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Everybody's favorite feature is back! On this FTC Mailbag episode, Jared and Ross respond to listener-submitted questions and topics like pastoring without seminary, terms for elders, restoring disqualified pastors, what happens to the soul when someone dies, whether SBC churches should bring into membership those baptized as infants, and more.

At the request of one of our listeners, Pastor Jimmy Johnson addresses the doctrine of "Progressive Sanctification." We hope that this conversation is useful as we seek to equip our listeners with theological content from a 1689 Baptist perspective!

John kicks off a new series with a sermon on both how and why we pray.

In Episode 113 of Theology In Particular, Dr. Daniel Scheiderer returns to make a case for Amillennialism. It was in episode 80 that Dr. Scheiderer provided us with an overview of the various eschatological positions on the millennium. Here he presents two arguments against mellennarianism in its various forms and five arguments for the Amillennial position.  Links: International Reformed Baptist Seminary: irbsseminary.org If you have feedback, questions, or suggestions, please email Joe at: tip@irbsseminary.org Recommended Resources: A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times, by Kim Riddlebarger On The End Of The World And On Hell – Theological Commonplaces,  Vol. 32-33, Pages 129-36, by Johann Gerhard, Institutes Of Elenctic Theology, Section 20.3, by Francis Turretin.

In today’s episode of Words of Grace, we share a recent message from the pulpit of Flint River. Our passage under consideration is the latter part of 2 Corinthians chapter 1, specifically verses 15-22. On the surface, much of this might be random language or pleasantries, but there's actually a significant point Paul makes here … Continue reading "Yea and Amen"

Having clarity of thought and peace of mind in the gospel of Grace.

Philippians 2:12-13. From the "Reaching Forward: Philippians" sermon series. Preached by Jody Killingsworth.

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Pastor Mike Ray

Pastor Mike Ray

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Part 5 of 8. Imagine Heaven - The Highlight of Heaven by John Burke Watch this speech at-  https://youtu.be/sbJ-zrVYY-s?si=vyrA4UORpow8Urcu Daily Thoughts w/ Ate Beth 1.8K subscribers 14,328 views Jun 1, 2020 Near Death Experience/ Life After Death by John Burke Video Credits: Grief Care - Cornerstone Fellowship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHM8Q... Imagine Heaven 8 Part Series Playlist-  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlyTShyFToQ&list=PLulgd9eHkENpyBmp6hIFSFQgcomxVhzjA Imagine Heaven - Evidence for the Afterlife by John Burke Imagine Heaven - Relationships in Heaven by John Burke Imagine Heaven - The Most Beautiful Place by John Burke Imagine Heaven - What About Hell by John Burke Imagine Heaven - The Highlight of Heaven by John Burke Imagine Heaven Rewards That Last Imagine Heaven Heaven Encounters by John Burke Heaven Testimony Yonggi Cho   About the book- Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You by John Burke.  October 20, 2015   All of us long to know what life after death will be like. Bestselling author John Burke is no exception. In Imagine Heaven, Burke compares over 100 gripping stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) to what Scripture says about our biggest questions of Heaven: Will I be myself? Will I see friends and loved ones? What will Heaven look like? What is God like? What will we do forever? What about children and pets?  For decades, Burke has been studying accounts of survivors brought back from near death who lived to tell of both heavenly and hellish experiences. While not every detail of individual NDEs correlate with Scripture, Burke shows how the common experiences shared by thousands of survivors--including doctors, college professors, bank presidents, people of all ages and cultures, and even blind people--point to the exhilarating picture of Heaven promised in the Bible. This thrilling journey into the afterlife will make you feel like you've been there. It will forever change the way you view the life to come and the way you live your life today. You'll discover Heaven is even more amazing than you've ever imagined.   Book mentioned in interview- 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life by Don Piper September 1, 2004 As he is driving home from a minister's conference, Baptist minister Don Piper collides with a semi-truck that crosses into his lane. He is pronounced dead at the scene. For the next 90 minutes, Piper experiences heaven where he is greeted by those who had influenced him spiritually. He hears beautiful music and feels true peace. Back on earth, a passing minister who had also been at the conference is led to pray for Don even though he knows the man is dead. Piper miraculously comes back to life and the bliss of heaven is replaced by a long and painful recovery. For years Piper kept his heavenly experience to himself. Finally, however, friends and family convinced him to share his remarkable story.   HELP ACU SPREAD THE WORD!  Please go to Apple Podcasts and give ACU a 5 star rating. Apple canceled us and now we are clawing our way back to the top. Don't let the Leftist win. Do it now! Thanks. Also Rate us on any platform you follow us on. It helps a lot. Forward this show to friends. Ways to subscribe to the American Conservative University Podcast Click here to subscribe via Apple Podcasts Click here to subscribe via RSS You can also subscribe via Stitcher FM Player Podcast Addict Tune-in Podcasts Pandora Look us up on Amazon Prime …And Many Other Podcast Aggregators and sites ACU on Twitter- https://twitter.com/AmerConU . Warning- Explicit and Violent video content.   Please help ACU by submitting your Show ideas. Email us at americanconservativeuniversity@americanconservativeuniversity.com   Endorsed Charities -------------------------------------------------------- Pre-Born! Saving babies and Souls. https://preborn.org/ OUR MISSION To glorify Jesus Christ by leading and equipping pregnancy clinics to save more babies and souls. WHAT WE DO Pre-Born! partners with life-affirming pregnancy clinics all across the nation. We are designed to strategically impact the abortion industry through the following initiatives:… -------------------------------------------------------- Help CSI Stamp Out Slavery In Sudan Join us in our effort to free over 350 slaves. Listeners to the Eric Metaxas Show will remember our annual effort to free Christians who have been enslaved for simply acknowledging Jesus Christ as their Savior. As we celebrate the birth of Christ this Christmas, join us in giving new life to brothers and sisters in Sudan who have enslaved as a result of their faith. https://csi-usa.org/metaxas   https://csi-usa.org/slavery/   Typical Aid for the Enslaved A ration of sorghum, a local nutrient-rich staple food A dairy goat A “Sack of Hope,” a survival kit containing essential items such as tarp for shelter, a cooking pan, a water canister, a mosquito net, a blanket, a handheld sickle, and fishing hooks. Release celebrations include prayer and gathering for a meal, and medical care for those in need. The CSI team provides comfort, encouragement, and a shoulder to lean on while they tell their stories and begin their new lives. Thank you for your compassion  Giving the Gift of Freedom and Hope to the Enslaved South Sudanese -------------------------------------------------------- Food For the Poor https://foodforthepoor.org/ Help us serve the poorest of the poor Food For The Poor began in 1982 in Jamaica. Today, our interdenominational Christian ministry serves the poor in primarily 17 countries throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Thanks to our faithful donors, we are able to provide food, housing, healthcare, education, fresh water, emergency relief, micro-enterprise solutions and much more. We are proud to have fed millions of people and provided more than 15.7 billion dollars in aid. Our faith inspires us to be an organization built on compassion, and motivated by love. Our mission is to bring relief to the poorest of the poor in the countries where we serve. We strive to reflect God's unconditional love. It's a sacrificial love that embraces all people regardless of race or religion. We believe that we can show His love by serving the “least of these” on this earth as Christ challenged us to do in Matthew 25. We pray that by God's grace, and with your support, we can continue to bring relief to the suffering and hope to the hopeless.   Report on Food For the Poor by Charity Navigator https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/592174510   -------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer from ACU. We try to bring to our students and alumni the World's best Conservative thinkers. All views expressed belong solely to the author and not necessarily to ACU. In all issues and relations, we hope to follow the admonitions of Jesus Christ. While striving to expose, warn and contend with evil, we extend the love of God to all of his children.

