The artist David Crosby said could sing like God: “The biggest star in the country”
The real superpower behind every Crosby, Stills and Nash usually came from what David Crosby brought to the table.
He always had a slightly more advanced musical vocabulary than the average rock and roll star, and while he would have gladly played folk music to his heart’s content, it was a lot easier for him to gravitate towards what the more far-reaching acts like Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan were doing half the time. He wanted the chance to explore new textures every time he made an album, but even with that ear for vocal harmonies, he knew that the right singer mattered more than anything.
After all, no one in CSN got their place in the group by being a half-hearted singer. Their voices all blended perfectly from the first moments that they harmonised together, and while The Hollies may have had some of the biggest hits at the time, there was no way that Graham Nash would have been able to make a song like ‘Marrakesh Express’ sound half as good without the rest of his bandmates singing alongside him.
But Crosby was also interested in championing the kind of singers that could silence any room through the power of their voice. Mitchell didn’t necessarily have the most operatic singing voice that anyone had ever heard, but her performance with a dulcimer playing ‘California’ would have been enough for anyone to fall silent and figure out who the hell this musical goddess was when she started playing.
Then again, rock and roll didn’t normally cater to the greatest singers in the world when the 1960s got started. The Beatles were among the finest vocal groups at the time, but it’s not like everyone was buying a Bob Dylan record hoping to hear him make some showstopping performance. Most singers in the genre worked with what they had, and if you wanted to hear the greatest performers of all time, you’d have better luck listening to the greatest names out of R&B.
Stevie Wonder remains one of the greatest vocalists of his generation to this day, and everyone from Marvin Gaye to Smokey Robinson to Diana Ross could hold an entire audience in the palm of their hand, but Aretha Franklin was something different. There had been gospel-style singers before, but no one had as much power as Franklin did when she launched into ‘Respect’ for the first time. This was a singer for the ages, and Crosby knew she could never be ignored.
Even if she wasn’t the most glamorous star out at the time, Crosby said that none of the pretty faces could compete with what Franklin could do when Ahmet Ertegun signed her, saying, “Ahmet Ertegun — he saw Aretha Franklin signed to Columbia, who were trying to turn her into a lounge act, and he said, ‘Oh, these guys don’t know what they got!’ And he hired her away. And six months later, she was the biggest star in the country, because she could sing like God on a good day. She’s fantastic.”
And, really, turning down Franklin for not having the right stuff is as boneheaded as Decca Records refusing The Beatles back in the day. The times might not always be working in an artist’s favour, but when they have the raw talent to pull off any showstopping vocal that they want to, there comes a point where all sense of genre and trends don’t seem to matter anymore.
Franklin was a force of nature in many ways, and even if she didn’t have the rich sense of harmony of all of Crosby’s favourite bands, there’s nothing that could replace the raw power that she had whenever she opened her mouth. Anyone can try to match what she did, but the sounds that turned up on all of her hits is something that a higher power only grants to a few people.
