Podcast appearances and mentions of David Ritz

“Let's think of ourselves as emotional explorers. And we're always like that. You know, Raiders of the Lost Ark exploration because we want to have that excitement that I think education and understanding new things gives us.” – Ivana Chubbuck Today's featured international best-selling author is a mom, script consultant, premier acting teacher, and legendary coach, Ivana Chubbuck. Ivana and I had a fun on a bun chat about her book, “The Power of the Actor (Revised and Updated): The Chubbuck Technique: The 12-Step Acting Method for Creating Dynamic Characters”, art's empowering role in connecting people across cultures, the importance of embracing one's pain to inspire and uplift others, and more!!!Key Things You'll Learn:What inspired Ivana to revise and update her book for its 20th anniversaryHow behavioral science and cultural anthropology relate to actingThe role humor plays in addressing pain and engaging audiencesOne of her methods for helping actors connect with their characters emotionallyWhat it was like to work with Beyoncé to prepare her for her role in "Cadillac Records"Why it's important to empower others to genuinely believe in themselves and their own voiceIvana's Site: https://www.ivanachubbuck.com/Ivana's Book: https://a.co/d/aT3VV1LThe opening track is titled, “North Wind and the Sun” by Trevin P. To listen to and download the full track, click the following link. https://compilationsforhumanity.bandcamp.com/track/north-wind-and-the-sunPlease support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmonThe Going North Advancement Compass: https://a.co/d/bA9awotYou May Also Like…Ep. 877 – Full of Heart with J.R. Martinez (@iamjrmartinez): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-877-full-of-heart-with-jr-martinez-iamjrmartinez/Ep. 810 – You Are Worthy with Katherine Norland (@katnorland): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-810-you-are-worthy-with-katherine-norland-katnorland/Ep. 433 – Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes with Ira Rosen: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-433-ticking-clock-behind-the-scenes-at-60-minutes-with-ira-rosen/Ep. 944 – From Comedy Central to Crafting Thrillers in "What She's Hiding" with Art Bell (@ArtBellwriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-944-from-comedy-central-to-crafting-thrillers-in-what-shes-hiding-with-art-bell-artbellwr/173 - The God Groove with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/#Holiday Bonus Ep. – Emerge Triumphant with Eliana Gilad (@VoicesofEden): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/holiday-bonus-ep-emerge-triumphant-with-eliana-gilad-voicesofeden/Ep. 811 – American Wolf with Dr. Audrey Birnbaum (@audee24): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-811-american-wolf-with-dr-audrey-birnbaum-audee24/Ep. 332 – Her Perfect Life with Hank Phillippi Ryan (@HankPRyan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-332-her-perfect-life-with-hank-phillippi-ryan-hankpryan/275 – How Thoughts Become Things with Dr. Marina Bruni (@DrMarinaBruni): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/275-how-thoughts-become-things-with-dr-marina-bruni-drmarinabruni/Ep. 461 – Live for Joy with Anne Scottlin (@AnneScottlin): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-461-live-for-joy-with-anne-scottlin-annescottlin/Ep. 360 – Beyond Lovelyville with Dr. Lin Morel (@drlinmorel): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-360-beyond-lovelyville-with-dr-lin-morel-drlinmorel/Ep. 835 – Turn Words Into Wealth with Aurora Winter, MBA (@AuroraWinterMBA): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-835-turn-words-into-wealth-with-aurora-winter-mba-aurorawintermba/Ep. 320 – See Your Life As a Movie with Bob Brill (@BobBrillLA): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-320-see-your-life-as-a-movie-with-bob-brill-bobbrillla/

“What better accomplishment could you have under your belt than being able to hand somebody a book with your name on it, saying, this is me.” – Danielle Hutchinson Today's featured bestselling bookcaster is an English teacher, world traveler, ghostwriter, and Chief Creative Officer at Authors On Mission, Danielle Hutchinson. Danielle and I had a fun on a bun chat about her work, what it means to be an angel writer instead of a ghostwriter, the importance of writing for legacy and credibility, and tons more!!Key Things You'll Learn:What it means to be an “angel writer”Her time management strategies for juggling teaching and her writing careerThe growing trend of AI-generated manuscripts and some cautionary advice for those using AI in their writingHow the most difficult experiences can pave the way for new opportunities and personal developmentDanielle's Site: https://authorsonmission.com/Danielle's Podcast, “Authors On Mission”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/authors-on-mission/id1585639049The opening track is titled, “North Wind and the Sun” by Trevin P. To listen to and download the full track, click the following link. https://compilationsforhumanity.bandcamp.com/track/north-wind-and-the-sunPlease support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmonThe Going North Advancement Compass: https://a.co/d/bA9awotYou May Also Like…Ep. 473 – How to Write a Bestseller with Vikrant Shaurya (@VikrantShaurya): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-473-how-to-write-a-bestseller-with-vikrant-shaurya-vikrantshaurya/Ep. 896 – From Mind to Manuscript with Maggie Mills (@takemaggiesword): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-896-from-mind-to-manuscript-with-maggie-mills-takemaggiesword/Ep. 873 – From Broken Places to Booming Business with Rachel Thompson (@RachelintheOC): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-873-from-broken-places-to-booming-business-with-rachel-thompson-rachelintheoc/155 - Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business with Laura Pennington Briggs (@sixfigurewriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/155-start-your-own-freelance-writing-business-with-laura-pennington-briggs-sixfigurewriter/83 - From Teacher to 6-Figure Freelance Writer (@nathansegal): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/83-from-teacher-to-6-figure-freelance-writer-nathansegal/Ep. 311 – Works of Urban Mythopoeia with Cat Rambo (@Catrambo): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-311-works-of-urban-mythopoeia-with-cat-rambo-catrambo/Ep. 946 – How Stories Drive Impact and Inspire Action with Autumn Karen (@autumncarrying): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-946-how-stories-drive-impact-and-inspire-action-with-autumn-karen-autumncarrying/Ep. 668 – The Art & Business of Bringing Other People's Stories to Life with Amelia Forczak: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-668-the-art-business-of-bringing-other-peoples-stories-to-life-with-amelia-forczak/Ep. 712 – When Your Heart Says to Leave a Legacy with Bridget Cook-Burch (@inspiritwriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-712-when-your-heart-says-to-leave-a-legacy-with-bridget-cook-burch-inspiritwriter/Ep. 614 – Serve No Master with Jonathan Green (@ServeNoJonathan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-614-serve-no-master-with-jonathan-green-servenojonathan/Ep. 694 – Every Body Holds a Story with Marsha Vanwynsberghe (@Marsha_vanw): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-694-every-body-holds-a-story-with-marsha-vanwynsberghe-marsha_vanw/173 - The God Groove with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/Ep. 472 – “From Academia to Entrepreneurship” with Dr. Emily Crookston (@EMCrookston): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-472-from-academia-to-entrepreneurship-with-dr-emily-crookston-emcrookston/

