Sunday Focus: Aretha

     If you watched the broadcast of the Kennedy Center awards you know the Aretha Franklin performance in honor of Carol King was a high point. 
     The NPR folks rebroadcast an interview by Terry Gross with Franklin this week. 
     I recommend listening to the entire interview! But she talked about recording in Muscle Shoals:

GROSS: In 1966, after your contract with Columbia Records was up, you moved to Atlantic Records which was the home of rhythm and blues greats like Ruth Brown and Ray Charles. The producer Jerry Wexler took you down to a studio in Muscle Shoals, Ala. that was famous for its great session men, which included Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. And the first song that you recorded there was "I Never Loved A Man." Now, Spooner Oldham tells a story that when he heard you sit down at the piano and play your first chord, he thought, wow, that's really great, and that he who - and he's a pianist - that he should let you play piano while he moved over to electric piano playing behind you. What did you think of that arrangement? Were you pleased that he agreed that you should be the one at the piano?

A. FRANKLIN: I remember that particular session. It was the very first session so naturally, yes, I remember it. And we really were kind of struggling at that point to get to the music. It just wasn't quite coming off although we had dynamite players. We had the Muscle Shoals Section and they were really very, very hot, cutting them out of good, greasy stuff, or what you would call greasy in that day. But we weren't getting to the music in the way that we should have. It just wasn't coming off. And finally someone said, Aretha, why don't you sit down and play? And I did, and it just happened. It all just happened. We arrived, and we arrived very quickly.
GROSS: Well, Peter Guralnick, the music critic, describes this recording, "I Never Loved A Man," as one of the most momentous takes in the history of rhythm and blues, in fact, in the history of American vernacular music

 [Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]