This was a Lecture given at the State Convention of Primitive Baptist of Tn.

Missionary Evangelist Robert Breaker preaches a message entitled: "What Will Jesus Give You For Your Service?," at the historic Paran Baptist Church in Grandin, Florida on Sept. 10th, 2023. This is the THIRD of THREE Revival Sermons.

Kyle and Matt recently shared 5 Encouraging Church Trends, but now it's time to face the music and see 5 DISCOURAGING Church Trends. The other side of the coin, if you will. Article: https://research.lifeway.com/2023/09/26/5-current-challenges-facing-u-s-churches/Sponsor: SWBTSIf you're looking for a place to grow in your walk with the Lord and prepare to serve Him in ministry, then come visit Southwestern Seminary. At Southwestern, you will find experienced professors, committed to practicing what they teach you. And by being on campus, you'll get a glimpse of the many ministry opportunities in the surrounding area. Want to see for yourself? Come for Preview Day on October 20 to find out how Southwestern can help you live your calling. Register now at swbts.edu/preview.

September 27, 2023 | Pastor's Bible Study by Taylors FBC

After a near death experience in Gath, David finally started listening to the Lord. He went from running away from Saul in fear, fleeing into the land of the enemy, then finally finding rest in the strangest of places – a cave. There the Lord blessed David with clarity of mind, insight and direction, in …

September 27, 2023 | Equip Institute Week Four - Biblical Interpretation by Taylors FBC

Listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts I'm so delighted to present you with an interview I did with Professor Nancy Pearcey, an author whose books have significantly helped me understand and live out my faith better. Today we're talking about masculinity. Have you noticed the critical and uncharitable tone in our culture towards men? Although our society celebrates women and girls who excel at sports, education, and business, men and boys often receive nothing but criticism, even outright hostility. Some even say masculine men are the cause of all the problems with the world. Listen in as I ask Pearcey about her recent book and how Christians should approach the whole issue of masculinity both biblically and historically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOmzSm2_4RI Here are my 8 myths about masculinity that Pearcey responded to in this episode: Bible-believing Christians are slightly more likely to divorce than non-Christians or liberal Christians. Bible-believing Christian men are more likely to be harsh and abusive to their wives and children The Bible's endorsement of male patriarchy causes toxic masculine behaviors. Women initiated the suffragette movement in America because they wanted to be treated as individuals of equal value. Our time is the first when women in America have publicly accused men of toxic behavior. Men have traditionally worked outside of the home and have been the breadwinners. Traditionally women focused on keeping the home and raising the children rather than contributing economically. Blocking or limiting men's testosterone will solve the problems our society has with badly behaved men. Professor Nancy Pearcey is the author of The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes,as well as Love Thy Body,The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and Total Truth. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She's been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual." —— Links —— Get The Toxic War on Masculinity here More about Pearcey at NancyPearcey.com Support Restitutio by donating here Join our Restitutio Facebook Group and follow Sean Finnegan on Twitter @RestitutioSF Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments and we may play them out on the air Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library. Who is Sean Finnegan?  Read his bio here —— Transcript —— This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode. Sean Finnegan: Hey there I'm Sean Finnegan, and you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity put out today. I'm so delighted to present you with an interview I did with Professor Nancy Pearcy, an author whose books have significantly helped me understand and live out my faith better. Today. We're talking about masculinity. Have you ever noticed the critical and uncharitable tone in our culture towards men? Although our society celebrates? Women and girls who excel at sports, education and business men and boys often receive nothing but criticism, even outright hostility. Some even say masculine men are the cause. Of all the. Problems with the world listen in as I ask Piercy about her recent book and how Christians should approach the whole issue of masculinity, both biblically and historically. Here now is episode 515, The Toxic War on masculinity. With Professor Nancy Pearcy. Today on the show, I'm joined by Professor Nancy Pearcy. She's the author of the Toxic War on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles the sexes, as well as love thy body, the soul of science, saving Leonardo, finding truth and total truth, publish some other books and articles that I I don't have listed here, but she's a professor and scholar. And residence at Houston Christian University. She's been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek highlighted as. One of the five. Top women apologists by Christianity Today and hailed in the Economist as America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual. Well, Nancy Piercy, welcome to Restitutio. Nancy Pearcey:Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Sean Finnegan:So I first came. Across your work, when a friend of. Mine told me. He loved told Truth. So much that he read that book every year that intrigued me, I got to read it myself. Was really interested in the. Whole world view. Approach and but it was really the the love thy body book that hooked me. I really enjoyed this one. I think it was 2018. Such an interesting book, it hooked me and so now this new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, has outdone them all, in my opinion. This is such a fascinating read. I've learned so much about the history of masculinity in America, which I was not expecting. I just thought it was just another culture war book, which I'm happy to read anyhow. But this was really a lot deeper and I found it very challenging, especially the last. The last whole section. You you really challenged husbands in a healthy way. I felt challenged and I've tried to make some changes in my my marriage with my wife and get get a little more involved and so forth. But so I just want to say thanks for courageously stepping out on the limb here and writing this book. Nancy Pearcey:Well, thank you and I didn't realize when I started that it was going to take courage to tell you the truth, but it has in fact been the most controversial book that I've ever written. I really thought love thy body would be more controversial because it deals with issues like abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, which is really exploding today. But in fact. This one caused more controversy, at least in Christian Circle. Here's an example. When I was writing the manuscript, I taught several classes on it. I LED several leading groups. I like to get lots of feedback, rub off all the rough edges, and when they would tell their family and friends about it. So people who weren't actually seeing the book just hearing about it initially, their first question was always. Whose side is she on with that tone? Whose side is she? On and by. The way the second question was always and why is a woman writing a book on masculinity any. Sean Finnegan:Right. Nancy Pearcey:So this is what I was up against all through the writing process. I rewrote that first chapter multiple times because I had to sort of overcome that suspicion that almost hostility that people have when they just, they're just triggered by the word masculinity. So and and even after the book came out. I. Don't know if you followed. Twitter it all but the day after the book came out, it was jumped on by a Christian egalitarians. Who accused me of giving ammunition their word to complementarians, even though I don't even address that in the book. I even explain why I don't you, you know, because the social scientist said it doesn't seem to make much difference. So I'm giving you data from the social scientist and then once that calmed down, I started getting. Not nearly as not nearly as vicious, but some counter attacks from conservatives as well. So all I had to say it has something to make everyone angry, I guess. Sean Finnegan:Yes, yes and. And and everyone should read it and. See see what it says because it is. It's accessible, but it's also very evidence based and I really appreciated that. Nancy Pearcey:Yeah, yeah, it's the. Most fact based book I've written, so it starts with evidence from sociology and what Christian men are actually like. What are they like? Get rid of the, you know, the accusations back and forth. What are they actually like? Let's look at the social science data where they went out and actually surveyed. Tentacles and then as you mentioned a minute ago, there's a lot of history there too because I wanted. To show where the secular definition of masculinity comes from. As you know, since you've read my books, I'm an apologist at heart. So my goal really is to answer the charges from the secular world. It's secular world that says, you know. Masculinity is toxic, and if you want to counter any social trend, you need to ask where did it come from? How did it develop? And so that's really my goal, is to get to the bottom of the secular. Charges understand where they're coming from and how we can respond to them more effectively. Sean Finnegan:I appreciate that your book is not just masculinity. According to Nancy Pearcy. And what you crazy guys should change or something like that, you know, it's it's very much historical. It's broad in its approach and it is very research based, and it seemed like you were very circumspect not to inject. Your own opinion? Don't think I encountered your own opinion very much. It was just like this is what these people did. This is what this this movement contributed and so forth. Very objective, if I can put it that way. So you'll be commended on that. Your book confronts a number of lies and half truths and false stereotypes floating around in the culture today. So I thought we could get your response to a number of incorrect statements I've concocted. And so these are sentences that on their surface appear obviously true, but when examined closely, turn out to be false. So I've written 10. I don't know how many we can get to in this conversation, but what do you think you Are you ready to debunk some false myths? Nancy Pearcey:Yes, I loved reading your list, so I'd love to get started on your list of false accusations that we often hear, especially against Christian men. Sean Finnegan:Alright, so #1. Bible believing Christians are slightly more likely to divorce than non Christians or liberal Christians. Nancy Pearcey:Yeah. So talking about Twitter feed, I've gotten that several times in recent days, and it's also something that we hear in the church, right. In fact, that's probably the first pushback I get is that don't Christians divorced at the same rate of the rest of the culture or even? And higher. And so the sociologists were looking at accusations like that. And So what they did is they did the studies, they did the studies. And here's what they found. They made a careful distinction between