What would have happened if Aretha Franklin signed to Motown Records?
What would have happened if Pete Best had never got the sack, Brian Wilson had never heard ‘Be My Baby’, or Buddy Holly had never stepped onto the doomed aircraft back in 1959? Music history is awash with hypotheticals and narrowly missed connections that could have changed the cultural landscape forevermore.
Within the realm of soul, Aretha Franklin alone provides a wealth of those ‘what-ifs’, and perhaps the most intriguing revolves around Berry Gordy’s offer to sign the young vocalist to his emerging label back in 1960. That label, once it had renamed itself from Tamla to Motown, went on to define the pop-soul sounds of the decade, without the inescapable talents of Franklin within their roster.
Instead, the future queen of soul spent much of the 1960s languishing in Columbia’s plethora of rapidly failing performers. When Gordy had made that offer to an 18-year-old Franklin, it was her father-come-manager, C L Franklin, who turned him down, presumably due to the fact that Tamla had yet to amass many hits, whereas Columbia was one of the most established record labels in the world.
Nevertheless, Franklin’s time at Columbia was famously disastrous, with the label seemingly incapable of making the most of her incredible vocal abilities. While the records of her Columbia era are far from being bad, those jazz-focused recordings failed to grasp the attention of the mainstream charts in the same way as anthems like ‘Respect’ or ‘Until You Come Back To Me’, which arose after her move to Atlantic.
Had her father accepted Gordy’s offer, though, the career of the queen of soul would have been entirely different. Namely, she would likely have built up an arsenal of hits before her 20th birthday.
Motown’s roster was, famously, awash with vocal talent, spanning the spectrum from Marvin Gaye to Diana Ross, but Franklin’s voice would still most likely have triumphed over everybody else. If she had signed for Motown, therefore, it is easy to envision her becoming one of Gordy’s flagship performers, in a similar vein to Diana Ross or Mary Wells.
What’s more, Franklin would have had the songwriting prowess of Norman Whitfield, Smokey Robinson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and a litany of other legendary soul songwriters at her disposal. Not to mention Motown’s army of incredible producers, who might have known how to play to Franklin’s strengths in ways which seemed to elude Columbia’s producers.
Then again, Motown was not the be-all, end-all of the pop-soul world back in the 1960s and, if the sheer volume of lawsuits and royalty disputes that Berry Gordy attracted was anything to go by, the artists on its roster weren’t always content with their role on the label. What’s more, Motown was famous for its wasted talent, with voices as talented as Brenda Holloway, Chris Clark, and even Mary Wells at various points, to go overlooked and underutilised by the label.
It is possible, then, that Aretha Franklin could have become one of the leading hit-makers of the 1960s with Motown, but it is equally possible that she could have become a soul obscurity, being robbed of royalties and without the kind of creative freedom that was offered to her by Atlantic Records and Jerry Wexler.
Come to mention it, there is no guarantee that, had she signed for Motown, Atlantic Records would have poached her as they did from Columbia. In that case, the world would have been robbed of some of the greatest recordings of all time, including ‘Respect’, which, being a cover of an Otis Redding track and therefore indebted to Stax Records, Berry Gordy would undoubtedly have vetoed, had it ever even been suggested within the offices of Hitsville USA.
On paper, then, Aretha Franklin’s – or, rather, her father’s – decision to turn down Tamla Motown back in 1960 might have seemed like a missed opportunity for one of America’s greatest soul voices to join the nation’s fastest-growing soul sanctuary; in reality, it was probably for the best.
Not only did her years at Columbia allow Franklin to develop her voice and explore the kind of jazz standards that would have a lasting impact on her output, but it also led her to Atlantic and Jerry Wexler, who helped to launch the ‘Queen of Soul’ that will live on in the airwaves of eternity. In the end, that missed opportunity might just have been her saving grace.
