154. Aretha Franklin, "Amazing Grace"

 

Aretha Franklin is a towering figure in American music, one of the greatest singers who has ever lived and whose influence can be felt far and wide to this day.  She's at the top of her game on this album, wielding  her incredible voice like a sword, totally in command of every note.  So why did I have decidedly mixed feelings about it?

This album was recorded in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, under the watchful eye of Aretha's father, Rev. C.L. Franklin.  By this point, Aretha was already a world-famous talent; she had already released "Chain of Fools" and "Think" and won a couple of Grammys, so this was more of a homecoming than a coming out.  She, of course, had grown up in the church and had begun her legendary career by singing gospel music.

The importance of Christianity in African-American culture cannot, of course, be overstated.  The Bible's stories of enslaved people getting their freedom must have resonated strongly with those enslaved in America, and the religion spread quickly throughout black populations in the nascent United States.  Later, black churches were a center of the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King was Reverend King, after all.  

Gospel music looks to a more hopeful future.  On "Climbing Higher Mountains," Aretha sings:

I'm going up the Side of the mountain On my way home (meet my people)
Trying to get home
I'm going up the Side of the mountain On my way home
Trying to get home
I'm going up

Written out like this, the lyrics don't come anywhere close to conveying the power she imbues to the song.  Just watch it instead:

"Going up the mountain" is a familiar gospel theme; my Dad grew up dirt poor in the South, and one of his favorite songs was "Rough Side of the Mountain," which shares some of the same lyrics.  He asked that it be played at his funeral, and it was.

So this all sounds great!  Why am I not enthralled?

One reason is that I just don't love gospel (this is the best-selling gospel album of all time, btw).  Organized religion and I parted ways a long time ago, and there's a part of me that still isn't happy with all the Jesus talk.  I enjoyed our previous Aretha Franklin entry, Young, Gifted and Black, so much more, because it's not weighted down with the Christianity stuff.  And I can't stop thinking about how Christianity was a tool used to keep slaves in their place before it was an instrument of liberation, and that dark history just gives the whole thing a dark undercurrent to me.

But I'm going to put that aside and say that this album is a remarkable testament to a magnificent talent.  The shows themselves were an event - attended by labelmates Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, who were in LA to record Exile on Main Street, and filmed for a concert documentary that has its own tormented history (short version, the production was botched and the audio and video weren't synched and it took 30 years until it was fixed) - and the resulting album is beautiful in its own way.  But it's not for me.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I mean, yes, of course, but not mine.