by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-in-Chief
It’s generally identified if Aretha Franklin coated a music you wrote and/or recorded, it could from her recording ahead be generally known as her music.
Otis Redding, composer and unique performer of “Respect”, mentioned as a lot on the Monterey Pop Competition in 1967: “a woman took [‘Respect’] away from me, a good friend of mine, this woman she simply took this music.”
Different examples of this usurpation embody “I Say A Little Prayer” (composed by Burt Bacharach/Hal David and recorded by Dionne Warwick), “Till You Come Again To Me”(composed by Stevie Marvel) and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (composed by Simon and Garfunkel).
If you wish to hear her variations of those songs together with much more proof of Aretha’s virtuoso mastery of covers, examine the hyperlink to my playlist “How I Acquired Over”: Aretha Franklin’s Cowl Songs proper right here.
However as we speak, on what would have been her 83rd birthday, I’m drawn to the songs that Franklin herself composed or co-wrote — ones that formed her sound and provided insights into her personal thoughts and soul. A set of these gems, “Rock Regular”: Songs Aretha Franklin Wrote is included beneath:
Whereas her basic bangers “Assume”, “Dr. Feelgood” and “Rock Regular” include, remark and mirror upon the vitality of the civil rights and girls’s actions of the Sixties and Seventies — actions rooted in opposing and dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy — and are extra related than ever within the present political local weather, it’s “Spirit within the Darkish” that’s hitting hardest for me as we speak.
Granted, “Spirit within the Darkish” is an all-time Aretha favourite of mine, as a result of it’s concurrently probably the most and least gospel gospel music I’ve ever heard.
It’s mind-blowing, actually. The sluggish, rocking gospel intro, the raise into the refrain, the transition into the overestimated “get the spirit” part – the compositional construction is masterfully basic – but additionally feels fully secular and fashionable in how Franklin arranges it.
The lyrics are as uplifting as they’re raunchy and Aretha’s supply of the music is deliciously desirous and divine. This intentional blurring of what have been historically regarded as separate traces/sounds/philosophies/life brings a wholeness, a completeness and a joyousness to each the sacred and profane.
As a result of actually, on the finish of the day, life is life, love is love, pleasure is pleasure and rapture is rapture. All avenues to it that don’t hurt others are all good and it’s my sturdy perception that Aretha knew this and was expressing exactly this on this unique music of hers – and all through her life.
“Spirit within the Darkish” expresses for me what I’ve been feeling for the reason that totally disappointing results of the 2024 Presidential Election – the need to connect with actual spirit or be an actual spirit amid the collective darkness and doom. To reside our truths it doesn’t matter what systemic forces try to proscribe or prohibit for us.
Additionally, it gave me the fantastic excuse to rewatch and share the 15 minute video above of the reside 1971 efficiency of “Spirit In The Darkish” on the Filmore West the place Aretha performs the Wurlitzer, spirit dances throughout the stage (rattling if she doesn’t do an early model of the moonwalk in right here!) and spontaneously brings up Ray Charles to riff and exercise on the monitor as nicely.
As I wrote a number of years in the past in elegy to her 2018 passing, amongst so many different issues, Aretha Franklin was a Black lady from Detroit by the use of Memphis who perpetually regarded like my grandmother, my mom, my auntie, my deacon – and lived within the form of physique delivered to this nation solely to serve this nation, to not sway it.
But that’s precisely what she did, with the breadth of a brilliance that will probably be revered and remembered perpetually.
