Aretha Franklin was a favorite of Sarasota's Jerry Wexler, her legendary producer
Aretha Franklin, who died today at age 76, never played Sarasota and had to cancel what would have been her sold-out debut at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in 2016.
But the iconic singer had a deep connection with longtime Sarasota resident Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer and record label boss.
"I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows," Wexler wrote in his award-winning autobiography "Rhythm and Blues," coauthored with David Ritz. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
After five years recording at the more prestigious Columbia label, Franklin, the conflicted daughter of a preacher man, finally found a producer who understood her and understood how to make her a superstar when she signed with Wexler and the Atlantic Records label he co-owned in late 1966.
Paired with the white boys with soul from Muscle Shoals, the Memphis Horns, and background vocals by her sisters Carolyn and Erma (as well as Cissy Houston, mother of Whitney Houston), Franklin recorded her first album for Atlantic, the 1967 release “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You." In 2002, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 1 for its cover story “Women in Rock: 50 Essential Albums.”
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"I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" opens with the greatest cover in the history of pop music, Franklin’s ownership of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” a song she had reworked — adding among other key elements the “sock-it-to-me” call and response — while on tour prior to signing with Atlantic.
“The call for respect went from a request to a demand,” Wexler wrote. “And then, given the civil rights and feminist fervor that was building in the 1960s, respect — especially as Aretha articulated it with such force — took on new meaning. ‘Respect’ started off as a soul song and wound up a kind of national anthem.”
Side one of “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" also includes the hit title track, a song so utterly raw and sensual and vulnerable but it also delivered with a total sense of self pride. The singer is declaring her love, admitting weakness for the man, but she’s doing so with pluck and sass. “Baby, you know that I'm the best thing that you ever had,” Franklin sings. “Kiss me once again.”
In case there’s any doubt about the singer getting her “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” especially in its most sexual interpretation, side two opens with the Franklin original “Dr. Feelgood.” A song about the greatest cure of all delivered by a woman who gets what she wants, when she wants it. Yeah, her doctor is on call at all times.
In its own way as important as “Respect,” Franklin delivers the ultimate quid pro quo love song "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man." Composed by ace songwriters Chips Moman and Dan Penn, Franklin got first crack at the song — Moman was a guitarist at the recording sessions — and hit it so far out of the ballpark that even after covers by such accomplished stylists as Etta James and Willie Nelson, Franklin’s original remains the definitive version of the song.
Franklin would go on to record one great album after another, at least one per year through 1972’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” with Wexler at Atlantic. She became a leading voice of the civil rights movement, virtually the voice of black America, and even returned to the church to record probably the most popular gospel album of all time with “Amazing Grace.” Forever the Queen of Soul, Franklin easily ranks among a handful of the greatest recording artists of the past century.
"I worked with three geniuses," Wexler told me at his Siesta Key home in 2003, "Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan."
Wexler, at the age of 91, died at that same Siesta Key home in 2008.
Rolling Stone updated its “Women in Rock: 50 Essential Albums” list in 2012. Franklin and Wexler's masterpiece remained on top.
This essay originally appeared last year in "Classic Albums: 1955-1980," one of the Gatehouse Media Premium Plus Editions only made available to print subscribers.