‘Spanish Harlem’: The Aretha Franklin hit Phil Spector stabbed his girlfriend in the back with
In 1971, Aretha Franklin was finally getting used to the heady and decadent taste of glittering success.
It had taken a long road to get there, but ever since I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You was released on Columbia in 1967, it had all been leading to the moment where she could finally breathe. Or, more appropriately, put her foot on the gas – now that she was a famous singer, there was no time to stop and take stock.
In this sense, Franklin’s unique musical brand was harnessed through looking at the world around her, honouring the past and roots of where she came from, but also blazing a path forward into the future. There was a damn good reason Otis Redding said “That little girl done took my song away from me” when he heard her version of ‘Respect’. She was the envy of all.
By that logic, you could argue that the success of ‘Respect’ in 1967 was a direct link that led to the product of ‘Spanish Harlem’, the Ben E King song she subsequently covered in 1971. Franklin’s talent lay not so much in delivering the covers note-by-note perfectly, but in putting her own twist on it that gave her unmistakable ownership.
That was seen all through the song, like her changing the original lyric from “A red rose up in Spanish Harlem” to “A rose in Black and Spanish Harlem”. It was a social awareness, of course, but it was also like a unique fingerprint – this was Franklin’s time to shine, and no one else’s.
All of that stood to reason in its own capacity, but it was also somewhat ironic given the tumult the song had initially gone through when it was first being released by King in 1960, at the hands of Phil Spector and Jerry Leiber. They were men fighting to the death to get their sense of pride showing through. Franklin, by comparison, thrashed them all like it was child’s play.
Bearing in mind this was the very beginning of the ‘60s, and Spector was not yet the master producer he would go on to be, Leiber seemed to enjoy flexing his muscles over his young apprentice. “I think that he learned a lot by just writing that song with me,” he proffered. “By the choices that I made and what I told him to do, shade this and shade that, make this shorter and make that a shade longer, whatever.”
But by the same token, Spector had a few of his own tricks up his sleeve. Namely, this came at the expense of his girlfriend at the time, Beverly Ross, who helped him write the riff and was allegedly shocked to hear it appear on the track with King’s vocals some time later. She had been mugged off, to put it lightly.
As a result, although Franklin’s cover was not directly restoring justice, it was putting women’s voices on the tape that had, for so long, been overtaken by men’s egos. She had a particularly strong talent for doing that throughout her life, but arguably it was never more important than in moments like those. Down with Spector and Leiber, and up with the Spanish revolution.
