“A wonder child”: Why Smokey Robinson thought Aretha Franklin was unrivalled
There’s a certain type of magic that comes from any good soul music. Despite many people trying their best to capture a feeling every time they pick up their instruments, the best soul artists of all time tend to channel something from deep inside them rather than spend their time practising their scales to make some massive epic. Because all of the good music comes from the heart, and as far as Smokey Robinson could tell, there were singers that seemed to come from a different world entirely.
When Robinson had his first hits with Motown, though, the concept of soul music was still emerging. Ray Charles had pointed the way forward when making his own mix of rhythm and blues and jazz, but listening to the way The Temptations moved in the early days of Motown Records, they had everything a group could have asked for, from the fantastic vocals to the massive hooks on ‘My Girl’ or later on ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’.
But despite being the one-stop shop for all things soul music, no one was obligated to sign with them. Some of the other big names in the genre were coming from the South, and outside of Otis Redding and Al Green making waves out of Memphis years later, Aretha Franklin still dominated the conversation whenever she sang tunes like ‘Respect’.
Then again, Franklin was never a Motown-focused artist. She had come up in the same areas that Robinson had come from, but her signing with Columbia Records and then Atlantic Records helped give her a greater presence on the charts, sharing the same label that housed artists like Bob Dylan. And whenever she opened her mouth, it was not hard to see what the labels saw in her when she sang.
While a lot of the biggest soul singers got their chops up by singing in church, Franklin threw caution to the wind every single time she sang. She had a booming voice, but listening to her sing tracks like ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’ made her seem superhuman compared to her competition. Since many people had become used to female stars like Marianne Faithfull, hearing Franklin sing with this much gusto helped put every single singer on the charts to shame.
And despite having his own signature vocals, Robinson knew that there was no one like Franklin when she started off, saying, “At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. … Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood.”
It’s easy to see where a lot of the biggest stars after her got their start as well. It was now OK for female artists not to sound delicate, and whether that’s listening to Dusty Springfield in the 1960s, Mariah Carey in the 1990s, or even Ariana Grande today, everyone took from Franklin’s playbook to find that inner strength as a vocalist.
But maybe it’s best that we never knew what kind of world she came from. The world only gets so many Aretha Franklins every generation, and while we can certainly appreciate the ones that we get, the real lesson comes from what we can learn from her singing rather than trying to copy her outright.
