Last night, a chunky 5ft 5in 28-year-old Negress called Aretha Franklin, known to her admirers as Lady Soul, stampeded her way through her first London concert for three years at the Hammersmith Odeon. She was not so much giving a performance as bearing witness to the tradition of black American music that gave birth to pop and from which pop has gained much of its stimulus.
The lady who first made the phrase "sock it to me" popular, who attacks an audience with voice and gesture, beseeching them to understand the suffering of her countrymen, whose performances make you sweat, give you a chill and cause you to shout, has grown old in trying to grow up. "I am an old woman in disguise," she says. "Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them and when you don't it hurts even more. And I've been hurt – been hurt bad."
She grew up in the Negro ghetto on east side Detroit. At six, her mother left home. Her father preached at the local Baptist church with such fire in his belly that two white uniformed nurses stood by to tranquillise overwrought parishioners. Today, he commands $6,000 a performance and has recorded 90 LPs of his sermons.
Aretha became the star turn in her father's travelling religious circus. She would be driven eight to 10 hours a day between church meetings and then have to eat in a backstreet fish and chip shop because she was black. She was 12 at the time and stuck it for six years. And then, following the example of former gospel singer Sam Cooke, she decided to try pop. Columbia Records pasted on every technical gimmick in the book to make her rich, but the results were disastrous and she toured fifth-rate clubs for another six years.
Four years ago, her chance came. Signed by Atlantic Records, she was allowed to sing the only way she knew how – about herself and her nightmares. "Oh listen to the blues and what they're sayin'," she sings. "Oh they tell me that life's just an empty scene, older than the oldest broken hearts, newer than the newest broken dreams." Within a year, she had won two Grammy awards and sold several million records. Ray Charles said: "She's one of the greatest I've heard."
Although at one time her shyness reached an almost paranoiac state, there is little evidence of this on stage. "You make me feel, make me feel like a natural woman," she breathes as she launches into a "holiness shout", a writhing dance reminiscent of gospel services. Her repertoire is often self-penned and usually self-arranged.
Unlike the Tamla Motown-packaged Supremes and Temptations, Aretha is in no danger of going white and that is as reassuring to her white fans as it must be to her black brothers. One of her most famous songs ends: "You know what's happening... and it's a bad time right now. Just lead us, just lead us on – we've got to get home."
This is an edited extract