"It's one of the things that people in both films and books woefully underestimate—the amount of time and effort. We can write a screenplay that's fantastic, we can write a book that's amazing, but that's just a third of it. Getting it out there to the world is a whole different thing." – Autumn KarenToday's featured author is a mom, ghostwriter, poet, professor, filmmaker, award-winning journalist, "Writer of Vibes", and the founder of Medusa's Gaze Films, Autumn Karen. Autumn and I had a fun on a bun chat about her books, her journey from a challenging upbringing to becoming a successful ghostwriter and filmmaker, and more!!!Key Things You'll Learn:What got Autumn into ghostwritingHow Autumn balances inhabiting other voices while maintaining her creative integrityHow a person's life experiences shape their storytellingHow she juggles both fiction and nonfiction writingWhy it's crucial for authors to promote their projects activelyWhy she believes that human creativity will always have the upper hand when it comes to AIAutumn's Site: https://www.autumnkaren.com/Autumn's Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0DVKLCHRV/allbooksThe opening track is titled, "Set Sail" by Sparks Dynamite. To listen to and download the full track, click the following link. https://planetastroproductions.bandcamp.com/track/set-sail-intro Please support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmonThe Going North Advancement Compass: https://a.co/d/bA9awotYou May Also Like…279 – “Peak Performance Ghostwriting” with Kathrin Hutson (@ExquisitelyDark): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/279-peak-performance-ghostwriting-with-kathrin-hutson-exquisitelydark/173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/Ep. 821 – How to Spark Your Curiosity & Live Bravely with Heather Vickery: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-821-how-to-spark-your-curiosity-live-bravely-with-heather-vickery/Ep. 896 – From Mind to Manuscript with Maggie Mills (@takemaggiesword): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-896-from-mind-to-manuscript-with-maggie-mills-takemaggiesword/Ep. 807 – Inside The Mind of The Author Activist with Dawn Bates (@msdawnbates33): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-807-inside-the-mind-of-the-author-activist-with-dawn-bates-msdawnbates33/Ep. 472 – “From Academia to Entrepreneurship” with Dr. Emily Crookston (@EMCrookston): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-472-from-academia-to-entrepreneurship-with-dr-emily-crookston-emcrookston/Ep. 442 – “Jungle Jean” with Geralyn Gendreau (@geralyngendreau): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-442-jungle-jean-with-geralyn-gendreau-geralyngendreau/Ep. 459 – “Secret Life of a Hollywood Sex & Love Addict” with Brianne Davis (@TheBrianneDavis): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-459-secret-life-of-a-hollywood-sex-love-addict-with-brianne-davis-thebriannedavis/18 - "Inspirational Stuff" with Amy Brooks (@AmyReneeBrooks): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/18-inspirational-stuff-with-amy-brooks-amyreneebrooks/Ep. 668 – “The Art & Business of Bringing Other People's Stories to Life” with Amelia Forczak: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-668-the-art-business-of-bringing-other-peoples-stories-to-life-with-amelia-forczak/Ep. 712 – When Your Heart Says to Leave a Legacy with Bridget Cook-Burch (@inspiritwriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-712-when-your-heart-says-to-leave-a-legacy-with-bridget-cook-burch-inspiritwriter/Ep. 920 – The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done with Sam Bennett (@realsambennett): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-920-the-surprisingly-simple-art-of-getting-it-done-with-sam-bennett-realsambennett/

“She knew who she was at a young age. She was able to pick herself up, dust herself off, and literally keep going no matter what cards were dealt to her.” - Ludie Montgomery, about her big sister Tammi TerrellShe was alive for just 24 years, but Tammi's voice is immortal in pop music history. Her songs with Marvin Gaye have been sampled by Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, LL Cool J, Method Man and Mary J. Blige, and The Notorious B.I.G. When her fans are the greats, you know she was great herself! Tammi's irrepressible spirit inspires us all to live life boldly, love openly, and shine brightly. There is no mountain high enough and no river wide enough to hold you back. “Tammi Terrell: Sweetheart of Motown” is available wherever you stream your podcasts

FROM DJ SPINNA PODCASTS: Marvin Pentz Gaye Jr. (April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984) The whole world knows that I'm a huge Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Prince buff. But the other beast of a soul artist that I love to death is Marvin Gaye, of course! His music deeply expresses the soul of a man. The most bewildering thing about Marvin that I've come to understand more in my adult years is how he was able express his life experiences so artistically despite all his traumatic upheaval. I mean, his pops was a cross dressing preacher that practically despised his own son. I'll never forget the day I found out his dad took him out, the day before his birthday! I couldn't understand it and I was sad as hell. But life is wild that way. All that pain he endured led to greatness. Check these two youtube clips. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUfsI9jJr_I&feature=related (Tom Joyner interview) The most honest interview I think I've ever seen an artist do while they're STILL dealing with their issues, not after. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ9FViYsDQA His dad was illmatic! And a suggested read... Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz (who actually co wrote Sexual Healing) This book will change your life and have you paying more attention to Marvin's lyrics. I guarantee it! I grew up with his music like so many so I thought it was only right to bless the world with a mix. Included here here in this first episode are some rare releases, B-sides, alternate versions, exclusive re-edits and remixes courtesy of myself and some legendary dj/producer friends. More Marvin heat to come shortly... Enjoy BLOG POST https://soulofsydney.org/2011/04/03/marvin/

