
Happy Birthday to the Queen of Soul: Aretha Franklin
Commentary by Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
I want to rock the porch with music today, on the last Tuesday of Women's History Month 2014, and can't find a better way to do it, than to celebrate with the sounds of our Sister Aretha Franklin, on her birthday.
I feel like every period of my life, from my high school years till now, has had her voice as part of the soundtrack.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942. She was the daughter of Barbara Siggers and Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, better known as Rev. C.L Franklin, who founded Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit Michigan, when he and his daughters relocated there in 1948.
From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:
Her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, was the charismatic pastor at New Bethel Baptist Church, which he turned into a large and thriving institution. His services were broadcast locally and in other urban markets around the country, and 60 of his sermons (including the legendary “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest”) were released in album form. One of the best-known religious orators of the day, Rev. Franklin was a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and other key figures in the civil-rights movement.
On the musical side, some of the greatest vocalists of the gospel age were acquaintances and guests in the Franklin household. Aretha and her siblings – sisters Erma and Carolyn and brothers Cecil and Vaughn – grew up hearing the likes of Clara Ward (her greatest influence), Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland both in their father’s church and the family’s living room. From an early age, Aretha sang at her father’s behest during services at New Bethel. Her first recordings turned up on an album called Spirituals, recorded at the church when she was only 14. (It also included material by gospel singer Sammie Bryant and C.L. Franklin.) Spirituals was released locally on the J.V.B. label in 1956 and re-released on the Battle label in 1962. Aretha’s five tracks formed the basis of the 1964 album Songs of Faith: The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin, issued on Checker (Chess Records’ companion label), with additional material recorded by Franklin at services in other locales. In her autobiography, Aretha notes that some of it came from a performance at the Oakland Arena. As a teenager, Aretha accompanied her father on gospel bills and services as far away as California and the Deep South.
Although she was firmly rooted in gospel, Franklin also drew from such blues and jazz legends as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn as she developed her singing style. On the male side, she was inspired by Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke (both with and without the Soul Stirrers). From the emerging world of youthful doo-wop groups and early soul, Aretha enjoyed the likes of LaVern Baker, Ruth Brown, Little Willie John, the Falcons (featuring Wilson Pickett), and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Out of an array of influences both sacred and secular, Franklin forged a contemporary synthesis that would speak to the Sixties generation in the revolutionary new language of soul music. As Jerry Wexler, Aretha’s longtime producer, observed: “Clearly, Aretha was continuing what Ray Charles had begun – the secularization of gospel, turning church rhythms, church patterns and especially church feelings into personalized love songs.”
Young Aretha (like many of us her age) had a crush on
Sam Cooke, who she got to travel with when he was still part of the
Soul Stirrers.
After turning 18, Aretha confided to her father that she aspired to follow Sam Cooke to record pop music. Serving as her manager, C. L. agreed to the move and helped to produce a two-song demo that soon was brought to the attention of Columbia Records, who agreed to sign her in 1960. Franklin was signed as a "five-percent artist". During this period, Franklin would be coached by choreographer Cholly Atkins to prepare for her pop performances. Before signing with Columbia, Sam Cooke tried to persuade Aretha's father to have his label, RCA sign Aretha. He had also been persuaded by local record label owner Berry Gordy to sign Aretha and her elder sister Erma to his Tamla label. Aretha's father felt the label was not established enough yet. Aretha's first Columbia single, "Today I Sing the Blues", was issued in September 1960 and later reached the top ten of the Hot Rhythm & Blues Sellers chart.
"Today I Sing the Blues"
In January 1961, Columbia issued Aretha's debut album, Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo. The album featured her first single to chart the Billboard Hot 100, "Won't Be Long", which also peaked at number 7 on the R&B chart. Mostly produced by Clyde Otis, Franklin's Columbia recordings saw her recording in diverse genres such as standards, vocal jazz, blues, doo-wop and rhythm and blues. Before the year was out, Franklin scored her first top 40 single with her rendition of the standard, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody", which also included the R&B hit, "Operation Heartbreak", on its b-side. "Rock-a-Bye" became her first international hit, reaching the top 40 in Australia and Canada. By the end of 1961, Franklin was named as a "new-star female vocalist" in Down Beat magazine.
Here she is performing "It Won't be Long" on the Steve Allen Show in 1964.
1967
I know Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote this, and many artists, including King have covered it - but in my book, no one can sing it like Aretha did.
You Make me Feel like a Natural Woman
and her signature song Respect
1972
I can't begin to count how many copies of this album I wore out.

Amazing Grace
from the album:
Amazing Grace is a 1972 live album by Aretha Franklin. It ultimately sold over two million copies in the United States alone, earning a Double Platinum certification.
As of 2013, it stands as the biggest selling disc of Aretha's entire fifty-plus year recording career. The double album was recorded at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles during January 1972. It won the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance. The LP is the biggest selling live gospel album of all time.