evangelical men who are actually committed to their faith, who are who attend church regularly versus nominal Christian men. And that distinction made all the difference, because committed Christian men actually test out the best of all groups in America in. Other words, they. Test test out as the most loving husbands and fathers their wives test out the highest in terms of saying they feel. Happy with their husband's expressions of love and affection, evangelical fathers spend the most time with their children 3.5 more hours per week than secular men, both in shared activities like sports or church youth group, and in discipline, like setting limits on screen time or enforcing bedtime. Evangelical couples actually divorce at a lower rate than any other major group in society, 35% lower than secular men, and they have the lowest rates of domestic violence. Of any group. In America, so this was a real shocker because we've all heard the charges that you just met. That believing in any form of male headship in the home turns evangelical men into overbearing, tyrannical, coercive patriarchs tyrannical. Did I say, tyrannical, trying to get all those? Words in there? Yeah. I mean, there's there's no. Sean Finnegan:Question that, as a pastor who regularly preaches, I'm the lead pastor here at a. Church in New York, Upstate New York, and this stat has it says torment to me. You know, this idea that the Bible doesn't work if you apply the Bible to your marriage, you divorce more, something that really has not fit for me. But I I'm the sort of person that wants to accept. Facts as they are and see if we can do better. And so reading that early on in your book that actually, no, the Bible is not hurting marriages is is helping men to be well not just men men and women to stay together more frequently. That was just like mind blowing it was just like this is. This is a breath of fresh air and I think it's a great. Place to start because you are. Wading into treacherous waters where there are All kinds of. Sharks and piranha and electric eels out to get you. So I think to start somewhere complementary is good because that does make sense to me that like guys that and women that are regularly attending church services. As as a a measurement of how serious they are about their faith that it that it would have an impact. So I I appreciate that on my next statement. You already just kind of dipped your toes into it, but I I wonder if you could elaborate it. It is #2 is Bible believing Christian men are more likely to be harsh and abusive to their wives and children. Nancy Pearcey:Let's go back to that distinction. When I said Church going committed Christian men test out at the top. And by the way, I'm glad you mentioned that we don't hear this very often. I had to go digging in the academic literature to find this, and this is really the final reason. You know, the final trigger that made me decide to write this book as I was, I was overwhelmed. I was. And you know it's it's so counter to the media narratives. And I said we need. To get this. Out there, this is not just a religious figure, you know, giving a pep talk. This is evidence based findings from the social sciences. But the reason that we have the wrong impression is that the social scientists went back and made that crucial distinction. Of nominal Christians, right? These are men who, on a survey like that, might check the Baptist box, for example, but who rarely, if ever, attend church. It's no more of a family background, coastal background. These are cultural. And they test out shockingly different. They test out with all the toxic stereotypes. They'll rise, report the lowest level of happiness with their husband's treatment of them. They spend the least amount of time with their children. They have the highest rate of divorce, higher than secular men, 20%. Higher than secular men and they have the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence, higher than secular men. And so what's happened is most studies have just looked at evangelicals, you know, as an overarching category. So they're picking up men who are better than secular men and men who are worse than secular men. And that's why the numbers get skewed. It does suggest a different way, maybe that churches can deal with this issue. On the one hand, I think they should be more positive and supportive. Of men who are doing a good job, one of my graduate students is the leader of a women's ministry in a large Baptist Church here in Houston. And she said on on Mother's Day, we hand out flowers and tell the women they're wonderful. On Father's Day, we scold the men and tell. Them to do better. And so I was very careful not to have a scolding tone in this book because I think we should get this positive information out there. Ohh, and here's another example. So in my class at Houston Christian University, when I told them I was writing a book on masculinity, one of the male students shot back what masculinity? It's been beaten. All of us. So in Christian circles, men are also feeling beaten down and demoralized. You know, they're picking up the message. You know that that, that masculinity is toxic and we need to come to. That in the church it does suggest too, that we need to do something about these nominal men if they're sort of hanging around the fringes of the Christian world and claiming an identity. As evangelicals, how do we reach out to them? They are using the language of headship and submission, but they're not giving the biblical meaning to those terms. Instead, they're imputing me importing, meaning infusing meaning from the secular script for masculinity. And so how do we disciple these men? You know, insofar as we have access to them because they're hanging around? You know, the edges of the Christian world? How can the church have a better ministry to disciple these men? Sean Finnegan:That's that's really an excellent question to address because it's these guys on the fringe, as you point out that. The old fashioned word for it are hypocrites. You know, there are people that are going to talk the talk but not walk the walk and they're giving the rest of us a bad name. And yet as a pastor, I can tell you that we are hopeful that by having them come whenever it is, they happen to come, that something will sink in and. That they will have a true. Heart change, you know. So I I think. It's a hard thing to figure out. We can't just cast everyone out of the church who's not living up to the standard of Christianity. Some churches have tried that, but it, you know, it, it ends up with this very judgmental, you know, holier than thou kind of environment. So. It you're right, it is. It is a really thorny problem. Problem but it is important to address for. Sure. Well, let's. Let's move on to number. Three. So the Bible is endorsement of male patriarchy, we're told causes toxic masculine behaviors. What do you think? Nancy Pearcey:Yes, that that's one of the reasons that I relied so heavily on the social science data. What was happening was, of course, evangelical men were being held up. Exhibit A of toxic masculinity. It was very easy to find examples with a quick Google search, but I will give you just one example. So this was the co-founder of the Church 2 Movement, which came after the Me Too movement and she said the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture. That we see permeating American Christianity Today. So what happened was the social scientists, psychologists, sociologists were reading these accusations and saying, oh, where's your evidence? You know you're making these charges, but where's your data? Yeah. And that's what really sent them back to the data to do the studies in my book, I cite some dozen studies or so. I was just looking at what the social scientists were actually finding. Like, some people have said, well, wait a minute. Who cares what the social scientists found? I want to know what the spokesman say. What did the theologians say? What does this Danvers statement say? For example, which is on complementarianism egalitarianism, and so on, and and frankly, that's not what I was concerned about. I don't want to hear what the spokesman. I wanted to answer the secular charge, which is, if you believe in this theology, it will turn you into an overbearing, tyrannical, coercive Patriarch. And my question was, does it does it? Let's look at what it does do, in fact, in terms of these surveys of evangelical couples. And so I have two chapters on this. And I was to tell you the truth. I was again. I was blown away by the the. Surveys the surveys where they went to Christian couples and said, do you believe in male headship and not all? But the majority of the evangelicals would say yes and then they would say what do you think it means? How do you live it out? I was blown away. The loving, respectful, mutual understanding that they had of headship. They would not usually define it in terms of, you know, the final authority or the tiebreaker or the bread. Dinner, the most frequent definition, was spiritual leader, spiritual leader, and then they'd be asked, what does that mean? And of course, they would start with the practical things, get your family to church, get your kids to youth group, have family devotions and family prayer. But it also most of them would talk about the intangibles as well, right? That you're responsible for your children's spiritual growth. You're responsible for your wives, spiritual health and the most frequent verse they quoted was Ephesians 5. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. That might not sound significant to you, but when I had chapters later on abuse in Christian homes, I literally ran into people who said they never heard that verse, one woman who said I had to go look it up in the Bible. I didn't believe it was there. I had never heard a sermon on Ephesians 5, the part of it. That is addressed to husbands, and there was another example where there's a pastor who works with abusive men in court ordered counseling. Most abusive men are not in counseling unless it's court ordered, but this is a Christian pastor and he was working with a man who was abusive and and his wife had actually fled the home to escape from his physical abuse. And he kept quoting the first part of Effusions 5. She's supposed to submit to me. This is wrong. She can't leave. The home and he. And so the pastor said, well, what about this other part of it? She didn't. And he said the man was shocked. Kid never heard the part of Ephesians 5 that was addressed to husbands. And so that's why it's so significant that the committed Christian men and couples. That was what they quoted all the time. Ephesians 5. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. And so I went to the actual studies. The surveys done of Christian couples to see. How do you live it out? What do you? Think it means. That's what I report in. The book. Sean Finnegan:Yeah, a lot of your book gets into the history of masculinity in America. And I thought that was really eye opening because as somebody who started a lot with early church history, Old Testament history, New Testament history, Second Temple Judaism. I could tell you all about. The Roman Empire, you. Know there's this, like memes going around. How? Often, do you think about? The Roman Empire too much, that's. That's my answer but. American history. I'm not so strong and much less with respect to gender. I really found this, this research you did fascinate. Thing. And so my next myth is about the suffragette movement. And it goes like this. Number four women initiated the suffragette movement in America because they wanted to be treated as individuals of equal value. It sounds just like obviously true, right. But is it? Nancy Pearcey:No, it's not true. First of all, women didn't initiate it. A small group of women did the early feminist. But even they acknowledge that most women were against it at the time. I had so many readers. You remember, I said I had readers on my manuscript. I had so many readers who were skeptical of that that I went out and find the quotes. Some people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminists saying the main opposition to the vote. For women, it's other women. So I got the quotes from people saying that why would they opposed to it? Because they did not want to be treated as individuals. It was just the opposite. Is the framework to understand it. The vote was not described in that day as men's vote versus women's vote. It was framed as household vote versus individual vote, and most women wanted the household vote. And why did they want that? Because it put responsibility on men to take into account the. Interest of the entire household. And even broader, I'll try to be short, but even broader. It was a shift in political philosophy. Early America was governed by political philosophy that saw so institutions like the family as an organic unit. Not just a collection of individuals who happen to be there, but there's an organic unit connecting them all to one another and therefore there was a common good. In other words, I look out for what's good for me. You look out for what's good for you, but who looks out for the common good of the marriage, of the family, of the Church, of the school and so on. That's what authority was for. Authority was a person who was not supposed to look out for his own interest. The favorite word of the time at the time was he should be disinterested by which they meant he doesn't pursue his own interest. He's the one who's responsible for the common good of the whole. America, after roughly after the revolution began to shift from that political philosophy to a political philosophy called social contract theory, which does see societies and social institutions as collections of autonomous individuals who've just come together out of a common interest. Well, in that case there is no common good. And so men were no longer held responsible for the common good. And so many women at the time realized this is actually letting men off. The hook. It's giving them a pass on moral responsibility. You know, they're no longer held responsible for the common good of the entire house. And so that's how the debate was framed. Many women that at the time said we want our men to two cents, that they are responsible for their wife and children, and back then the household was was larger, right? So it included extended family and servants and and so on. The man was in charge of the small. Commonwealth. So anyway, it was women who opposed the vote largely, and it was because they saw it as a way that men were going. To be held to a reduced standard that we were lowering the standard on male responsibility. Now I would say that eventually most women came around to it. It took. About a. Century. Eventually, women came out to around to supporting it. But why? Early feminists framed it in terms of autonomy and individual rights that did not speak to most women. Women came around to supporting it when the temperance movement. Began to say this can be a way that we can hold men in check because men are drinking. They're coming home drunk and beating their wives and children and women have little recourse when that happens. And so the head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, her name is Francis Willard. Historian says she was the most influential. Women of the entire 19. And she began to see the vote as a way to give women power in the temperance movement against drunken, abusive husbands. And so she renamed. It she called it the ballot for home protection. No. If it was about home protection, women were for it, so that that, that shift is why women came around to endorsing it. But again, not for the reasons we think autonomy and individual rights. But ohh, this is a way to give us some leverage against some of the common male voices of drunkenness. And abuse. Sean Finnegan:This home protection at every turn seems like there's so much more to the story than you know on the surface you think? Ohh well. Women were hopelessly oppressed and you know until they got the right to vote, they couldn't do anything about it. You know, that's kind of like the typical way of saying it, but it's so much more complicated and new, nuanced. Just Dance between men and women in American history is incredible. To see it going back and forth throughout your book. So what about the statement our time today, the 21st century is the first when women in America have publicly accused men of toxic behavior. You think? Nancy Pearcey:Well, I just gave you a good example. Where the temperance movement certainly popularized a lot of public rhetoric that was very critical of men, here's the the bigger picture on that, too. So America was becoming more secular. And as that happened, they were governing their behavior less by a biblical ethic, naturally. And how did that happen? Well, the material conditions that gave rise to secularism. This before the Industrial Revolution, men worked alongside their wives and children all day on the family farm, family industry, the family business, and so the cultural expectation on men focused a lot more on their caretaking role and their like. I said a minute ago. Their responsibility for the common good of the whole. Even a secular historian says the masculine virtue was defined as duty to God and man. I I love these surprising facts that come out of history. A surprising fact is that most literature on child rearing was addressed to fathers. If you go to a bookstore today, they're mostly dressed to mothers, but back then they were dressed to fathers. Fathers were considered the primary parent, and so men were given. A lot more responsibility for the. Sean Finnegan:Right. Nancy Pearcey:The Industrial Revolution takes work out of the home and of course, men had to follow their work out of home, into factories and offices for the first time. They were not working with family members who the people they loved and had a moral bond with. They were working as individuals and competition with other men, and that's when you see the literature start to change. People began to protest that men were becoming individualistic, self interested, egocentric, make it at all cost, greedy and acquisitive to use the language of the day. And that they were making their career, their idol, as they were losing their biblical loyalty, they were making their career, their idol, actually using language from the day they complained that men were starting to make an idol out of financial success the first time that we see negative language applied to the male character. Was in the 19th century after the Industrial Revolution and the secularization was was happening at the same time, in a sense, with the Industrial Revolution, a large public sphere developed. You know, society kind of split into private and public people began to ohh public. What do I mean by that? Factories, businesses, financial institutions, universities. Of course the state. And people began to argue that these large public institutions should be operated by scientific principles by which they meant value free. In other words, don't bring your private values into the public realm, which is what we hear today. And since it was men who were getting that secular education and working in that secular field, they were becoming more secular in their outlook before women did. And so naturally, are we surprised that the 19th century saw a huge increase in what our kind of traditional male vices like drinking and gambling and fighting and crime and prostitution? And that's why there was, in response to that, a huge flowering of reform movements. The reform movements are where you see the negative language really develops as they begin to attack men. For all of these vices, I'll give you a quote. So one of my favorite historians puts it this. All of these reform movements were implicit condemnations of males. There was little doubt as to the sex of the Tavern keeper, the slave master, the drunkard, and the seducer. So the language of the 19th century was almost as hostile as anything that we hear today. From radical feminists. Sean Finnegan:It's interesting, you know, if there's smoke, there's usually