Album Reviews

Aretha Franklin’s escape from the squares at Columbia Records to become the Queen of Soul on groovy Atlantic is one of the great legends of popular music.

Think about it: Aretha Franklin, John Hammond and Jerry Wexler —three giants of music— all converge in one story. But do the facts support the legend? This album certainly gives pause.

Speaker’s Corner reissue of the 1964 Unforgettable finds Aretha at 22 years old, about midway through a run of albums for Columbia that yielded little in the way of commercial success and still three years away from her Atlantic debut, I Never Loved A Man, one of the great soul albums of all time. While Unforgettable is not up to that standard, it’s one of the clearest recordings of the young Aretha—and that includes the Atlantic sides

The album was made a few months after Dinah Washington’s death. Listening to it is a bit like watching one of those nested Russian dolls being taken apart. Dinah Washington herself was something of a nested character. She was called “Queen of the Blues,” yet to my ear she stayed as far from the prior Queen —Bessie Smith— as she could.

From what I’ve read, she prided herself on her clear diction and insisted on a much more conventional pose than the bawdy Smith. I may be treading on thin ice here, but it seems to me that Washington belongs to that group of post-War Black performers—people like Nina Simone, Nat Cole, Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan—who steered hard away from the stereotype of the barroom gutbucket Black singer, but still worked proudly to project and extend their tradition, albeit in a way that at least left the door open for people outside that tradition to enjoy their work.

And that seems to be the same kind of treatment Columbia was determined to give Franklin, already an experienced performer on the gospel circuit. The legend suggests cluelessness— I’m not so sure it wasn’t consideration and a perhaps misplaced notion of dignity. Aretha herself was a Dinah Washington fan, and although she was to become a much different singer, here she pays proper homage.

Robert Mersey, who produced and charted her stuff on Columbia, often gave her a full string section, and she benefits as little from that as most powerful singers do. This album also features a smallish combo (trumpet, trombone, bass, drums, sax, organ and piano) of talented New York jazz session guys. They play well but are not on the same page as Aretha most of the time.

The legend also suggests that Aretha finally found her true talent at Atlantic. Yes and no. On this album, she frequently sings her butt off. Many of the vocals are indistinguishable from her Atlantic singing. “This Bitter Earth,” for example, gets Aretha’s full dramatic attention, building with each chorus. It’s compelling, but it won’t make you think of “Respect.”

But Aretha does break out here. First, on “Nobody Knows the Way I Feel This Morning,” where she is backed only by bass, organ, drums and a bluesy stinging guitar. They catch fire, she settles back into the groove, takes her time, lets the organ swirl around her, testifies and slowly raises the temperature to white hot. I was reminded of her version of “Drown in My Own Tears.” Parts of other songs tease as well.

And then we get to the singular “Soulville,” the final cut. Aretha has shed the strings, the band is way back in the mix and the horns are doing a creditable impression of the Memphis Horns. Now we have finally gotten to that doll inside all the other dolls. She sits down at the piano herself and belts out this number, egging herself on with her own double tracked soul backup tracks. With her own playing giving her a deeper groove, she absolutely soars.

This tune could have gone on any of her early Atlantic albums. I have to imagine that this was one of the tunes that encouraged Jerry Wexler to sign Aretha to Atlantic. It’s a rocking soulful number and for the first time on the album Aretha sounds like the Queen of Soul. So, no, it wasn’t just the trip to Muscle Shoals that made her what she became—Aretha was already doing it in 1964. But yes, Atlantic sure did allow her to explode in a way that Columbia probably never would have.

The Speaker’s Corner reissue is a great piece of work. I’ve never heard the original, but this far outshines the other two Columbia Aretha LPs I have. The 180 gram vinyl is absolutely silent, there are very realistic drums and organ and the recording and mastering also producing decent sounding horns. Aretha is a teeny bit back in the mix for me, but that seems to be common on her records —maybe they have to do that to accommodate her swooping peaks. Compared to either the original I Never Loved A Man LP or the excellent 4 Men With Beards reissue, this is much clearer and natural sounding.

The one place where I noticed the production intruding was on the songs with heavy strings. There, the sound was a bit “Hi-Fi”-ish. With so much to fit on the soundstage, the engineers opted for a wraparound effect: Aretha in the middle, the strings stage right, and then the band wrapped around the edges. It’s a tad fakey, but if you’re like me, you’ll probably be more annoyed by the mere presence of the strings than by the mixing.

If you’re a Dinah Washington fan, this is a great treatment of her tunes. Even with the strings, the arrangements are cleaner than many of Dinah’s original recordings. And Aretha, as you might expect, holds her own on the tunes. On “Unforgettable” and “What a Diff’rence a Day Made” she mimics a little of Dinah’s vocal style, which is regrettable but it’s not so overdone as to be obnoxious. If you’re a fan of this style of 1950s vocal album (and really, that’s what the style is), you’ll also like this record. If you’re an Aretha fan, you’ve got a choice to make. If you’re looking for the more down-home, Gospel-driven, Black is Beautiful Aretha of later years, not so much.

I’m an Aretha nut, and I’m not sorry I bought this album (unlike the other two Columbia ones). It’s a chance to hear Aretha in development, and some of the tunes are great enough to make you forget that she still hadn’t reached her peak.