Mathieu Bitton, a Grammy Award-winning photographer, sits with Paris Chong to discuss his recent travels and work, including his upcoming book, "Paris Blues." He has been to various locations, including Paris, London, and several African countries, often accompanying Dave Chappelle on his shows and safaris. Bitton's photography captures personal moments and experiences, aiming to evoke emotions and memories. Bitton's "Paris Blues" book is a deeply personal project, featuring photographs and stories from his childhood and career. He shares insights into his creative process, including the challenges of writing the foreword and editing the vast collection of photos. The book also includes contributions from notable figures like Naomi Campbell, who wrote the foreword, and David Ritz, who provided feedback on the writing. Throughout the conversation, Bitton expresses his gratitude for the opportunities he's had to work with talented artists like Dave Chappelle and Lenny Kravitz. He emphasizes the importance of mutual respect and trust in his collaborations. Bitton also discusses his passion for producing vinyl editions of albums, which has led to Grammy nominations and awards. He reflects on his journey as a photographer, highlighting the importance of hard work, dedication, and seizing opportunities. Show Notes: http://www.theparischongshow.com/episodes/mathieu-bitton-paris-blues-to-winning-grammys-and-working-with-the-people-you-want Chapters: (00:00:00) Intro (00:00:45) Tell Us Where You've Been (00:02:46) Paris Blues (00:05:58) Did You Use AI? (00:11:51) The Forward (00:16:59) The Grammys (00:25:40) How To Get A Steady Job (00:27:45) Two Biggest Prince Fans (00:28:41) Paris to Malibu (00:33:01) New Work (00:37:16) Upcoming Shows (00:43:04) Where To See Mathieu Bitton CandyTman (00:47:42) Outro

“You can't avoid the tough stuff, but there's always a lesson in it.” – Maggie MillsToday's featured award-winning author is a speaker, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach, Maggie Mills. Maggie and I had a fun on a bun chat about her ghostwriting process, the emotional aspects of writing, and more!!!Key Things You'll Learn:How Maggie became a ghostwriterWhy storytelling and helping others articulate their narratives is importantSome of the common fears and anxieties that authors face when publishing their workWhy it's okay to embrace opportunities when they arriveMaggie's Site: https://maggiemills.com/Maggie's Ghostwriting Services: https://takemaggieswordforit.com/The opening track is titled "Heatsource" by the magnanimous chill-hop master, Marcus D (@marcusd). Be sure to visit his site and support his craft. https://marcusd.net/Please support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmonThe Going North Advancement Compass: https://a.co/d/bA9awotYou Might Also Like…Ep. 668 – “The Art & Business of Bringing Other People's Stories to Life” with Amelia Forczak: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-668-the-art-business-of-bringing-other-peoples-stories-to-life-with-amelia-forczak/Ep. 781 – Laughter, Learning, and Liberating Yourself Through Memoir Writing with Alison Wearing: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-781-laughter-learning-and-liberating-yourself-through-memoir-writing-with-alison-wearing/Ep. 712 – “When Your Heart Says to Leave a Legacy” with Bridget Cook-Burch (@inspiritwriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-712-when-your-heart-says-to-leave-a-legacy-with-bridget-cook-burch-inspiritwriter/Ep. 614 – “Serve No Master” with Jonathan Green (@ServeNoJonathan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-614-serve-no-master-with-jonathan-green-servenojonathan/Ep. 694 – “Every Body Holds a Story” with Marsha Vanwynsberghe (@Marsha_vanw): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-694-every-body-holds-a-story-with-marsha-vanwynsberghe-marsha_vanw/173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/Ep. 293.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “Foster Care System Survivor to Inspirational Thriver” with Loren Michaels Harris (@LorenListens2U): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-2935-host-2-host-special-foster-care-system-survivor-to-inspirational-thriver-with-loren-michaels-harris-lorenlistens2u/Ep. 421 – “How to Write Your Book In 21 Days” with Wendy Scheuring (@AuthorsWriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-421-how-to-write-your-book-in-21-days-with-wendy-scheuring-authorswriter/Ep. 472 – “From Academia to Entrepreneurship” with Dr. Emily Crookston (@EMCrookston): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-472-from-academia-to-entrepreneurship-with-dr-emily-crookston-emcrookston/Ep. 442 – “Jungle Jean” with Geralyn Gendreau (@geralyngendreau): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-442-jungle-jean-with-geralyn-gendreau-geralyngendreau/18 - "Inspirational Stuff" with Amy Brooks (@AmyReneeBrooks): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/18-inspirational-stuff-with-amy-brooks-amyreneebrooks/#Bonus Ep. – “From Idea to Finished Manuscript” with Chandler Bolt (@self_pub_school): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/bonus-ep-from-idea-to-finished-manuscript-with-chandler-bolt-self_pub_school/216 – “The Write Way” with Amy Collins (@askamycollins): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/216-the-write-way-with-amy-collins-askamycollins/279 – “Peak Performance Ghostwriting” with Kathrin Hutson (@ExquisitelyDark): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/279-peak-performance-ghostwriting-with-kathrin-hutson-exquisitelydark/ 240 – “Living An International Life” with E.J. Moran: https://shorturl.at/337f0

Guest Speaker David Ritz of Red Frogs Canada

ICYMI: Hour Three of ‘Later, with Mo'Kelly' Presents – An in-depth conversation with Writer/Producer Je'Caryous Johnson, Rick James' Daughter & President of the Rick James Estate Ty James, and Grammy-nominated vocalist, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Stokley who stars as Rick James in "Superfreak: The Rick James Story," playing at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre for 4 performances ONLY! June 6-8th (tickets available at BroadwayInHollywood.com)…Based on ‘Glow,' by Rick James and David Ritz and ‘Memoirs of a Super Freak,' by Rick James; “Super Freak: The Rick James Story is taking over the stage, with Stokely transforming into Rick James and delivering a performance that allows audiences to sink into #ColdBlooded beats, get swept by the #SuperFreak rhythm, and sway to the #MotherFunker vibe” - on KFI AM 640…Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app

ICYMI: ‘Later, with Mo'Kelly' Presents – An in-depth conversation with Writer/Producer Je'Caryous Johnson, Rick James' Daughter & President of the Rick James Estate Ty James, and Grammy-nominated vocalist, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Stokley who stars as Rick James in "Superfreak: The Rick James Story," playing at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre for 4 performances ONLY! June 6-8th (tickets available at BroadwayInHollywood.com)…Based on ‘Glow,' by Rick James and David Ritz and ‘Memoirs of a Super Freak,' by Rick James; “Super Freak: The Rick James Story is taking over the stage, with Stokely transforming into Rick James and delivering a performance that allows audiences to sink into #ColdBlooded beats, get swept by the #SuperFreak rhythm, and sway to the #MotherFunker vibe” - on KFI AM 640…Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner. 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 Mixcloud will be up with the next episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. Motown: The Golden Years is another Motown encyclopaedia. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. For information on Marvin Gaye, and his relationship with Norman Whitfield, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. I’ve also used information on Whitfield in  Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, I’ve also referred to interviews with Whitfield and Strong archived at rocksbackpages.com , notably “The Norman Whitfield interview”, John Abbey, Blues & Soul, 1 February 1977 For information about Gladys Knight, I’ve used her autobiography. The best collection of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ music is this 3-CD set, but the best way to hear Motown hits is in the context of other Motown hits. This five-CD box set contains the first five in the Motown Chartbusters series of British compilations. The Pips’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” is on disc 2, while Marvin Gaye’s is on disc 3, which is famously generally considered one of the best single-disc various artists compilations ever. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a brief note — this episode contains some brief mentions of miscarriage and drug abuse. The history of modern music would be immeasurably different had it not been for one car breakdown. Norman Whitfield spent the first fifteen years of his life in New York, never leaving the city, until his grandmother died. She’d lived in LA, and that was where the funeral was held, and so the Whitfield family got into a car and drove right across the whole continent — two thousand five hundred miles — to attend the old lady’s funeral. And then after the funeral, they turned round and started to drive home again. But they only got as far as Detroit when the car, understandably, gave up the ghost.  Luckily, like many Black families, they had family in Detroit, and Norman’s aunt was not only willing to put the family up for a while, but her husband was able to give Norman’s father a job in his drug store while he saved up enough money to pay for the car to be fixed. But as it happened, the family liked Detroit, and they never did get around to driving back home to New York. Young Norman in particular took to the city’s nightlife, and soon as well as going to school he was working an evening job at a petrol station — but that was only to supplement the money he made as a pool hustler. Young Norman Whitfield was never going to be the kind of person who took a day job, and so along with his pool he started hanging out with musicians — in particular with Popcorn and the Mohawks, a band led by Popcorn Wylie. [Excerpt: Popcorn and the Mohawks, “Shimmy Gully”] Popcorn and the Mohawks were a band of serious jazz musicians, many of whom, including Wylie himself, went on to be members of the Funk Brothers, the team of session players that played on Motown’s hits — though Wylie would depart Motown fairly early after a falling out with Berry Gordy. They were some of the best musicians in Detroit at the time, and Whitfield would tag along with the group and play tambourine, and sometimes other hand percussion instruments. He wasn’t a serious musician at that point, just hanging out with a bunch of people who were, who were a year or two older than him. But he was learning — one thing that everyone says about Norman Whitfield in his youth is that he was someone who would stand on the periphery of every situation, not getting involved, but soaking in everything that the people around him were doing, and learning from them. And soon, he was playing percussion on sessions. At first, this wasn’t for Motown, but everything in the Detroit music scene connected back to the Gordy family in one way or another. In this case, the label was Thelma Records, which was formed by Berry Gordy’s ex-mother-in-law and named after Gordy’s first wife, who he had recently divorced. Of all the great Motown songwriters and producers, Whitfield’s life is the least-documented, to the extent that the chronology of his early career is very vague and contradictory, and Thelma was such a small label there even seems to be some dispute about when it existed — different sources give different dates, and while Whitfield always said he worked for Thelma records, he might have actually been employed by another label owned by the same people, Ge Ge, which might have operated earlier — but by most accounts Whitfield quickly progressed from session tambourine player to songwriter. According to an article on Whitfield from 1977, the first record of one of his songs was “Alone” by Tommy Storm on Thelma Records, but that record seems not to exist — however, some people on a soul message board, discussing this a few years ago, found an interview with a member of a group called The Fabulous Peps which also featured Storm, saying that their record on Ge Ge Records, “This Love I Have For You”, is a rewrite of that song by Don Davis, Thelma’s head of A&R, though the credit on the label for that is just to Davis and Ron Abner, another member of the group: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Peps, “This Love I Have For You”] So that might, or might not, be the first Norman Whitfield song ever to be released. The other song often credited as Whitfield’s first released song is “Answer Me” by Richard Street and the Distants — Street was another member of the Fabulous Peps, but we’ve encountered him and the Distants before when talking about the Temptations — the Distants were the group that Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryant had been in before forming the Temptations — and indeed Street would much later rejoin his old bandmates in the Temptations, when Whitfield was producing for them. Unlike the Fabulous Peps track, this one was clearly credited to N. Whitfield, so whatever happened with the Storm track, this is almost certainly Whitfield’s first official credit as a songwriter: [Excerpt: Richard Street and the Distants, “Answer Me”] He was soon writing songs for a lot of small labels — most of which appear to have been recorded by the Thelma team and then licensed out — like “I’ve Gotten Over You” by the Sonnettes: [Excerpt: The Sonnettes, “I’ve Gotten Over You”] That was on KO Records, distributed by Scepter, and was a minor local hit — enough to finally bring Whitfield to the attention of Berry Gordy. According to many sources, Whitfield had been hanging around Hitsville for months trying to get a job with the label, but as he told the story in 1977 “Berry Gordy had sent Mickey Stevenson over to see me about signing with the company as an exclusive in-house writer and producer. The first act I was assigned to was Marvin Gaye and he had just started to become popular.” That’s not quite how the story went. According to everyone else, he was constantly hanging around Hitsville, getting himself into sessions and just watching them, and pestering people to let him get involved. Rather than being employed as a writer and producer, he was actually given a job in Motown’s quality control department for fifteen dollars a week, listening to potential records and seeing which ones he thought were hits, and rating them before they went to the regular department meetings for feedback from the truly important people. But he was also allowed to write songs. His first songwriting credit on a Motown record wasn’t Marvin Gaye, as Whitfield would later tell the story, but was in fact for the far less prestigious Mickey Woods — possibly the single least-known artist of Motown’s early years. Woods was a white teenager, the first white male solo artist signed to Motown, who released two novelty teen-pop singles. Whitfield’s first Motown