Aretha Franklin’s unreleased 1972 Amazing Grace documentary trailer
In 2010, Variety Magazine wrote, Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album “Amazing Grace” outsold every other record she’s ever made. Some say it’s the greatest gospel album ever recorded. What few outsiders know is that the recording sessions on those two nights in January 1972, at L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, were captured on film by a four-man camera team headed by director Sydney Pollack.
More than 20 hours of 16mm footage — vaulted away for 38 years — are now being edited into a concert film that Warner Bros. once envisioned (curiously, in retrospect) as part of a double bill with “Superfly.”
And to this day, the doc is still unreleased.
1980
The Blues Brother's movie introduced her to whole new audiences, when she sang "Think" and her classic R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
1985
Surprising many folks was this feminist tribute performed with Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics.
Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves - Aretha and the Eurythmics
The same year she took us zoomin' on the Freeway.
1998
Aretha wound up as a surprise guest, stepping in for Pavarotti at the Grammy's
Twenty two minutes after she was asked to cover for her ailing friend, Luciano Pavarotti, Aretha Franklin takes the stage to perform the legendary aria "Nessun Dorma", a piece she sang previously a few days earlier (in her own register, I might add), without changing Pavarotti's key - which is no minor achievement. It begets one of the most extraordinary musical moments in awards show history. It brought the audience to a thunderous ovation.
2006
At the funeral for Luther Van Dross she sings "Amazing Grace", preaches and calls down the spirit.
2009
At President Obama's Inauguration, she was simply amazing, and her hat, from the true black church ladies tradition wound up with its own facebook page
Her awards list is long. But for many of us, the best one is the reward we receive listening to her.
Happy birthday Aretha, from all of us.
Sing on!
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Hardliners the world over eventually realize force alone rarely ever works. Economist: Nigeria's insurgency; How about some carrot?
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NEARLY a year after President Goodluck Jonathan intensified a military campaign to squash Islamist militants of Boko Haram in the north-eastern corner of Nigeria, the rebels are still running rings around his soldiers and terrorising whole communities, which in turn are losing faith in the government. Now a group within Mr Jonathan’s security team wants to try something new. “It’s a stick-and-carrot approach,” says Sambo Dasuki, Nigeria’s national security adviser. “We believe we can win the war against terror by mobilising our family, cultural, religious and national values.” At the same time, however, the conventional military campaign will continue.
Under Mr Dasuki’s “soft approach”, the government will seek to enrol repentant Boko Haram members into vocational schools, psychologists will provide counselling and local imams will give them a pacifist interpretation of the Koran. Education and sports programmes will be offered to disaffected youths who have hitherto been drawn to the sect. Mr Dasuki admits that poverty, injustice and corruption have encouraged disgruntled young locals to back or join Boko Haram, meaning “Western education is forbidden”. It may, in any case, be almost impossible to reverse the trend while fighting rages. Alienated north-easterners, who are nearly all Muslim, deeply distrust the people who have been running Mr Jonathan’s counter-insurgency campaign.
Despite the thousands of extra troops sent in since last May, bolstered by air assaults on Boko Haram camps, the army has failed to make much headway. As a result, public anger across the country has been mounting. Heavily armed Islamists have responded with increasing brutality, targeting civilians and wresting swathes of the rural north-east from the army. Violence linked to Boko Haram has caused the deaths of more than 700 people this year, making it the one of the bloodiest periods since the insurgency took off in 2010. Since last May, some 350,000 people have fled their homes, according to the UN.

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Enough with the old narratives about refugee camps and impoverished children. A new book sheds light on the continent’s movers and shakers who are operating innovative businesses grounded in one motto: For Africa, By Africa. The Root: Africans Are Helping Themselves—Fuel Their Innovation, Not Your Own.
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t has been a recurring experience during my trips to Ghana and Nigeria in the past few years: seeing Africans do far more for themselves than the mainstream narrative about Africa would have you believe. More important, the methods used by local merchants—and even laymen who have to be ready at a moment’s notice to engineer solutions to everyday problems—are not only creative and innovative, but also sometimes a bit more efficient than some methods stateside.
Take the makeshift water system I saw operating in a hair salon a few blocks from my mother’s house in Accra, the Ghanaian capital. It was an arrangement consisting of tubes, a heating tank and several dispensers from which water flowed—all to make use of the limited water supply and nonexistent piping system. The entire apparatus worked amazingly well at getting the shampoo out of a patron’s hair. My mother and the salon owner told me that the system conserved water better than some modern methods, a feat that Americans have been trying to accomplish for years.
Nigerian-American journalist Dayo Olopade explores this idea more thoroughly in her new book The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa.
“The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves,” a passage from the book reads.