fire, right? So and you, you do get into that a little bit at the end of the book, some of the misbehavior of men is driving the the modern complaints about toxic masculinity. I think a lot. Pundits advocates today for men are not really delving into the misbehavior of men in our own time. But I think getting this historical perspective can really help us to see, OK, well, what did you want the. Women to do. You want them to just get beaten and treated like punching bags in the home. Of course they they rose up and they advocated and there was rhetoric and. You know, women are powerful, just like men are powerful. Women are powerful, so it makes sense that that would happen. You talk so much and and and this. This is probably the biggest thing that blew my mind in the a lot of the historical work you did, you talked so much about the industrial revolution and you've already touched on it here, but this this next myth really ties into that. Number six men have traditionally worked outside of the home and have been the breadwinners. I think so many of Us are under that impression, especially as conservatives as Christians, Bible believing man, we're like ohh yeah, it's my job to, to, to work outside the home and be the breadwinner. And if I just do that, then I'm satisfied what God requires of me. Nancy Pearcey:The the fact that the literature on parenting was addressed to fathers speaks to the fact that fathers were in the home. See what happened is with the family industry, the family business, the the home was the economic center of society. They didn't have this distinction. A father could be working at home. And raising his kids, you know, and so could a mother, by the way, a lot of manufacturer with household manufacturer think of Proverbs 31, right? The the woman who's running several businesses. She wasn't going to an office to do that. She was working out of her home. And that was the case. That was case right up until the industrial revolution. Both men and women. Could be, could be involved in economically productive work while raising their kids and and in fact, historians say that fathers were just as involved with their children as mothers were. So that kind of blows your mind too. Wait, just as involved as as. Because we're, I mean, just it's just hard for us to use our historical imagination, you know, to think what that was like. So what we have to remember is prior to the industrial revolution, we're talking about all of human history. We're talking about millennia. So it's only very recently in human history, namely the 19th century, that fathers began to work out of the home. And by the way, another thing that I this helps explain is why our fathers ridiculed and mocked so much in the media today. That was another one. That I thought. Well, you know, we all know this is true. Homer Simpson, you know, from advertisements to animations and to movies. Fathers A you know the doofus dad, the the bumbling idiot, my, my, my own son loved the Bernstein bears. So you know the dad was always the bumbling idiot. Anyway, where did that come from? Well, when fathers were taken out of the home at the Industrial Revolution, they did lose touch with their children compared to when they worked side by side. All day they didn't know their children as well. They didn't know what was happening, their family dynamics and already in the 19th century, you see people say, you know, fathers are becoming kind of irrelevant, you know, to the family and even incompetent. You know, the idea that he's incompetent if he doesn't know what's going on in his family, he. Doesn't know the solutions. You know, he doesn't know how to how to solve the family problems, so he's considered incompetent and you see it in the literature of the day. So again, the deep roots to this. And of course, it does also suggest. What the solution is the solution is can we reconnect fathers to their children even after the industrial age? Are there ways to tweak the workplace? I have a whole chapter on that and and the pandemic had a very small silver lining in that a lot of fathers discovered they do like being at home more. One study found that 65% of fathers don't want to go back to the office full time. You know they prefer some kind of hybrids setup and and this one's not in the book because it just came out recently. But the New York Times had an article and the title was something like during the pandemic. Many fathers got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that. So I think that's encouraging that when fathers had a chance to be close to their kids, a lot of them said this is great. Look what I've been missing out on. I mean, I think Christians should really think creatively about ways to flex the workplace. I've had interviews with a lot of fathers who said I'm willing to pay the daddy penalty. You. Know they know they. May not move. Forward quite as quickly in their career if they take more time off to have time with their kids. But most of them said it was well worth paying the daddy penalty. Sean Finnegan:Yeah. I mean at the end. Of the day, let's say you choose to work. You know an extra 10 to 20 hours a week so that you're always the one who gets in the report or finishes the project. And you, you. Find some upward mobility and you know. You what do you? Do you just move your house to a different neighborhood? You move to a different neighborhood by a fancy your house. Now you've got, you know, some more. Expensive cars. Maybe you have a more expensive boat. Maybe you're going to a farther away place for vacation, but like. It's not. It's not worth the sacrifice to not know your children and to not be able to have a healthy marriage that lasts. You know, we tell women. Oh, well, don't. Sacrifice your family for the sake of your career. Because we see so much pressure to do that now. In whatever wave of the feminist movement we're in right now, and so much celebration for women in the workplace, any kind of achievement celebrated and yet the same is true for men. You know, don't sacrifice your family for your career because at the end of the day, you're going to be sitting on your. You got with people you don't even know, people that don't even care about, you know, like, even if you did succeed to that, to that degree. So let's switch sides. We were just talking about how the men are the breadwinner is a new term that was unused before the industrial revolution. Just a totally foreign idea. But what about on the women's side? Traditionally, women focused on keeping the home and raising the children rather than contributing economically, right? Nancy Pearcey:They didn't have to make that decision. There wasn't an either or choice until the Industrial Revolution took work out of the. Home. Remember, it took women's work out of the home too, not just men's work. So women back then, a lot of household manufacturer was presided over by women. So you Can you imagine when you had to cook everything. From scratch, turn your butter, bake your bread, and even grind your flour. And when you had to make all your clothing from scratch, you had to card the wool or the cotton, and you had to weave it. You had to design it and. Cut it out, I. Mean canning and preserving food, making buttons, making candles women's work was extremely rich and and varied. You know, women had a lot of different skills, they had to master. So in many ways, that was more intellectually challenging too. And so it was a true loss, a genuine loss when all of that was taken out of the home. You know, life got easier. On the other hand, it got a lot more boring. You know, when all that's left now is early child care and cleaning. I mean, you know, that's why you have advertisements that glorify, you know, getting your sink cleaner. So I think that that's an important thing to recognize because it it was one of the causes of the feminist movement. Like many secular movements, it identified a true problem. It just gave the wrong. Solution and most people don't want women to follow men out of the home if it means leaving kids in substitute care. They really want parents raising their own. Kids, what women are doing today, though in my studies, I found that the vast majority of women who are home with their kids are doing some kind of home based business or home. Nice work, because it's almost impossible in our economy not to have two incomes. But women want to be home, and so they white collar work is the easiest. Of course, in a knowledge economy. So there's all kinds of IT professionals and writers and editors and marketers. And I I list several of them in the book Blue Collar and pink color, where it can be done from home to some extent as well. I I give the story of when I went to. I have my. Their style and the the woman had a beauty chair in a basement, one chair. And so while she's working with her customer or her client, she's got a glass door that looks out onto the backyard in a fence fenced in backyard. So she's kind of we're keeping an eye on. Her kids. And blue collar workers, this is some of the. Pushback I get is what you know. What about men? Isn't this kind of an elitist thing that, you know, men? Can come home well. Aspects of almost every job can be done at home. A friend of ours owns a car repair shop. For the most part, he's not going to bring his cars home, although sometimes he does work on friends cars. That is in his driveway. But he can bring his bookkeeping home right. He can bring his bookkeeping home. And in the evening, he's sitting there working while his kids are sitting beside him at the kitchen table and doing their homework. He's talking to them. He's answering their questions. And so there's aspects of almost every job that can be done at home while your children are young. I'm not saying it's the ideal for everybody at every stage of life. I'm just worried about the kids while your children are young. That that's what I recommend. People trying to find at least some aspect that could be done from home, you know, at least part time. Sean Finnegan:You know, it certainly is the case that with the the way our economy is and inflation