception of a couple of up-tempo tunes, the majority of the songs were on the “tender” and “moving” side of things. The “swinging” element was represented by the snappy “I'm Sitting on Top of the World,” the bluesy “Don't Cry Baby,” and a jumping “Lover Come Back to Me.”