Late on a winter night, Aretha
Franklin sat in the dressing room of Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino,
in Ontario. She did not wear the expression of someone who has just
brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls.
“What was with the
sound?” she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation.
Feedback had pierced a verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she
sat down at the piano to play “Inseparable,” a tribute to the late
Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a “Mr. Lowery” to fix
the levels once and for all. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her
circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. “For a
time up there, I just couldn’t hear myself right,” she said.
On
the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush,
were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She collects on the spot or
she does not sing. The cash goes into her handbag and the handbag either
stays with her security team or goes out onstage and resides, within
eyeshot, on the piano. “It’s the era she grew up in—she saw so many
people, like Ray Charles and B. B. King, get ripped off,” a close
friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. “There is
the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. And she
won’t have it. You are not going to disrespect her.”
Franklin has
won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is
generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of
postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding,
Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to
jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti
called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’
notice, sang “Nessun dorma” for him. What distinguishes her is not
merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal
instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the
beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of
constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute
song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.
“There
are certain women singers who possess, beyond all the boundaries of our
admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love,” Ralph
Ellison wrote in a 1958 essay on Mahalia Jackson. “Indeed, we feel that
if the idea of aristocracy is more than mere class conceit, then these
surely are our natural queens.” In 1967, at the Regal Theatre, in
Chicago, the d.j. Pervis Spann presided over a coronation in which he
placed a crown on Franklin’s head and pronounced her the Queen of Soul.
The
Queen does not rehearse the band—not for a casino gig in Windsor,
Ontario. She leaves it to her longtime musical director, a
seventy-nine-year-old former child actor and doo-wop singer named H. B.
Barnum, to assemble her usual rhythm section and backup singers and pair
them with some local union horn and string players, and run them
through a three-hour scan of anything Franklin might choose to sing: the
hits from the late sixties and early seventies—“Chain of Fools,”
“Spirit in the Dark,” “Think”—along with more recent recordings.
Sometimes, Franklin will switch things up and pull out a jazz
tune—“Cherokee” or “Skylark”—but that is rare. Her greatest concern is
husbanding her voice and her energies. When she wears a fur coat
onstage, it’s partly to keep warm and prevent her voice from closing up.
But it’s also because that’s what the old
I’ve-earned-it-now-I’m-gonna-wear-it gospel stars often did: they wore
the mink. Midway through her set, she makes what she calls a “false
exit,” and slips backstage and lets the band noodle while she rests.
“It’s a fifteen-round fight, and so she paces herself,” Barnum says.
“Aretha is not thirty years old.” She is seventy-four.
Franklin
doesn’t get around much anymore. For the past thirty-four years, she has
refused to fly, which means that she hasn’t been able to perform in
favorite haunts from the late sixties, like the Olympia, in Paris, or
the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam. When she does travel, it’s by bus. Not a
Greyhound, exactly, but, still, it’s exhausting. A trip not long ago
from her house, outside Detroit, to Los Angeles proved too much to
contemplate again. “That one just wore me out,” she said. “It’s a nice
bus, but it took days!” She has attended anxious-flyer classes
and said that she’s determined to get on a plane again soon. “I’m
thinking about making the flight from Detroit to Chicago,” she said.
“Baby steps.”
Even if the concert in Windsor was a shadow of her
stage work a generation ago, there were intermittent moments of
sublimity. Naturally, she has lost range and stamina, but she is miles
better than Sinatra at a similar age. And she has survived longer than
nearly any contemporary. In Windsor, she lagged for a while and then
ripped up the B. B. King twelve-bar blues “Sweet Sixteen.” Performing
“Chain of Fools,” a replica of the Reverend Elijah Fair’s gospel tune
“Pains of Life,” she managed to make it just as greasy as when she
recorded it, in 1968. ... [mehr] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul
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