The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Aretha Franklin · produced by Jerry Wexler · engineered by Tom Dowd · Atlantic · eleven tracks, about 33 minutes
Mode
Soul: the gospel idiom of the Black church carried into secular love, by a lead voice, her piano and answering voices over a Southern rhythm section
Mythos
The church carried into the world; the abandoned woman still bound, the healer, the river and the long road, and one figure built new: the woman who names her terms
Phase
Eleven tracks, six on side one and five on side two; each side opens up-tempo; the record opens on a demand and closes on a hymn of endurance
Presentation
Album; Atlantic, March 1967, in mono (8139) and stereo (SD 8139); one session in Alabama in January, the rest in New York in February
Register
Voice and gospel piano; electric piano, organ, guitars, bass and drums in head arrangements; a tenor saxophone and a horn section; two sisters as a choir in miniature
Scale
A woman and the man she loves, seen from several sides; the household and its money; the body; the sacred as the form of the singing; at the close, history
Governing Proposition
A singer six years into a career of standards and strings sits at her own piano in front of a Southern rhythm section, sings in the gospel idiom she was raised in, and shows across eleven songs, most of them other people’s, that a woman can be wholly bound by desire and still demand to be met as an equal. The authority of the church, carried by the voice into the bedroom and the household, does what the words only assert.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record began in Alabama. In January 1967 Jerry Wexler brought Aretha Franklin, newly signed to Atlantic after six years at Columbia, to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, to a rhythm section that worked without written charts and built its arrangements in the room around the singer. One session was held, and it produced the title track and the basic track of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” before it broke up. The rest of the album was recorded at Atlantic’s studio in New York in February, and the record was issued in March, in mono and in stereo, eleven tracks and about thirty-three minutes.
The title track is what that one session made. An electric piano opens it with a figure that sets a slow gospel feel, and the voice comes in held back, pressing against the verses, until it is released on the turn. The song is a vamp and a vow and nothing more: a woman bound to a man she knows to be a “no good heartbreaker” and cannot leave. Nothing in it is idle. The rise is made by pressure, not by volume, and the band follows the singer rather than leading her, the method of the whole record heard in its first hours of work.
Franklin plays piano on most of the album, and her piano is not an accompaniment. Carolyn and Erma Franklin sing the answering voices; the players include Spooner Oldham on keyboards, Jimmy Johnson and Chips Moman on guitars, Tommy Cogbill on bass, Roger Hawkins and Gene Chrisman on drums, and King Curtis on tenor saxophone with a horn section. Tom Dowd’s recording keeps the room clear and the voice forward. What the musicians in the room supplied was a setting; what made the setting mean something was a singer leading a band from the keyboard.
Movement II
The record opens on Otis Redding’s song, and turns it. Redding’s “Respect” is a man’s plea on coming home: he asks for his due for what he brings. Here a woman sets the terms. The title is spelled out letter by letter, the sisters answer the lead with “sock it to me”, the band stops before the saxophone break, and a new bridge makes the song a different one. Two and a half minutes, and each added element is required by the argument. The household and its money are in it, the claim laid against what she brings home, and the claim is made by a voice that does not ask.
That reversal is the swerve the record makes. The rest of the turn is real for Franklin and smaller for the tradition. Her Columbia records had set her voice in standards, strings and supper-club pop; here she sings in the gospel idiom she was raised in, at her own piano, with her career at stake after six years of modest sales. But the path was proven. Ray Charles had joined gospel to secular love a decade earlier, Sam Cooke had carried the church voice into pop, and Wexler had already taken Wilson Pickett south with success. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and the figure for the departure stays below the gate.
Part of what “Respect” now discloses was made by its reception: within months it was taken up as a song of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, a public claim of race and of women that its words do not state. That reach is counted where it belongs, as pressure on the tradition and as presence, and not as disclosure. Charged to the record, the song discloses a woman naming her terms, and the sequence puts her first. It is the one figure the album builds new.
Movement III
What the record brings into the open can be put in a sentence: a woman’s love and her dignity are not opposed, and she may be wholly bound by desire and still demand to be met as an equal. Both halves are on the record. The title track is bondage confessed; “Drown in My Own Tears”, Henry Glover’s song, which Ray Charles had made his, is grief without remedy, a slow blues in which the voice lifts out of the band like a soloist out of a choir. Against them stand “Respect” and “Do Right Woman”, and between them stands “Dr. Feelgood”, which opens side two.
