Aretha Franklin Soul Sides Box Set

Like many people born after Aretha's original run, I came upon her music thanks to oldies radio and became familiar with all the huge hits from her catalog. These are the songs that earned Aretha her reputation as the greatest female soul singer of our time, if not the greatest soulster, period.

Music historian Peter Guralnick writes that when he first heard, "I Never Loved a Man," "it was as if the millennium had arrived," and indeed, her signature voice carries such power, such emotion that it's easy to imagine how it could be so transcendent, especially if heard for the first time.

It says much for how incredible that voice is that Aretha has one of the best-known catalogs in soul music yet no matter how many times one hears her songs, she still has the potential to profoundly move listeners at their core.

That pairing - the familiarity of her songs alongside the sheer force of her voice - is what makes learning about Aretha's wider career so intriguing. Unbeknownst to even self-declared Aretha fans, her Atlantic years tell only part of the story. True - it's the more significant, more impactful part of her career but before Aretha ever signed an Atlantic contract, she had already recorded nine albums and over 20 singles, all with Columbia Records. Most artists would have been lucky to have even had a third of that output and Aretha already stacked all this up in the six years before joining Atlantic.

Yet these songs, over 60 in total, are as invisible as her Atlantic songs have become hyper-visible. The commonly given reason is that her Columbia output was simply so poor that it's not worth even mentioning. Notably, most biographies of Aretha treat her Columbia years as an embarrassing mistake - albeit one that went on for half a decade! One of the anthologies of her Columbia-era songs sums up the conventional attitude: The Queen In Waiting, as if those years (1960-1966) found Aretha merely killing time before she could blossom into her true greatness of Atlantic.

This always struck me as a rather myopic way to treat Aretha's early career. It'd be one thing if she cut an album for Columbia and that was it but we're talking about the whole first half of the 1960s. No matter how inconsistent her output was for Columbia (at it was, indeed, very inconsistent), dismissing that entire period feels like overkill.

Lest I overstate this, I am not suggesting that the two eras should be held in equal light. Her Atlantic years lead to some of the most defining American pop songs of the late half century; there is nothing in her Columbia catalog that comes close to being as influential. Instead, Aretha sang everything from glossy pop tunes to big belted Broadway songs to loungey jazz standards to blues-inflected ballads but there was little there that hinted at the kind of fit Aretha could find with the Southern soul sound of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. Conventional wisdom has blamed Columbia's producers for being unable to find the "right fit" for Aretha but Guralnick, among others, argues that these songs also fit into Aretha's interests as well. She came to Columbia barely out of her teens. At the very least, one could say that her time there was spent "finding a voice" even if that meant take chances on material that, in retrospect, may have seemed inadvisable.

In saying this, even if it were possible to erase the memory of Aretha's later career and just listen to her Columbia material with virgin ears, most of it would sound fairly innocuous if not downright awkward. However, there were still times when Aretha would get to unleash that sublime instrument of hers and rattle the decks. True, the music may not be up to par with the best of Atlantic years, but that hardly makes some of her better Columbia songs disposable.

For this reason, the following songs, albums and videos have been put together with a more balanced eye to these two halves of Aretha's rise, focusing on her output from the early 1960s through mid 1970s.

This Bitter Earth
From Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington (Columbia, 1964)

The music surely doesn't sound like the Aretha most people know but the voice...oh, the voice. As the track openly sleepily on strings and vibes, the bands fade back and lets Aretha burst forth: "This! Bitter! Bitter...Earth..." It is stunning, the way her voice just cuts to the quick and there's Aretha's sublime sense of inflection and syllable stretching that demonstrates what melisma is supposed to enhance (rather than the rampant displays of false virtuosity it's become). For a jazz standard, Aretha's presence here is hard to compare with too many other contemporaries as she can sing sweet but also apply the blowtorch too.

Walk On By
From Running Out of Fools (Columbia, 1964)

In contrast, this cover of the famous Burt Bacharach tune (most identified with Dionne Warwick) demonstrates how off the mark some of Aretha's Columbia songs could be. It's not the worst cover of the version ever recorded but Aretha's voice ranges from being understated to the point of torpor or else she's overpowering the accompaniment. Mostly, it just sounds like she's trying to mimic Warwick which doesn't work since the two women have very distinctly different styles and voices.

God Bless the Child
From The Tender, The Moving, The Swinging (Columbia, 1962)

Tackling "God Bless the Child" must have been a risk for Aretha. After all, Billie Holiday's version is so definitive that anyone trying to cover it is bound to be compared. Yet here, Aretha doesn't try to "do Billie." Instead of the hushed tones one usually associates with this ballad, Aretha lets herself flow rich and strong. It's restrained but not muted and you get a sense of the power bubbling beneath as Aretha expertly controls her performance here to infuse the song with the emotion it needs but without overwhelming it. It may not erase the memory of Billie's original - nor is it meant to - but this version is indelibly Aretha's own.