and everything else that. Being a single income household is closed to most people, even if you would. Want to be a. Stay at home. Mom, you have to make some serious sacrifice. This is a lot depends on what's available too, whether or not you can. You can do that and where you live and and so. Forth, but let's talk. About solutions my myth #8 here blocking or limiting men's testosterone will solve the problems of our society with badly behaved men. Nancy Pearcey:We have to start with how to God create men. And by the way, this is one of the questions I always got and therefore I had to put it at the front of the book. People would say, well, what do you think are the differences between men and women then? Well, let's start with basic biology. Men are larger, faster, stronger, 75%, greater upper body muscle mass, 90% greater upper body strength. Ohh, and I just read this one the other day. It was something like 300%. It was very high, 300% more punch force. Any woman who's been abused knows that and because of testosterone, men do tend to be more aggressive. And more risk taking and I think we have to start with just saying, well, this is all God made men and therefore it is intrinsically good. This is before the fall. These are the traits that God created men with. And I have to tell you, one of the things I found most encouraging is I have a couple of studies of men around the world. And they find that. Men do know that these unique masculine strengths are not giving them just to get whatever they want right to dominate others, but are giving them to provide and protect. I'll give you one of them. The this was a study done by an anthropologist. It was the first ever cross cultural study done on concepts of masculinity and what he found out is. Of course, there's differences between cultures. But what they? All share is what this anthropologist called the three P's. It is expected that the good man will provide, protect and procreate, meaning become a father, right, have a family. Build into the next generation, be future oriented and this was all across the world. These were not countries with the Western or Christian background and I thought it was really amazing to see that this just seems to be an inherent innate knowledge that men have universally. I would say they're made in God's image. And therefore they inherently know that their unique masculine strengths were not given them to just get whatever they want, but to provide, protect and build into the future the next generation. This gives us a better approach when we're dealing with men as we can, we can try to tap into that innate inherent knowledge, men. Don't respond well to being called toxic. Nobody would. But what we can do is to tap into their inherent and acknowledge of what it does mean to be a good man. What it does mean to use their unique strengths and abilities for good. And that way we support masculinity as God created it. Including the testosterone, we can then be. Obviously, and my book is full of criticism of the secular definition of masculinity, you have no problem with being a, you know, good critical thinker in analyzing secular thought. But we should start with really supporting, affirming and respecting men for the way God created them. Sean Finnegan:Yeah, that's so helpful. Because I think so many of us are feeling beaten down. I've got four sons. My oldest is 17, and you know, just seeing how Society is telling them over and over be more feminine? Change yourself, and of course you know who celebrated guys who dress like women. Those are those are like the most popular kids in the school. Now it's it's everything is kind of flipped on the the trans, LGBT and Q and so forth in the in the. Last few years. And you know the message they're receiving is you. Know if you. Could just be more like Sally then you know you'd be really great. We want to avoid toxic masculinity, but we don't want to avoid masculinity. There's a difference there. Nancy Pearcey:Yeah. Yeah. Let me give you another study again. I love these studies done by non Christians. But this was the study again. I put this at the front of the book. As well because answering remember I said, people said who? People would say, whose side is she on? Well, you don't have to take a side because there are different scripts for masculinity. And this study brought it out very well. This is done by a sociologist and again it's global. So this is. Around the world is universal. He gets invited to speak around the world, so he came up with this clever experiment where he asked young men two questions. The first question was what does it mean to be a good man? If you're at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man, what does? Young men all around the world had no trouble answering that they would immediately say things like honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice do the right thing, look out for the little guy, be a provider, and be a productive. Be responsible and the sociologist would say, would you like that? And they say, I don't know, it's. Just in the. Air we breathe. If they were in a western country. They would often say it's part of our judeo-christian heritage. And then he would follow up with the second question. And he'd say, well, what does it mean if? I say to you, man up be a real. And the young man would say ohh no, that's completely different. That means be tough. Be strong, never show weakness, win at all costs. Suck it up. Play through pain, be competitive, get rich, *** ****. I'm using their language. And so the sociologist concludes that there is an inherent universal knowledge of what it means to be the good man. You know another way we could talk about this from a Christian perspective is general revelation, right? General Revelation is what we know. On the basis of creation, apart from Scripture, there are truths that we can know through general revelation. It's also Romans too, right? Everyone has a conscience. What these non Christians anthropologists are finding is that it is a universal awareness that men aspire to be the good man, but they are also feeling this. Cultural pressure to be the quote UN quote real man. And as you saw, those were somewhat more toxic traits. Especially if they are disconnected, decoupled from a moral vision, they can slide into the Andrew Tate phenomenon that we see today, where masculinity is, you know, fast money, fast cars, fast women, it can slide into that. I mean, that is apparently for many young men today that's becoming the real man I just got. A e-mail from a former graduate student of mine who's teaching now at the high school level, and she said all my boys, all my male students, are fans of Andrew Tate. They're even using both of his in the yearbook. And then she said I'm teaching at a classical Christian School. So even a Christian young men are looking to places like Andrew Tate, who are exemplifying a very secular view of masculinity. I'm finding out not everyone knows this, but you know he does. Run. He's made a lot of his money by running an only fans company. Sean Finnegan:Yeah. Andrew Tate is is a pretty complicated fella and he's, I, I have hopes that he will reform his ways, seen glimmers of hope there that, you know, he can embrace more the PPP that you mentioned before than the FFF fast cars fast. Come in and fast success, but instead protect, provide and. What was the? Third one. Procreate. Yeah. Within marriage, I would say. But yeah, there's no question about it. Tate has struck a nerve, and he's preaching a gospel of masculine excellence and. At the same time, there's a lot of that real man script mixed in with his message and really what we need is insight from the designer of masculinity himself, you know, and and we could find that in Scripture and we could find that. Also in our own souls, you know. Seeing these different. Sides of us, you know the the image of God, the imago day stamped upon us, but then also our fallenness, so really really deep points and I encourage you listeners that if you're curious about this at all, check out this book. Get yourself a copy the toxic War against masculinity. Well, this has been a great conversation. How can people find out more about? Hey, Nancy. Nancy Pearcey:Yes, I'm glad you asked because my publisher graciously just designed a new website for me, so it's nancypearcy.com, and Piercy is P/E, ARCEY, nancypearcy.com. And so you can come over there. You can browse my other books you've mentioned a few of them already today. You can browse them and find out what he. Was talking about. And you can also leave the message. I don't have time to answer them all, but I do read them all. So come on by nancypiercy.com. Come on by and say hello. Sean Finnegan:Very good. Well, thanks so much for joining me on Restitutio today. Nancy Pearcey:Thanks for having me. Sean Finnegan:Well, that brings this interview to a close. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and find Episode 515 the Toxic War on masculinity and leave your feedback there and I can't stress to you enough how important. This book is. Whether you're a man or a woman, but especially I talked to the the men out there. I really found this book incredibly informative and very challenging. The whole last section, which I didn't really get into. She goes into issues within Christian marriage on how to handle yourself as a man, as a husband, and the whole thorny topic of domestic abuse and how to handle that. As a church leader and some really important thoughts there that we didn't get into in the interview, so take a look at that. For the record, I'm not receiving any. Compensation for promoting this book, I really just believe in it, and I think Piercy is really good. So take a look at that. Well, that's going to be it for today. If you'd like to leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, we certainly appreciate that. If you'd like to support. Studio you can find us.online@restitutio.org select the word restitution with no n.org and thanks to all who are supporting us, we'll catch you next week and remember, the truth has nothing to fear.