“Dr. Feelgood”, one of the four tracks with a Franklin co-credit, states adult desire as a woman’s own and is unashamed of it. It is a slow gospel blues, sung close, the church’s cadence set to the bedroom, and its elevation is the transport of desire rather than of the spirit. The healer it names is an old figure. What is new is who sings of him, and in what voice: the voice of the church, with its authority, brought to claims about the body. The authority does what the lyrics only assert.
The record’s myth is made in the same way. Its structural pattern is the church carried into the world, the call of the preacher and the response of the congregation, made by the lead and the sisters’ answers and set to secular love on every slow track. The songs bring older figures with them, the abandoned woman still bound, the healer, the river and the long road. But most of those figures come with the songs inherited, and none is built whole across the sequence. The disclosure is often stated by the song rather than by the record, and both axes stand below the gate for that.
Movement IV
“Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, third on side two, is the record’s most beautiful performance. Dan Penn and Chips Moman wrote it, two white Southern songwriters, and it is country soul: piano and organ, the sisters’ voices, and a lead that swells to its last plea without strain. In its last verse, “a woman’s only human” is not an apology but the ground of a contract. The gospel chords that set its feel are Franklin’s, and the voice controls pitch at the very edge of the note. Here the record’s making is at its height, and its making is the voice.
Around it the record is less exact. “Good Times”, Sam Cooke’s party song and the shortest track, could go without loss; “Soul Serenade” puts words to King Curtis’s instrumental and carries the least of the singer’s weight; “Save Me” is a strong groove over a thin song. Three tracks of eleven, about seven minutes of thirty-three, are separable, and their arrangements are routine for their year. Some horn charts are perfunctory, and several performances are cut off at the fade before they finish. The record was assembled from sessions as an album of songs, and it shows at those points.
The sequence does some of the work of a form. Each side opens up-tempo, and side two turns to ballads at its centre and its end. But side one runs from a blues ballad to a light cover to two of Franklin’s own slighter songs, “Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream” and “Baby, Baby, Baby”, without much argument. One law holds across all of it, the order of a Black church carried into secular song, and holds even across two studios a month apart. The lighter tracks obey it loosely, and the range it governs is a range of song types more than of tones.
Movement V
The record ends on Sam Cooke’s hymn, its longest track. Franklin opens it at her own piano, slows the song, and drives the last verses to a height Cooke’s own record does not try. The river is Cooke’s, “born by the river”, and the exodus stands behind it; history and race enter the album here, with the long struggle and the brother who will not help, and the album ends on them. The private claim of “Respect” at one end and the public hope of this song at the other make the record’s frame. It is placed more than built, but it is placed well.
What the record holds lies mostly close to the couple: consciousness as bondage, grief and desire; the woman wronged, demanding and satisfied; the household and its money; the body; the sacred as the very form of the singing. Labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and the natural order are absent or glimpsed. The reach is wider than the holding. The record set a new standard for what a singer of popular music could be, adult, self-possessed and in full command of a gospel voice, and that standard passed to Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the vocal pop of the decades that followed. The record has lasted nearly sixty years, and its two most famous tracks carry much of its presence.