In a New York Times op-ed, Olopade describes her elation that Bill Gates is encouraging people to do away with categories such as “developing” and “developed” or “first world” and “third world” to describe where a nation sits on the fiscal ladder. Olopade instead developed her own vocabulary: fat and lean. Lean countries, such as those in Africa and South America, “approach consumption and production with scarcity in mind,” she wrote, while fat nations are obsessed with “plenty.”
Fat-nation problems include subprime mortgages, skyrocketing credit card debt and the overproduction of fossil fuels. Lean nations have their share of problems, too, such as infant mortality and malaria outbreaks.
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he U.S. is sending military aircraft as well as an increased number of special operations forces to Uganda to assist in the search for fugitive African warlord Joseph Kony. The Grio: President Obama orders increase in special forces to hunt Joseph Kony.
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The White House confirmed early Monday the U.S. is sending “a limited number” of CV-22 Osprey, refueling aircraft and “associated support personnel” to assist local forces in their long-running battle against Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. President Barack Obama sent about 100 U.S. troops to help the African forces in 2011.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said early Monday the additional support would enable the African Union “to conduct targeted operations to apprehend remaining LRA combatants.”
“Our African partners have consistently identified airlift as one of their greatest limiting factors as they search for and pursue the remaining LRA leaders across a wide swath of one of the world’s poorest, least governed and most remote regions,” Hayden said.
The aircraft would be based in Uganda but will be used in LRA-affected areas of the Central African Republic, Congo and South Sudan to support the African Union’s regional task force, Hayden said.
“The deployment of these aircraft and personnel does not signify a change in the nature of the U.S. military advisory role in this effort,” Hayden said. “African Union-led regional forces remain in the lead, with U.S. forces supporting and advising their efforts.”
The U.S.-based Enough Project advocacy group said in a report released Friday, Nov. 9, 2012 that the hunt for the African warlord Joseph Kony is hopeless without more troops and urges American forces to "play a more operational role" on the ground. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
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Even in preschool, black students are disciplined more harshly than white students. New York Times: School data finds pattern of inequality along racial lines.
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One of the striking statistics to emerge from the data, based on information collected during the 2011-12 academic year, was that even as early as preschool, black students face harsher discipline than other students.
While black children make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, close to half of all preschool children who are suspended more than once are African-American.
“To see that young African-American students — or babies, as I call them — are being suspended from pre-K programs at such horrendous rates is deeply troubling,” said Leticia Smith-Evans, interim director of education practice at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
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The news seems saturated with stories of young black men whose lives were cut short because they were perceived as a threat. Now one director has set out to investigate the images and myths around black men. The Grio: ‘Afraid of Dark’ filmmaker hopes to make black men ‘harder to kill’.
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Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Jonathan Ferrell.
The news seems saturated with stories of young black men and boys whose lives were cut short — often because they were perceived as a threat.
Moved to action by the trend, one director has set out to investigate the images and myths around black males that feed those negative perceptions.
With Afraid of Dark, documentary filmmaker Mya B. says she hopes to make real the lives of everyday black men onscreen in hopes it could “make them harder to kill.”
theGrio talked to Mya B about her upcoming film and the image of black men in the popular imagination.
theGrio: What inspired you to make this documentary? Was it some of the high-profile cases in the news or was the inspiration more personal?
Mya B: My first film was Silence: In Search of Black Female Sexuality and that film dealt with analyzing different stereotypes of black women from the Tragic Mulatto, down to the emasculating Sapphire and Jezebel. Going on college tours and just showing it, men would always ask, “Well, when are you gonna do a piece about us?” That was the reason why I started filming for it in 2007.
Director Mya B
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Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Song which is America is harmonized by many diverse voices. Some of those voices sing America from an unbridled joy deep within them; while others sing America from the constant anguish brought by generation after generation suffering under the manacle and the lash; a sad refrain sung from that inner pain brought from the loss of ancestry and Home. The melodies of both interweave and play a coda on the landscape and the Soul of America.
It is on that landscape that the first faint strains of the Song that is America became the forceful tacet on an American Exceptionalism; a certainty of purpose and an almost religious devotion to save those not touched by our benevolence. It is the chorus singing that they must be saved and it's for their own good. As when...
A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America
All day she heard the mad stampede of feet
Push by her in a thick unbroken haste.
A thousand unknown terrors of the street
Caught at her timid heart, and she could taste
The city of grit upon her tongue. She felt
A steel-spiked wave of brick and light submerge
Her mind in cold immensity. A belt
Of alien tenets choked the songs that surged
Within her when alone each night she knelt
At prayer. And as the moon grew large and white
Above the roof, afraid that she would scream
Aloud her young abandon to the night,
She mumbled Latin litanies and dream
Unholy dreams while waiting for the light.
-- Helene Johnson
Portrait representing Henry Ward Beecher and Pinky, one of the most famous slave girls whom he auctioned at Plymouth Church, c.1860
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