This week, Justin and Scott talk about the importance of seeing God as revealed in Scripture, and how true biblical community can help us pursue Christ.  The Words of Grace Podcast seeks to clarify, amplify, and apply the Sunday morning sermon at Grace Community Church. From time to time we will address other topics. We hope these podcasts help impress the Word of God into your everyday life. Episodes are hosted by Justin Tucker and Scott Patty.

Building an Engaged and Purpose-Driven Design Firm: The Rebranding Journey - Jerrod Hogan"We recognized that if we were going to take it to the next level, we're going to have to really develop a brand. Your people deserve a brand that's as great as them." - Jerrod Hogan, OWN, Inc.Jerrod Hogan's path to leadership is anything but conventional. He grew up learning the virtues of empathy and service from a devoted Baptist pastor. A pivotal moment came when his family moved to Missouri due to his mother's cancer diagnosis. Following her passing, Jerrod decided to make Missouri his permanent home, raising his young daughter there.Jerrod joined Anderson Engineering, a firm where he spent two decades evolving both personally and professionally. But a life-altering event came in the form of the devastating Joplin tornado in 2011. The tragedy revealed to him the incredible power of community and the human capacity for mutual support in times of crisis.This event served as a catalyst for Jerrod, making him recognize the untapped potential of collective responsibility and active participation. It opened his eyes to the concept of extreme employee ownership. Inspired, he took bold steps to transform the very company he had been part of for so long.The shift was dramatic. Jerrod led Anderson Engineering through a rebranding and restructuring process that embraced an employee ownership model. This courageous move had manifold benefits. It allowed team members to share in the company's success, elevated client satisfaction, and instilled a sense of belonging among employees.In essence, this change didn't just spur phenomenal growth for the company; it also created a work environment where everyone felt like a stakeholder. Jerrod's journey illustrates the profound impact of community, unity, and shared ownership in shaping both individual lives and business successes.In this episode, you will be able to:Gain insight into how employee ownership is revolutionizing the design industry.Understand how harnessing extreme ownership can propel your company to greater heights.Learn the transformative effect of employee ownership on individual self-esteem and secured finances.Explore the myriad trials and triumphs young professionals face in their career journeys.Decode the role of rebranding and the core values in steering its direction.All of this and much more are on this episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast.Resources:Connect with Jerrod Hogan on LinkedInVisit OWN Engineering websiteVisit OWN Engineering on FacebookVisit OWN Engineering on Twitter (X)Visit OWN Engineering on InstagramVisit OWN Engineering on LinkedInGet your FREE Subscription to the Zweig Letter Newsletter.Other episodes you'll enjoy:Transforming the AEC Industry: A Conversation with Robert Yuen of Monograph

In this interview with Dr. James Renihan we continue our series of discussions on The Doctrine Of The Church as addressed in Chapter 26 (Of The Church) of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. Specifically, we are again looking at paragraph 8 of Chatper 26.

MIDWEEK SERMONWatch/Listen here using the Embedded Subsplash Playerdiv.sap-embed-player{position:relative;width:100%;height:0;padding-top:56.25%;}div.sap-embed-player>iframe{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;}Central Baptist Church of Ponca City, OKDATE: Wednesday, September 27, 2023SERMON BY: Dr. John WaterlooSERMON TITLE: Don't Abandon God for Favor SERMON THEME: Why Do We Fear Men?SERMON SERIES: ProverbsSERMON TEXT: Prov. 29:25Prov. 29:25  The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.— — —Watch/Listen here using our Subsplash WebShare Playerhttps://cbcponca.subspla.sh/2d6j586Listen on Archive.orghttps://archive.org/download/092723-wed-facebook-stream/092723WED-FacebookStream.mp3  

The Beatific Vision seems antiquated today. Much less does it appear to belong in Baptist theology. Join me as I briefly explore what the beatific vision is, and also where we can find it among the Baptists.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the