song was the B-side to Woods’ second single, a knock-off of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” called “They Call Me Cupid”, co-written with Berry Gordy and Brian Holland: [Excerpt: Mickey Woods, “They Call Me Cupid”] Unsurprisingly that didn’t set the world on fire, and Whitfield didn’t get another Motown label credit for thirteen months (though some of his songs for Thelma may have come out in this period). When he did, it was as co-writer with Mickey Stevenson — and, for the first time, sole producer — of the first single for a new singer, Kim Weston: [Excerpt: Kim Weston, “It Should Have Been Me”] As it turned out, that wasn’t a hit, but the flip-side, “Love Me All The Way”, co-written by Stevenson (who was also Weston’s husband) and Barney Ales, did become a minor hit, making the R&B top thirty. After that, Whitfield was on his way. It was only a month later that he wrote his first song for the Temptations, a B-side, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”] That was co-written with Smokey Robinson, and as we heard in the episode on “My Girl”, both Robinson and Whitfield vied with each other for the job of Temptations writer and producer. As we also heard in that episode, Robinson got the majority of the group’s singles for the next couple of years, but Whitfield would eventually take over from him. Whitfield’s work with the Temptations is probably his most important work as a writer and producer, and the Temptations story is intertwined deeply with this one, but for the most part I’m going to save discussion of Whitfield’s work with the group until we get to 1972, so bear with me if I seem to skim over that — and if I repeat myself in a couple of years when we get there. Whitfield’s first major success, though, was also the first top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] “Pride and Joy” had actually been written and recorded before the Kim Weston and Temptations tracks, and was intended as album filler — it was written during a session by Whitfield, Gaye, and Mickey Stevenson who was also the producer of the track, and recorded in the same session as it was written, with Martha and the Vandellas on backing vocals. The intended hit from the session, “Hitch-Hike”, we covered in the previous episode on Gaye, but that was successful enough that an album, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow, was released, with “Pride and Joy” on it. A few months later Gaye recut his lead vocal, over the same backing track, and the record was released as a single, reaching number ten on the pop charts and number two R&B: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] Whitfield had other successes as well, often as B-sides. “The Girl’s Alright With Me”, the B-side to Smokey Robinson’s hit for the Temptations “I’ll Be In Trouble”, went to number forty on the R&B chart in its own right: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Girl’s Alright With Me”] That was co-written with Eddie Holland, and Holland and Whitfield had a minor songwriting partnership at this time, with Holland writing lyrics and Whitfield the music. Eddie Holland even released a Holland and Whitfield collaboration himself during his brief attempt at a singing career — “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To” was a song they wrote for the Temptations, who recorded it but then left it on the shelf for four years, so Holland put out his own version, again as a B-side: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To”] Whitfield was very much a B-side kind of songwriter and producer at this point — but this could be to his advantage. In January 1963, around the same time as all these other tracks, he cut a filler track with the “no-hit Supremes”, “He Means the World to Me”, which was left on the shelf until they needed a B-side eighteen months later and pulled it out and released it: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “He Means the World to Me”] But the track that that was a B-side to was “Where Did Our Love Go?”, and at the time you could make a lot of money from writing the B-side to a hit that big. Indeed, at first, Whitfield made more money from “Where Did Our Love Go?” than Holland, Dozier, or Holland, because he got a hundred percent of the songwriters’ share for his side of the record, while they had to split their share three ways. Slowly Whitfield moved from being a B-side writer to being an A-side writer. With Eddie Holland he was given a chance at a Temptations A-side for the first time, with “Girl, (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”] He also wrote for Jimmy Ruffin, but in 1964 it was with girl groups that Whitfield was doing his best work. With Mickey Stevenson he wrote “Needle in a Haystack” for the Velvettes: [Excerpt: The Velvettes, “Needle in a Haystack”] He wrote their classic followup “He Was Really Sayin' Somethin’” with Stevenson and Eddie Holland, and with Holland he also wrote “Too Many Fish in the Sea” for the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Too Many Fish In The Sea”] By late 1964, Whitfield wasn’t quite in the first rank of Motown songwriter-producers with Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson, but he was in the upper part of the second tier with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. And by early 1966, as we saw in the episode on “My Girl”, he had achieved what he’d wanted for four years, and become the Temptations’ primary writer and producer. As I said, we’re going to look at Whitfield’s time working with the Temptations later, but in 1966 and 67 they were the act he was most associated with, and in particular, he collaborated with Eddie Holland on three top ten hits for the group in 1966. But as we discussed in the episode on “I Can’t Help Myself”, Holland’s collaborations with Whitfield eventually caused problems for Holland with his other collaborators, when he won the BMI award for writing the most hit songs, depriving his brother and Lamont Dozier of their share of the award because his outside collaborations put him ahead of them. While Whitfield *could* write songs by himself, and had in the past, he was at his best as a collaborator — as well as his writing partnership with Eddie Holland he’d written with Mickey Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Janie Bradford. And so when Holland told him he was no longer able to work together, Whitfield started looking for someone else who could write lyrics for him, and he soon found someone: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Barrett Strong had, of course, been the very first Motown act to have a major national hit, with “Money”, but as we discussed in the episode on that song he had been unable to have a follow-up hit, and had actually gone back to working on an assembly line for a while. But when you’ve had a hit as big as “Money”, working on an assembly line loses what little lustre it has, and Strong soon took himself off to New York and started hanging around the Brill Building, where he hooked up with Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the writers of such hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “Viva Las Vegas”, “Sweets for My Sweet”, and “A Teenager in Love”.  Pomus and Shuman, according to Strong, signed him to a management contract, and they got him signed to Atlantic’s subsidiary Atco, where he recorded one single, “Seven Sins”, written and produced by the team: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Seven Sins”] That was a flop, and Strong was dropped by the label. He bounced around a few cities before ending up in Chicago, where he signed to VeeJay Records and put out one more single as a performer, “Make Up Your Mind”, which also went nowhere: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Make Up Your Mind”] Strong had co-written that, and as his performing career was now definitively over, he decided to move into songwriting as his main job. He co-wrote “Stay in My Corner” for the Dells, which was a top thirty R&B hit for them on VeeJay in 1965 and in a remade version in 1968 became a number one R&B hit and top ten pop hit for them: [Excerpt: The Dells, “Stay in My Corner”] And on his own he wrote another top thirty R&B hit, “This Heart of Mine”, for the Artistics: [Excerpt: The Artistics, “This Heart of Mine”] He wrote several other songs that had some minor success in 1965 and 66, before moving back to Detroit and hooking up again with his old label, this time coming to them as a songwriter with a track record rather than a one-hit wonder singer. As Strong put it “They were doing my style of music then, they were doing something a little different when I left, but they were doing the more soulful, R&B-style stuff, so I thought I had a place there. So I had an idea I thought I could take back and see if they could do something with it.” That idea was the first song he wrote under his new contract, and it was co-written with Norman Whitfield. It’s difficult to know how Whitfield and Strong started writing together, or much about their writing partnership, even though it was one of the most successful songwriting teams of the era, because neither man was interviewed in any great depth, and there’s almost no long-form writing on either of them. What does seem to have been the case is that both men had been aware of each other in the late fifties, when Strong was a budding R&B star and Whitfield merely a teenager hanging round watching the cool kids. The two may even have written together before — in an example of how the chronology for both Whitfield and Strong seems to make no sense, Whitfield had cowritten a song with Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”, in 1962 — when Strong was supposedly away from Motown — and it had been included as an album track on the That Stubborn Kinda Fellow album: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”] The writing on that was originally credited just to Whitfield and Gaye on the labels, but it is now credited to Whitfield, Gaye, and Strong, including with BMI. Similarly Gaye’s 1965 album track “Me and My Lonely Room” — recorded in 1963 but held back – was initially credited to Whitfield alone but is now credited to Whitfield and Strong, in a strange inverse of the way “Money” initially had Strong’s credit but it was later removed. But whether this was an administrative decision made later, or whether Strong had been moonlighting for Motown uncredited in 1962 and collaborated with Whitfield, they hadn’t been a formal writing team in the way Whitfield and Holland had been, and both later seemed to date their collaboration proper as starting in 1966 when Strong returned to Motown — and understandably. The two songs they’d written earlier – if indeed they had – had been album filler, but between 1967 when the first of their new collaborations came out and 1972 when they split up, they wrote twenty-three top forty hits together. Theirs seems to have been a purely business relationship — in the few interviews with Strong he talks about Whitfield as someone he was friendly with, but Whitfield’s comments on Strong seem always to be the kind of very careful comments one would make about someone for whom one has a great deal of professional respect, a great deal of personal dislike, but absolutely no wish to air the dirty laundry behind that dislike, or to burn bridges that don’t need burning. Either way, Whitfield was in need of a songwriting partner when Barrett Strong walked into a Motown rehearsal room, and recognised that Strong’s talents were complementary to his. So he told Strong, straight out, “I’ve had quite a few hit records already. If you write with me, I can guarantee you you’ll make at least a hundred thousand dollars a year” — though he went on to emphasise that that wasn’t a guarantee-guarantee, and would depend on Strong putting the work in. Strong agreed, and the first idea he brought in for his new team earned both of them more than that hundred thousand dollars by itself. Strong had been struck by the common phrase “I heard it through the grapevine”, and started singing that line over some Ray Charles style gospel chords. Norman Whitfield knew a hook when he heard one, and quickly started to build a full song around Strong’s line. Initially, by at least some accounts, they wanted to place the song with the Isley Brothers, who had just signed to Motown and had a hit with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song “This Old Heart of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)”] For whatever reason, the Isley Brothers didn’t record the song, or if they did no copy of the recording has ever surfaced, though it does seem perfectly suited to their gospel-inflected style. The Isleys did, though, record another early Whitfield and Strong song, “That’s the Way Love Is”, which came out in 1967 as a flop single, but would later be covered more successfully by Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “That’s the Way Love Is”] Instead, the song was first recorded by the Miracles. And here the story becomes somewhat murky. We have a recording by the Miracles, released on an album two years later, but some have suggested that that version isn’t the same recording they made in 1966 when Whitfield and Strong wrote the song originally: [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] It certainly sounds to my ears like that is probably the version of the song the group recorded in 66 — it sounds, frankly, like a demo for the later, more famous version. All the main elements are there — notably the main Ray Charles style hook played simultaneously on Hammond organ and electric piano, and the almost skanking rhythm guitar stabs — but Smokey Robinson’s vocal isn’t *quite* passionate enough, the tempo is slightly off, and the drums don’t have the same cavernous rack tom sound that they have in the more famous version. If you weren’t familiar with the eventual hit, it would sound like a classic Motown track, but as it is it’s missing something… [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] According to at least some sources, that was presented to the quality control team — the team in which Whitfield had started his career, as a potential single, but they dismissed it. It wasn’t a hit, and Berry Gordy said it was one of the worst songs he’d ever heard. But Whitfield knew the song was a hit, and so he went back into the studio and cut a new backing track: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (backing track only)”] (Incidentally, no official release of the instrumental backing track for “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” exists, and I had to put that one together myself by taking the isolated parts someone had uploaded to youtube and synching them back together in editing software, so if there are some microsecond-level discrepancies between the instruments there, that’s on me, not on the Funk Brothers.) That track was originally intended for the Temptations, with whom Whitfield was making a series of hits at the time, but they never recorded it at the time. Whitfield did produce a version for them as an album track a couple of years later though, so we have an idea how they might have taken the song vocally — though by then David Ruffin had been replaced in the group by Dennis Edwards: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But instead of giving the song to the Temptations, Whitfield kept it back for Marvin Gaye, the singer with whom he’d had his first big breakthrough hit and for whom his two previous collaborations with Strong – if collaborations they were – had been written. Gaye and Whitfield didn’t get on very well — indeed, it seems that Whitfield didn’t get on very well with *anyone* — and Gaye would later complain about the occasions when Whitfield produced his records, saying “Norman and I came within a fraction of an inch of fighting. He thought I was a prick because I wasn't about to be intimidated by him. We clashed. He made me sing in keys much higher than I was used to. He had me reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.” But Gaye sang the song fantastically, and Whitfield was absolutely certain they had a sure-fire hit: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But once again the quality control department refused to release the track. Indeed, it was Berry Gordy personally who decided, against the wishes of most of the department by all accounts, that instead of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Gaye’s next single should be a Holland-Dozier-Holland track, “Your Unchanging Love”, a soundalike rewrite of their earlier hit for him, “How Sweet It Is”. “Your Unchanging Love” made the top thirty, but was hardly a massive success. Gordy has later claimed that he always liked “Grapevine” but just thought it was a bit too experimental for Gaye’s image at the time, but reports from others who were there say that what Gordy actually said was “it sucks”. So “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was left on the shelf, and the first fruit of the new Whitfield/Strong team to actually get released was “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”, written for Jimmy Ruffin, the brother of Temptations lead singer David, who had had one big hit, “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and one medium one, “I’ve Passed This Way Before”, in 1966. Released in 1967, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got” became Ruffin’s third and final hit, making number 29: [Excerpt: Jimmy Ruffin, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”] But Whitfield was still certain that “Grapevine” could be a hit. And then in 1967, a few months after he’d shelved Gaye’s version, came the record that changed everything in soul: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Respect”] Whitfield was astounded by that record, but also became determined he was going to “out-funk Aretha”, and “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was going to be the way to do it. And he knew someone who thought she could do just that. Gladys Knight never got on well with Aretha Franklin. According to Knight’s autobiography this was one-sided on Franklin’s part, and Knight was always friendly to Franklin, but it’s also notable that she says the same about several other of the great sixties female soul singers (though not all of them by any means), and there seems to be a general pattern among those singers that they felt threatened by each other and that their own position in the industry was precarious, in a way the male singers usually didn’t. But Knight claimed she always *wished* she got on well with Franklin, because the two had such similar lives. They’d both started out singing gospel as child performers before moving on to the chitlin circuit at an early age, though Knight started her singing career even younger than Franklin did. Knight was only four when she started performing solos in church, and by the age of eight she had won the two thousand dollar top prize on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour by singing Brahms’ “Lullaby” and the Nat “King” Cole hit “Too Young”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Too Young”] That success inspired her, and she soon formed a vocal group with her brother Bubba, sister Brenda and their cousins William and Eleanor Guest. They named themselves the Pips in honour of a cousin whose nickname that was, and started performing at talent contests in Atlanta Chitlin’ Circuit venues. They soon got a regular gig at one of them, the Peacock, despite them all being pre-teens at the time. The Pips also started touring, and came to the attention of Maurice King, the musical director of the Flame nightclub in Detroit, who became a vocal coach for the group. King got the group signed to Brunswick records, where they released their first single, a song King had written called “Whistle My Love”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Whistle My Love”] According to Knight that came out in 1955, when she was eleven, but most other sources have it coming out in 1958. The group’s first two singles flopped, and Brenda and Eleanor quit the group, being replaced by another cousin, Edward Patten, and an unrelated singer Langston George, leaving Knight as the only girl in the quintet. While the group weren’t successful on records, they were getting a reputation live and toured on package tours with Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others. Knight also did some solo performances with a jazz band led by her music teacher, and started dating that band’s sax player, Jimmy Newman. The group’s next recording was much more successful. They went into a makeshift studio owned by a local club owner, Fats Hunter, and recorded what they thought was a demo, a version of the Johnny Otis song “Every Beat of My Heart”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (HunTom version)”] The first they knew that Hunter had released that on his own small label was when they heard it on the radio. The record was picked up by VeeJay records, and it ended up going to number one on the R&B charts and number six on the pop charts, but they never saw any royalties from it. It brought them to the attention of another small label, Fury Records, which got them to rerecord the song, and that version *also* made the R&B top twenty and got as high as number forty-five on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (Fury version)”] However, just because they had a contract with Fury didn’t mean they actually got any more money, and Knight has talked about the label’s ownership being involved with gangsters. That was the first recording to be released as by “Gladys Knight and the Pips”, rather than just The Pips, and they would release a few more singles on Fury, including a second top twenty pop hit, the Don Covay song “Letter Full of Tears”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Letter Full of Tears”] But Knight had got married to Newman, who was by now the group’s musical director, after she fell pregnant when she was sixteen and he was twenty. However, that