How Aretha Franklin inadvertently inspired the sound of Motown
When we think of the people who have changed the face of popular music, we often think of the artists. Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Michael Bloomfield, Fletcher Henderson and Pete Seeger. We don’t often think of the talent scouts or A&R men who signed them, but one thing that each and every one of these artists has in common is that they were signed by the same man, John Hammond, of Columbia Records.
Hammond didn’t just have a fine ear, but he had a fine heart, too, and was instrumental in using his position and his privilege—his mother was a Vanderbilt, no less—to tear down the racial divide that was everywhere in his time, including in the music industry. As a journalist, concert booker and A&R man he championed artists both black and white. He was instrumental in orchestrating the From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939 which highlighted the music and art of black performers to a high-brow white audience, and encouraged Benny Goodman to break convention by hiring black musicians to play in his all-white group.
Put simply, the world of modern contemporary music would look a lot different if it wasn’t for the influence of and signings made by John Hammond. But, just because he knew a true and undeniable talent when he heard it, that didn’t mean that the label he worked for knew what to do with the artists he brought to them. Billie Holiday had her detractors owing to her “scratchy” and “off-key” singing, and when Dylan’s first album bombed, he was referred to inside the Columbia head office as “Hammond’s Folly”. Another singer they couldn’t get a hit out of at Columbia was the now-legendary Aretha Franklin.
Aretha’s name is so synonymous with soul music, and one of the very first names that comes to mind when you even think of the genre, but Columbia were pushing her as a jazz artist and backing her with lush orchestration and slow ballads. It wasn’t until she signed with Ahmet Ertegun and began working with Jerry Wexler that her true sound started to be heard. Before long, she was nicknamed ‘The Queen of Soul’.
Perhaps the defining record of her work arrived a year after she swapped labels, in I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love You. Recorded for Atlantic first at the mythical FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with the help of such luminous session players and sidemen as Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, Dan Penn and the rest of the Swampers, and then later in New York at Atlantic Studios with King Curtis, the album is a Southern soul masterpiece which showcases all the very best elements of Franklin’s extraordinary talents, not least her masterful piano playing and awesome voice.
Her soul shines for all to see on her exuberant and transformational cover of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’ while the jazzier side that Columbia had focussed on is blended with cool, greasy blues on ‘Drown in My Own Tears’. The titular track is a smouldering, grooving lashing of slow-burn rhythm and blues, whilst ‘Dr. Feelgood (Love is a Serious Business)’ has a great helping of gospel shining in its spirit.
This may be a Southern soul album—and, honestly, it may even be the Southern soul album—but Aretha was a Northern girl. Raised in the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father was a minister, it’s no wonder that Franklin has such a spiritual feeling in her singing.
John Hammond was far from the first to have been impressed with her talents, either. In 1972, George Jackson released the gorgeous ‘Aretha, Sing One for Me’ on the Hi label, but her influence was felt far before she’d even become a star. Though she was a year younger than the future Motown hit-machine Lamont Dozier, they were each enrolled in Hutchins Junior High when she first caught his eye, and his ear.
Dozier, who would go on to write some of the greatest pop songs of all time as part of the legendary Holland, Dozier and Holland triumvirate such as ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘Baby Love’, ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)’, ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, ‘Heaven Must Have Sent You’, ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ and more, was captivated by the young ministers daughter and would take himself to her fathers church every Sunday just to hear her sing.
Queen Aretha may be the quintessential Atlantic soul artist, but she was a sweet inspiration to one of the key members of Motown’s success.
