Her collaborators talk about how she would sit down at the keyboard, play a few chords, and everyone would get chills. Aretha, in other words, gives us reasons and ways to really listen-to music, to African American culture, and to each other. Trying to hear Aretha’s thinking, feeling, and ways of connecting with people can teach us something about how thinking works, in all its unruly variety. Sometimes we hear this intelligence in emotionally gripping, ad-libbed note-choices nobody else would’ve made sometimes it’s a little inner-voice melody she plays under her vocal line sometimes it’s her verbal wit, as when in her marvelous post-disco hit “Jump to It” she describes a gossipy phone-call as getting “the 4-1-1 on who drop-kicked who this week.” Sometimes we can almost hear her having three musical thoughts at once.įranklin’s work rewards attention to the moment-by-moment flow of individual songs, to a bird’s-eye view of her choices, tendencies, and techniques across a 20-year prime, and to time-scales that lie in between, like the Valentine’s Day 1967 session in New York City that yielded her biggest hit, “Respect”-and, somehow, four other quite different songs that also appeared on her first Atlantic Records LP. Her collaborators acknowledge that she heard more, felt more, and understood more than the people around her, lots of whom were also super-smart.
The more I study Franklin’s works and life the more I see that she was not just a musical genius-which is something we normally imagine as bursting forth at inspired moments-but also someone who possessed a smartest-person-in-the-room capacity for grasping musical problems and possibilities. Her soul is being black and liking it.” There are many instances of this.īut I too have gotten obsessed with what’s inside Aretha’s head. More important, she feels what is in the music. Franklin, said she had “the ability to hear each note perfectly in her head. Critics, fans, family members, and fellow musicians invested a lot in her interiority: Her contemporary Roberta Flack said Aretha’s performances embodied “truth and sincerity.”Īretha’s father, the Rev. People paid careful attention to what Aretha sang and played, what she said in interviews and onstage monologues, what they could read into her movements, facial expressions, clothes, hair, and so on. That is, I was looking at how 1960s and ’70s listeners tried to “get inside her head.” I was actually motivated more by how Franklin projects her thinking outward, verbally and nonverbally.
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