Skylark (alternative version)
From Laughing On the Outside (Columbia, 1963)

This is a personal favorite and as much as anything else I've included, this is a song that would have been unimaginable from Aretha's Atlantic years and onward: a straight dinner jazz ballad, complete with tinkling piano and mellowed guitar. (Note: this version is an alternate recording, not on Laughing but available on Jazz to Soul, see Albums below). The song is engineered to sound like it was recorded live in a jazz lounge and Aretha's approach is suitably laid back and languorous. It's a song like this which makes you appreciate having her Columbia output available since it's such a difference from what we know of her later career and even if it doesn't achieve the heights of musical genius that she's accorded for her R&B work, these are still good songs that deserve to be heard in their own right.

I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You
From I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You (Atlantic, 1967)

I Never Loved a Man (demo) (snippet)
From Rare and Unreleased (Atlantic, 2007)

There's an entire book practically dedicated to this song (see below) and you don't have to agree that it's one of the most incredible songs in pop music history to acknowledge that, historically speaking, it is a singularly important song in launching Aretha's career and in signaling a new era for soul music in America and around the world. Part of its mythic status is based around how a strange collision of events had to happen in order for the song to even get recorded - Aretha, with then-husband Ted White, traveling to Muscle Shoals, Alabama to meet with Atlantic's producer-visionary Jerry Wexler and the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section where they managed to only lay down a single song - this one - before an altercation forced Aretha to leave Alabama and finish the album in New York. Yet whatever stars needed to be aligned that day, all came together on this song - the rich, Southern sound of the Muscle Shoals band, Aretha's own gospel-inflected piano playing, and of course, the opportunity for her to sing a genuine soul song that would allow her to bring the full, emotive force of her voice and conviction.

In contrast, Atlantic is about to release an amazing artifact from the past - the original version of this song on the demo that Aretha passed onto Wexler. It's not quite fair to compare the two versions - after all, Aretha's demo is just her on piano with a drum accompaniment, and her vocals feel even closer to the gospel shouting style of her mentor Mahalia Jackson vs. the more controlled intensity of her eventual Atlantic recording. The beauty of the demo is that it allows the listener to trace just how important a shift the song takes once it enters into a Southern soul style vs. this which is part gospel, part blues.

Respect
From I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You (Atlantic, 1967)

Ok, at this point, the only people who haven't heard this song have likely been in a time capsule since 1966 but it'd be impossible not to include it given that it was Aretha's first #1 pop and R&B hit and the song that really became her coming out party. It's even more remarkable that this too was a cover - of an Otis Redding original of no small fame - but Aretha's version was so different and so exclusively hers that it all but erased the memory of the original.[1] It was also the first upbeat, dance-able song in her Atlantic repertoire and even some 40 years later, the vigorous rhythm is as infectious now as it was then.

More than that though, "Respect" also became closely aligned with the social times; it didn't function just as a statement of personal equality but stood as an anthem for a post-Civil Rights Movement America, especially as a proto-feminist declaration.

Young, Gifted and Black
From Young, Gifted and Black (Atlantic, 1972)

I write more about this album below but of Aretha's early '70s output, this stands out amongst a field of other strong contenders. It's another cover (of a Nina Simone original) but again, it's one where Aretha puts her stamp on it by carrying the song with a beatific grace that cannot be overstated. Obviously, it's also more explicitly connected with an era of Black Is Beautiful politics and while Aretha was rarely as outwardly political as other artists in the era, here she crafts a joyous anthem that allows her to bring her gospel background into with a powerful flourish towards the end.

Something He Can Feel
From Sparkle (Atlantic, 1976)

As meteoric as Aretha's rise in the late 1960s, less than a decade later, her catalog was falling out of relevance with changes in R&B and pop. The Sparkle soundtrack (read more below) offered one of the last gems from her '70s string of hits, the smoky, sultry "Something He Can Feel." Written by Curtis Mayfield, the song oozes with a warm sexuality that harkens back to older tunes like "Dr. Feelgood." En Vogue brought the song back into play 16 years later by covering it.

American Masters - Aretha Franklin
This PBS documentary, written by journalist Nelson George and produced in 1988 is an excellent, one hour introduction to her music and career even if it is nearly 20 years old now. It still airs on PBS so check your local listings.

Aretha Franklin Discography (Wikipedia)
As good as anything out there but just be wary that there may be potential gaps.