Aretha Franklin
The jewels in the Queen Of Soul’s crown.
Back Story
BORN: March 25, 1942. Memphis, Tennessee, USA
GENRES: Soul, gospel, R&B, jazz, pop
YEARS ACTIVE: 1956-present
Concerted efforts to rehabilitate Aretha Franklin’s CBS output seem to have been going on for most of the 21st century, and arguably stretch back well into the 1990s. While it is true that there was much promise and skill in the recordings, they were almost totally out of step with the younger music happening in the years 1960-65.
Did Aretha and CBS believe those new directions were passing fads and that the styles of Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan would prevail? Within the CBS albums one can often hear what would happen if the over-elaborate orchestrations were stripped away. Jerry Wexler at New York’s Atlantic label certainly did and instantly made the CBS style obsolete during the 1967-72 classic period, when Franklin redrew the black music landscape and became Queen Of Soul. In fact, just as deserving of reassessment as the CBS years is the transitional Atlantic period of ’73-’75...(continues below)
TOP TEN ALBUMS
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“I sing to the realists – people who accept it like it is”
Aretha Franklin
Her slow decline after decamping for Clive Davis’s Arista in 1979 was foreshadowed in her last recordings at Atlantic as eminent producers (Lamont Dozier, Curtis Mayfield, Van McCoy) struggled to find a logical new path for her. Typified by booming arena duets with younger singers (George Michael, Annie Lennox, Whitney Houston), the ’80s were marked by a steady subsidence of glory as the challenge of giving Aretha suitable material with either message or melody flummoxed producers. Actually, this was the time to be making the kind of music she’d recorded for CBS, exploring the great American songbook and the jazz singers who’d made them famous.