It stands at 8.4, level with Rubber Soul, 8.4 here: the singer’s record higher where its making and its elevation are, the songwriters’ record higher where its departure and its reach are. What’s Going On stands at 8.6 and Kind of Blue at 8.8. Every summit condition is met but one. The Epochal Gate fails on three axes: the disclosure is often the inherited song’s, the myth is evoked track by track rather than built, and the turn, real for the singer, was made on a path already proven. Those three hold the record in Tier IV, and nothing in them doubts the voice.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the tracks almost nothing is idle. “Respect” is two and a half minutes in which each added element, the title spelled out, the answering “sock it to me”, the stop before the saxophone break, is required by the argument of the song. The title track is a vamp and a vow and needs nothing more. The subtractive test bites on the album as a whole: “Good Times” is a light party song that could go without loss, “Soul Serenade” puts words to an instrumental and carries the least weight, and “Save Me” is a strong groove over a thin song. Three of eleven tracks, about seven minutes, are separable. The record was assembled from sessions as an album of songs, not composed as one argument.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a woman’s love and her dignity are not opposed, and she may be wholly bound by desire and still demand to be met as an equal. The record holds both halves. The title track is bondage confessed, to a “no good heartbreaker” she cannot leave; “Drown in My Own Tears” is grief without remedy. Against them stand “Respect”, where a man’s plea on coming home becomes a woman’s terms, spelled letter by letter, and “Do Right Woman”, where “a woman’s only human” is the ground of a contract. Sound discloses as much as words and is credited fully. Held below the gate because the condition is often stated by the song inherited rather than by the record.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and high. The title track rises from the electric piano’s opening figure into a vocal that climbs by pressure, held back through the verses and released on the turn. “Drown in My Own Tears” is a slow blues in which the voice lifts out of the band like a soloist out of a choir. “Do Right Woman” is the record’s most beautiful performance, piano, organ and the sisters’ voices under a lead that swells to its last plea without strain. “A Change Is Gonna Come” closes on a rising plainly of the church, and “Dr. Feelgood” is elevated in another register, the transport of desire. “Good Times”, “Soul Serenade” and “Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream” stay on the level.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth is built in the voice more than in the songs. The record’s structural pattern is the church carried into the world: the call of the preacher and the response of the congregation, made by the lead and her sisters’ answers and set to secular love, load-bearing on every slow track. The songs supply older figures: the abandoned woman still bound, in the blues lament of the title track and “Drown in My Own Tears”; the healer of “Dr. Feelgood”; the river and the long road of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, with the exodus behind them. “Respect” builds a new figure, the woman who names her terms, and the sequence places her first. But most figures come with the songs, and none is built whole across the sequence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The turn is real and partly a return. Franklin’s Columbia records set her voice in standards, strings and supper-club pop; here she plays her own piano, in the gospel idiom she was raised in, in front of a Southern rhythm section that built the arrangements in the room. That was a turn for her, and the stake was a career after six years of modest sales. But the path was proven: Ray Charles had joined gospel to secular love a decade before, Sam Cooke had carried the church voice into pop, and Wexler had already taken Wilson Pickett south with success. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve. The swerve on the record is “Respect”, Otis Redding’s song made a different song, and that is credited.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The form is the performance in the room: a head arrangement built around Franklin’s piano, a rhythm section that follows her, and a lead voice answered by other voices. Change it to written charts and strings, the form of her Columbia records, and the record can no longer say what it says, because the authority it discloses is made by a woman leading a band from the keyboard and a choir from the lead. The sequence, counted here once, adds a frame: the private claim of “Respect” at one end and the public hope of “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the other. The middle is less shaped. Side one runs from a blues ballad to a light cover to two slighter songs of Franklin’s own without much argument, and the frame is placed more than built.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The record yields on return, mostly by its performances. The vocal lines repay close hearing: the placement of the beat in “Respect”, the bent notes and held breath of the title track, the dynamics of “Do Right Woman”, the variations Franklin makes in Cooke’s melody. The arrangements, made in the room, reward attention to how the rhythm section answers her. The re-examination has been sustained for nearly sixty years, in the histories of Muscle Shoals and in the continuing argument over what “Respect” means and to whom it belongs. Semantic depth is less: most of these songs mean what they say, and their meaning is exhausted sooner than their singing. Formal depth carries the axis; semantic depth holds it from the top.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the singing of American popular music in 1967. The intrinsic force is a new standard for what a singer could do and be: a gospel voice of full power and technical command, leading from the piano, adult and self-possessed, in place of the girl-group singer or the supper-club stylist. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, built on Charles and Cooke and shared, in “Respect”, with Redding’s song. Part of the reach belongs to Franklin’s Atlantic years as a whole and is discounted to this record, where the reorganisation first happened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “Respect” taken up within months as a song of the civil rights and women’s movements; the soul singer as preacher and the melismatic gospel lead, which shaped Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the vocal pop of the decades after.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years and seven months. The form is whole: the record survives as released, in both its mono and its stereo mixes. Presence is continuous and wide: “Respect” is among the most heard recordings in American music, the title track and “Do Right Woman” remain in broadcast and use, and the album is heard whole by a wide public, not only by musicians. The charge is that the album as a whole is less present than its two most famous tracks, which carry much of its presence. The fabric bears its year lightly, a band playing in a room and recorded clearly, with little that dates but the length of the tracks and a few horn charts. It stands a tenth below Kind of Blue, which has eight years more.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium. The voice is the load-bearing making: range, timing, power held in reserve and released, the control of pitch at the edge of the note, the placement of each phrase against the band. The piano is the record’s second instrument: the gospel chords that open “A Change Is Gonna Come” and set the feel of “Do Right Woman” are hers. The rhythm section plays with restraint, bass and drums in the pocket; the saxophone break in “Respect” is exact; the sisters’ voices are arranged as a choir in miniature; Dowd’s recording keeps the room clear and the voice forward. The costs: routine arrangements on “Good Times”, “Soul Serenade” and “Save Me”, some perfunctory horn charts, and fades that cut several performances off before they finish.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dance of “Respect” and the hymn of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, or the frank desire of “Dr. Feelgood” and the country soul of “Do Right Woman”, written by two white Southern songwriters, Dan Penn and Chips Moman. One law governs them: a gospel voice and piano, a rhythm section that follows the singer, and answering voices, the order of a Black church carried into secular song. The range is real, blues, gospel, dance, country soul and the civil rights hymn, and the law holds across it; two studios a month apart do not sound like two physics. What holds the figure: the lighter tracks obey the law loosely and add no reach to it, and the record is never cold, never ironic, never strange.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as bondage, grief and desire. The couple is held from several sides: the woman wronged, the woman demanding, the woman satisfied. The household and its money enter in “Respect”, where the claim is laid against what she brings home, and the body in “Dr. Feelgood”. The sacred is held through the idiom itself, the church as the form of the singing, and stated in the close. History and race enter with Cooke’s song, and the record ends on them. What holds the figure: labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and most of what is held lies close to the couple.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.9, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. Elevation frequent and high, in the title track, Drown in My Own Tears, Do Right Woman and the close of A Change Is Gonna Come; a record whole and widely heard after nearly sixty years; a voice and a piano that are the load-bearing making; and a new standard for the singer of popular music.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: consciousness, the couple from several sides, the household, the body and the sacred idiom joined by one voice, with history entering at the close, and labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and the natural order absent or glimpsed. Then The Inevitable and The Swerve at 7.9: three of eleven tracks separable, and a turn real for the singer made on a path already proven.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.9 and The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and The Swerve at 7.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands at 8.4, in the band of Tier IV, and the Epochal Gate would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, the album as first released by Atlantic in March 1967, in mono (8139) and stereo (SD 8139), eleven tracks in their original order, six on side one and five on side two, about thirty-three minutes; the two mixes differ in balance, not in sequence or performance, and the judgment does not depend on the difference. Judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Side one: Respect (Otis Redding); Drown in My Own Tears (Henry Glover); I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) (Ronny Shannon); Soul Serenade (Curtis Ousley, Luther Dixon); Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream (Aretha Franklin, Ted White); Baby, Baby, Baby (Aretha Franklin, Carolyn Franklin). Side two: Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business) (Aretha Franklin, Ted White); Good Times (Sam Cooke); Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Chips Moman, Dan Penn); Save Me (Curtis Ousley, Aretha Franklin, Carolyn Franklin); A Change Is Gonna Come (Sam Cooke). Produced by Jerry Wexler, engineered by Tom Dowd; recorded at one session at FAME Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in January 1967, which produced the title track and the basic track of Do Right Woman, and at Atlantic’s studio in New York in February 1967. Later reissues with singles, outtakes or alternate takes added are not judged. Songs are cited by title, and lyrics are quoted only in fragments of four words or fewer. Facts that could not be verified, among them the day of release, further engineering credits, the day of the Alabama session and the details of its end, which players went north to New York, how Do Right Woman was finished, which musician plays on which track, the full horn section and any further backing singers, the singles issued from the album and their chart places, and the record’s place in the later practice of taking singers south to record, are not given.