On Aretha
When I was eleven years old, my mom operated a one-woman dog-sitting business and, on weekends, I would accompany her to the homes of her clients. I remember a charming old house owned by a woman named Alethea: it was tucked away from the road, past a low stone wall, situated by a quiet wood. We’d pull into her long pebble driveway, and park by the kitchen door. My mom would go inside and emerge with a young Wheaten Terrier named Milo. We'd take a brief walk around the yard, return him to the house, get back in the car and drive home.
On the way to and from these visits, we listened to music. I was trapped in the car for twenty minutes at a time, so my mom took the opportunity to educate me. “I think you’ll like this,” she’d say, then put on the likes of Paul Simon, Elton John or Stevie Wonder. To call those drives instructive would be an understatement: they were essential, rites of maternal as much as cultural inheritance.
It was on one of those drives that I first listened to Aretha Franklin. My mom owned a CD copy of Aretha’s Gold, the compilation album that Atlantic released of Franklin’s hits from 1967 to 1968, and she played it for me. The sauntering simmer of the first track — “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” — made for sublime entry into a record that doubled as a bible on troubles of the heart. Franklin wasn’t pop-y like Motown or cheerfully didactic like Mr. Wonder; her songs and the emotions in them were complicated, conversational. They were what I came to learn is referred to as “soul.”
My reactions to her music were unlearned and intense. “Do Right Woman - Do Right Man” suggested a situation of wrong, of things that went amiss; it was a mystery in adult pain that impressed me with its declarative power:
There was also the embarrassing sensual rapacity of “Dr. Feelgood,” met in turn by the funky pluck of “Respect." With age (and the coming of my own heartbreaks), I basked in the soaring surrender of “Ain’t No Way," was swept away by the twinkling resonance of “You Send Me.” I learned from these songs; they informed, gave shape to my silent curiosity about what love might be. At a time of profound emotional abstraction they offered me something to know. My emotions were validated, given a home to live in.
At times I’ve wondered if these impressions weren't confused for someone at so tender an age. Music cuts quick paths to our hearts, and can easily steer emotion in directions towards which a child would not instinctively think to move. “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” is a song about consummation that treads towards oblivion, ecstasy at the expense of personal will. It arranges itself in old-fashioned codes of womanhood and supplication, placing individual happiness in the hands of a benevolent other:
“Natural Woman” is one of the finest pieces of lyrical music ever recorded, and impossible in its premise that the love of another person can bring complete self-affirmation. Of course, plenty other songs by Franklin suggest the opposite: that love on its own is unsatisfying and requires constant work. But each individual song was a world unto itself — convincing and total. They limited what love could be while reveling in the limitations that love, by necessity, must live in.
In pubescence, I didn’t know better than to believe Franklin when she sang, “I know that a woman’s duty/ Is to help and love a man/ And that’s the way it was planned.” It would be another two years before my unplanned groping towards desire sent me stumbling blindly into the closet. Now I can see that, in the long run, Ms. Franklin's music set an invaluable precedent in my life. It invited me to participate in a language of love, a discussion on longing. Her feelings were definite, and they were definite because she felt them. There was no arguing with that certainty, that revelation. She taught me that vulnerability and strength are one and the same — that we are better off for wanting, and for singing about it.
