Aretha didn’t have to wait until she was grown to be great. She was great when she was 14.
Aretha Franklin (at 14, vocal and piano), “Precious Lord,” live, Detroit (New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor), 1956
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lagniappe
reading table
The film rights to Zeitoun, mentioned a while back, have been acquired by Jonathan Demme, who’s going to make an animated movie of it.
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I’m nearing the end of Billy Sothern’s Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City. It’s a mixed bag. Some sections are weighed down by political observations that quickly become predictable. But others are alive with the sights and sounds and smells of the streets.
When someone sounds as good as Aretha did last Sunday, only one word seems to fit: more.
Aretha Franklin (joined on the second number by Billy Preston and Little Richard), “Surely God Is Able,” “Packin’ Up,” live (Tribute to Marion Williams), Washington, D.C., 1993
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lagniappe
My heart is still there in gospel music. It never left.—Aretha Franklin
[A] lengthy service was perceived to be an honor to the deceased—a testimony to the great impact of his or her life. Consider the 1996 funeral of Bishop David Ellis Sr., pastor of Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple of the Apostolic Faith, whose services stretched over three days. His body was laid to rest in a $30,000 gold-plated casket that was ‘propped at an angle in the church aisle so mourners could see his body resting on red velvet cushions.’—Karla FC Holloway (in Passed On: African American Mourning Stories [2002])
Here, at Luther Vandross’s funeral, Stevie testifies.
Stevie Wonder, “I Won’t Complain,” live, New York (The Riverside Church), 2005
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lagniappe
For as long as you’ve got a harp in your heart, God’s got a hymn for your hurt. And as long as you’ve got a hymn, then you’ve got hope.—Maurice O. Wallace (funeral sermon, quoted in Karla FC Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories [2002])
On July 22, 1955, Sam Cooke took the stage at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. He was 24 years old. He sang that day with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel group he joined—as the new lead singer—when he was 19.
Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer My God To Thee,” live, 1955, Los Angeles
More:
Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “Be With Me Jesus,” live, 1955, Los Angeles
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lagniappe
Sam [Cooke] was shaped in large measure by the Soul Stirrers during their rehearsals. He reacted to them as they pushed him, like a good rhythm section inspires an instrumentalist.—Art Rupe (in Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke [2005])
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Of course, Sam did his best work in gospel. How you gonna take somebody who loves what he’s doing and turn him around and put him in something unfamiliar and he’s gonna be as free and natural as he was at home?—Dorothy Love Coates (in Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times [1971])
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reading table
How astonishing to see, yesterday, for the first time, a film snippet (the only known to exist) of Anne Frank.
This apparently dates from 1941, when Anne was 13. The couple walking out of the building are newlyweds—the woman’s a neighbor. That’s Anne leaning out the window.
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Yesterday I also heard this episode of the radio show “This American Life,” which features people whose lives were changed by books.
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Also yesterday (bigday), while driving around doing this and that, I heard bits and pieces of this interview with the great Nick Hornby (author of, among other things, High Fidelity).
Sometimes, as in yesterday’s performance by Sam and Dave, more is more. Other times, as here, what drives a performance is the power of restraint.
Mahalia Jackson, joined by Nat King Cole, “Steal Away,” TV performance, 1957
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lagniappe
“Without a song, each day would be a century.”—Mahalia Jackson
*****
In the baseball/music trivia department, I learned yesterday, while listening to the radio broadcast of the Cubs/Giants game, that both of Barry Zito’s parents worked with Nat King Cole—his mother as a singer and his father as a conductor/arranger.
Saturday night he sings soul, Sunday morning gospel. Here, at Christian Tabernacle Church on the south side of Chicago, is Otis Clay, a label mate of Al Green at Hi Records.
Otis Clay, live, Chicago
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lagniappe
“How can you sing of amazing grace and all God’s wonders without using your hands?”—Mahalia Jackson
If influence were compensable, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones—
a huge influence on Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks (Temptations), Al Green, even Paul Simon (who took inspiration from a line in the Swans’ “hit” “Mary, Don’t You Weep” [“I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”] when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)—would have, when he passed earlier this year at the age of 94, died a wealthy man.
“When he leaves the house [in NYC], he whistles his favorite tune, ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus,’ while greeting the assorted neighborhood junkies and prostitutes who knew him mainly as sometime manager of the [Hotel] Cecil. ‘What’s new, Jeter,’ they ask. ‘Nothing new, nothing good, just thank God for life up here with these heathens and muggers.'”—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1971)
Here—with a shout-out to my nephew Chris Balmes (who sent me this news [and frequently seems to display astonishingly good taste for one so young])—is gospel singer Marie Knight, who died this week in New York at the age of 89.
“Up Above My Head” (she sang on Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s 1947 “hit” recording)
Just finished Zeitoun, Dave Eggers’ intimate look at New Orleans just before, during, and after Katrina, through the eyes of one man and his family, which recently got a rave in the New York Times Book Review. Four-word review: moves quickly, deeply moving.
*****
Recently read Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, which tells the story of a young woman who, in the 1950s, emigrates, reluctantly, from Ireland to America. One of the quietest novels—I mean that as a compliment—I’ve ever read. (Novelist Claire Messud’s thoughtful essay-review in the New York Review of Books is well worth reading.)
music clip of the day 