first pregnancy tragically ended in miscarriage, and when she became pregnant again she decided to get off the road to reduce the risk. She spent a couple of years at home, having two children, while the other Pips – minus George who left soon after – continued without her to little success. But her marriage was starting to deteriorate under pressure of Newman’s drug use — they wouldn’t officially divorce until 1972, but they were already feeling the pressure, and would split up sooner rather than later — and Knight  returned to the stage, initially as a solo artist or duetting with Jerry Butler, but soon rejoining the Pips, who by this time were based in New York and working with the choreographer Cholly Atkins to improve their stagecraft. For the next few years the Pips drifted from label to label, scoring one more top forty hit in 1964 with Van McCoy’s “Giving Up”, but generally just getting by like so many other acts on the circuit. Eventually the group ended up moving to Detroit, and hooking up with Motown, where mentors like Cholly Atkins and Maurice King were already working. At first they thought they were taking a step up, but they soon found that they were a lower tier Motown act, considered on a par with the Spinners or the Contours rather than the big acts, and according to Knight they got pulled off an early Motown package tour because Diana Ross, with whom like Franklin Knight had something of a rivalry, thought they were too good on stage and were in danger of overshadowing her. Knight says in her autobiography that they “formed a little club of our own with some of the other malcontents” with Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, and someone she refers to as “Ivory Joe Hunter” but I presume she means Ivy Jo Hunter (one of the big problems when dealing with R&B musicians of this era is the number of people with similar names. Ivy Jo Hunter, Joe Hunter, and Ivory Joe Hunter were all R&B musicians for whom keyboard was their primary instrument, and both Ivy Jo and just plain Joe worked for Motown at different points, but Ivory Joe never did) Norman Whitfield was also part of that group of “malcontents”, and he was also the producer of the Pips’ first few singles for Motown, and so when he was looking for someone to outdo Aretha, someone with something to prove, he turned to them. He gave the group the demo tape, and they worked out a vocal arrangement for a radically different version of the song, one inspired by “Respect”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] The third time was the charm, and quality control finally agreed to release “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” as a single. Gladys Knight always claimed it had no promotion, but Norman Whitfield’s persistence had paid off — the single went to number two on the pop charts (kept off the top by “Daydream Believer”), number one on the R&B charts, and became Motown’s biggest-selling single *ever* up until that point. It also got Knight a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female — though the Grammy committee, at least, didn’t think she’d out-Aretha’d Aretha, as “Respect” won the award. And that, sadly, sort of summed up Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown — they remained not quite the winners in everything. There’s no shame in being at number two behind a classic single like “Daydream Believer”, and certainly no shame in losing the Grammy to Aretha Franklin at her best, but until they left Motown in 1972 and started their run of hits on Buddah records, Gladys Knight and the Pips would always be in other people’s shadow. That even extended to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” when, as we’ll hear in part two of this story, Norman Whitfield’s persistence paid off, Marvin Gaye’s version got released as a single, and *that* became the biggest-selling single on Motown ever, outselling the Pips version and making it forever his song, not theirs. And as a final coda to the story of Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown, while they were touring off the back of “Grapevine’s” success, the Pips ran into someone they vaguely knew from his time as a musician in the fifties, who was promoting a group he was managing made up of his sons. Knight thought they had something, and got in touch with Motown several times trying to get them to sign the group, but she was ignored. After a few attempts, though, Bobby Taylor of another second-tier Motown group, the Vancouvers, also saw them and got in touch with Motown, and this time they got signed. But that story wasn’t good enough for Motown, and so neither Taylor nor Knight got the credit for discovering the group. Instead when Joe Jackson’s sons’ band made their first album, it was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. But that, of course, is a story for another time…

Running back the most popular episode of 2023 in honor of the life (and love story) of Marvin Gaye.  References & Resources: To learn more about these couples, look into the following: After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye by Jan Gaye and David Ritz - https://tinyurl.com/yde98dj5 Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz - https://a.co/d/hElJSWm Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye by Michael Eric Dyson - https://a.co/d/7UIeTQv "Marvin Gaye Shocks Public with Record About Ex-Wife" - https://tinyurl.com/mvdfuxtv "Marvin Gaye's White Live-In Mate Suffers Miscarriage" - https://tinyurl.com/4edn76kc Aisle Tell You What is a weekly podcast that shares the weddings, marriages, and romances of notable Black figures throughout time. We bask on these relationships to remind you of the passion in our past and to give grace to the individuals we put on pedestals. Basically, it's all love Black History. Aisle Tell You What is brought to you by Hueido. Hueido is a media brand that adds color to Black weddings and marriage from yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Listen to Aisle Tell You What wherever you listen to podcasts: https://bit.ly/HueIDoPod Talk to me https://bit.ly/HueIDoContact Follow on Instagram https://bit.ly/ATYWinsta Follow on Twitter https://bit.ly/ATYWTwitter Follow on TikTok https://bit.ly/ATYWtiktok Donate/tip https://tinyurl.com/5e9b7rtd Shop aisletell.com ATYW Amazon Wish List https://tinyurl.com/53edh8uj Email Aisle Tell You What at aisle[at]hueido.com

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Brooks Long to discuss David Ritz' co-authored memoir of Grandmaster Flash "My Life, My Beats." Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue our Let Motown Roll mini-series with a recast of Nate and Brooks Long's 2022 discussion of "Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James" (co-written by David Ritz). Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue our Let Motown Roll mini-series with a recast of Nate and Brooks Long's 2022 discussion of the autobiography "Smokey Robinson: Inside My Life" (co-written by David Ritz). Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue our Let Motown Roll mini-series with a recast of Nate and Brook Long's 2021 discussion of David Ritz's classic biography "Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye." Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Thank you for being part of the conversation. This is Play It Forward. Real people. