The Proof is in The Covers: Why Aretha Franklin is the Greatest American Vocalist of the 20th Century
by Mark Anthony Neal
As the tributes to Aretha Franklin poured in after her death, many cited “Respect” as one of their favorite songs, and some were perhaps surprised that it was originally written and recorded by Otis Redding, who at the time was a far more popular artist. Another song that many recalled was Franklin’s version of “I Say a Little Prayer,” (1968) a song that was written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, who penned most of Dionne Warwick’s hits during the 1960s. Warwick scored a top-five hit a year before Franklin’s version. To say that Franklin’s version, which featured her on piano and backed by the Sweet Inspirations (including Warwick’s cousin Cissy Houston), is better than Warwick’s — the most successful Black female solo vocalists of that era, until Franklin’s ascent — is unfair; it’s a fundamentally different song. And therein lies Franklin’s genius: she didn’t cover a song, she made it something new, something distinctly Aretha.
Franklin’s covers seemed to be inspired by several dynamics — to work through a style to achieve some mastery, the need to pay tribute to an artist, and her belief that she might do something different (or better, shade being shade) with a song. When Franklin began her pop career at Columbia Records, pop music albums were becoming more popular, but the idea of the wholly conceived album was not yet a thing. Thus, it was not unusual for artists like Franklin to record album filler, which often included covers of existing pop standards and show tunes. Franklin’s 1964 album, Runnin’ Out of Fools, her most successful at Columbia, was filled with covers of the R&B hits of the likes Inez and Charlie Foxx (“Mockingbird”), Brenda Holloway (“Every Little Bit Hurts”), Brook Benton (“It’s Just a Matter of Time”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”) and Warwick (“Walk on By”).
Franklin’s most well-known collection of covers comes from the early 1960s. Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington (1964), arguably captures all the dynamics that would compel Franklin to record a cover song. Washington, the “Queen of the Blues” who died a year earlier, was a family friend and mentor of sorts to Franklin. More importantly Washington’s ability to straddle genres like the “ballsy” blues, driving R&B, and pop jazz standards, made Franklin the logical heir apparent. Franklin paid fitting tributes to some of Washington’s most popular mainstream hits like “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “This Bitter Earth” and “Unforgettable,” a hit for Washington who updated Nat King Cole’s signature version by mostly playing it straight. On tracks like “Drinking Again” and Washington’s early iconic hit “Evil Gal Blues” (1944), recorded two years after Franklin was born, you hear the singer working towards some mastery of a style most associated with the back rooms of the Chitlin Circuit.
But it is with “Cold, Cold Heart,” a piece of classic Americana originally written and recorded by rockabilly legend Hank Williams, Sr., that Franklin finds her voice. Washington had a major hit with “Cold, Cold Heart,” transforming the country blues into a strutting rhythm and blues track. Franklin’s version of the song is unrecognizable from both the Williams and Washington versions. Accompanying herself on piano, “Cold, Cold Heart” is the prototype for the style of soul that Franklin would revolutionize in the late 1960s. The “Queen of Soul” is born on that track.
By the time Franklin walked into the Atlantic studios in April and September of 1968 to record Soul ’69, she was unquestionably the “Queen.” Franklin’s first four albums for Atlantic were all top-five pop hits and all topped the R&B charts, generating eight top-ten pop singles and six number one R&B singles. With so much ahead of her, Franklin chose to look back on Soul ’69, covering a group of soul and R&B classics.
Some of the choices were obvious nods to the moment, as in the cover of her Detroit homeboy Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears” and Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” (she had covered Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “A Change is Gonna Come” on previous albums). And then there were the inspired choices, like covering Big Maybelle’s “Ramblin’ (Blues),” “River’s Invitation” by Percy Mayfield, who is most known for penning Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” which was a hit for Billie Holiday in the late 1940s, and “So Long” — one of her best performances — which was most well known as a hit for Ruth Brown, but was also covered by rhythm and blues stalwarts Big Maybelle and Charles Brown.
The irony of many of the covers on Soul ’69, is that Franklin paid tribute to artists that her successes had, to some extent, made irrelevant to mainstream pop audiences. And that includes Franklin herself; Soul ’69 includes a version of “Today I Sing the Blues,” which Franklin recorded in 1960 on her first album with Columbia. With the latter version of the song, listeners can literally hear the changes that Franklin had wrought on Black music.
Some of Franklin’s most inventive covers would be found on a string of studio albums that she released between 1970 and 1974 — albums that did not match the commercial success of her earlier Atlantic albums, but may represent her best, if not most underrated, work. This Girl’s in Love with You (1970) is most remembered for one of Franklin’s own compositions, “Call Me,” one of the few originals on the album. The title of the album comes from Herb Alpert’s This Guy’s in Love with You, written by David and Bacharach.
The single for “Call Me” was backed by what the Rev. CL. Franklin might have called a “stone cold” take on Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” To the uninitiated, one might have thought that Springfield must have been covering Franklin, though. And in fact, the Springfield version which was produced by longtime Franklin collaborators Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd, was initially turned down by Franklin, who took a second look after Springfield’s success with the song. Franklin also paid tribute to the “death” of The Beatles, with a faithful cover of “Let It Be” and then gives “Eleanor Rigby” a bath in the mythical lake of Muscle Shoals.
Culling Franklin’s roots, the first single from This Girl’s in Love with You was a rhythm and blues hit for Bobby “Blue” Bland six years earlier, and she covered James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street.” (The latter would be the inspiration for the title of historian Danielle McGuire’s book on sexual violence against Black women in the early 20th century.) And Franklin went deeper into her roots with the follow-up album Spirit in the Dark (1970).
The biggest hit from Spirit in the Dark was Franklin’s fresh cover of labelmate Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Song.” On the follow-up studio album Young Gifted and Black she would reimagine King’s “Spanish Harlem.” Franklin returned to the Carole King songbook with a cover of “Oh No Not My Baby,” originally recorded by the oh-so underrated vocalist Maxine Brown. And while B.B. King earned his own right to be a mainstream artist, Franklin’s cover of King’s most successful singles “The Thrill is Gone” and “Why I Sing the Blues” help solidify King’s career as a mainstream touring artist for the next 40-plus years. It was one of the moments when Franklin began to understand the gravitas of her ability to introduce older rhythm and blues and blues artists to younger crossover audiences. The irony of Spirit in the Dark is that Franklin’s four originals, especially “Try Matty’s” and “Spirit in the Dark” (which admittedly pales alongside the live Fillmore West versions) find Franklin achieving the full mastery of the very genres that she had previously gestured towards with covers.
With the covers that appear on Young, Gifted and Black (1972) and Let Me in Your Life (1974), Franklin had achieved a sublime quality, that coincided with a period that found her at the height of her creative power. There’s not even a novice Franklin fan that wouldn’t put the Franklin originals “Rock Steady” and “Day Dreaming” on their list of favorite Queen of Soul tracks. Yet Franklin’s cover of the title track “Young, Gifted and Black” — with her signature piano playing pushed to the front of the mix — transforms Nina Simone’s stately anthem into something otherworldly and multi-generational. We only need to consider at least two of the Hip-Hop tracks that sampled the song 20 years (Heavy D’s “Yes, Y’all”) and 45 years (Rapsody’s “Laila’s Wisdom”) after Franklin’s recording.
Elton John had not yet achieved his first number one hit in the U.S. (“Crocodile Rock”), when Franklin recorded his “Border Song (Holy Moses),” which initially appeared on the British rockers second album Elton John (1970). Additionally, Franklin broadly reimagines the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind),” with a Freddie Hubbard “Red Clay” styled intro, and updated Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” into a soulful slow drag. The standout though, was Franklin’s rendition of the Jerry Butler classic “A Brand New Me”, which becomes a rollicking celebration of self-love, and closes with a nearly minute-long piano solo that is among the best of her studio recordings.
At the time that Franklin recorded “Until You Come Back to Me” few knew it was a cover. Written and recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1967, Wonder’s version was not made publicly available until the release of his anthology, Looking Back (1977). For Franklin, it would be the last top-five pop hit of her Atlantic career, and an example of her taking on her “soul man” peers. The title track was a cover of a sparse Bill Withers track, which, courtesy of Donny Hathaway, becomes a slice of electrified funk. Bobby Womack’s “I’m in Love” was first recorded by Wilson Pickett in 1967 and by Womack in 1968. Franklin offers a whispering breeze version of the song in the spirit of “Day Dreaming.” Franklin had previously covered Womack on her studio album, Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of The Sky), presenting a stellar seven-minute version of “That’s The Way I Feel About Cha.” It was produced by Quincy Jones a year before he broke through with his prototypical jazz/pop with Body Heat (1974). Finally, there’s a slow and sassy version of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”
Let Me in Your Life, contains two of Franklin’s most impressive studio performances on “On Baby” and “If You Don’t Think” — both written by her, and perhaps the best evidence of her at her vocal peak. The only other match to these songs is the album closer, a cover of a Leon Russell’s “A Song for You.” After Donny Hathaway’s 1971 studio version, it became a big stage-cutting session for soul singers. Dennis Edwards’s fine version with The Temptations in 1975, and Hathaway’s own live version released after his death remain highlights. Franklin’s version, which opens with her solo on the Fender Rhodes, and her vocals slyly lagging just behind the beat to the close listener, might be the definitive version, if only because no one could sing along with her.
Franklin would continue to make covers, doing versions of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Turn Me Loose” and The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” on her first Arista album in 1980. On her most successful album Who’s Zoomin’ Who? (1985), Franklin covers “Sweet Bitter Love,” a song she first recorded during the legendary Clyde Otis sessions that had remained in the can for decades. Roberta Flack included it on her 1971 album Quiet Fire. On Franklin’s 1985 version, you hear an artist paying tribute to not simply the music and the artists that came before her, but to the long journey that had brought her to that moment.
Franklin’s last studio album, Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics (2014), found the artist covering songs from Etta James, Gladys Knight, Gloria Gaynor, Chaka Khan (via Whitney Houston), Diana Ross, and most famously Adele, adding her own Aretha-ish spin on “Rolling in the Deep.” Also included on that last studio is a rendition of “People,” a song best known for launching the career of Franklin’s contemporary Barbara Streisand in 1964. Franklin also recorded a version of the song in 1964 as part of the Clyde Otis sessions, but like “Sweet, Bitter Love,” it was canned. Franklin’s inclusion of the song on this last album was a coy reminder of what could have been — film, stage, television, perhaps, if we are to follow the arc of Streisand’s career — and what had to be. Franklin might have been the greatest Soul singer to ever live, but to limit her as the “Queen of Soul” was to limit the full range of her mastery of the American song book. Perhaps it is best just to consider Franklin as the greatest American vocalist of the 20th Century; The proof is in the covers.
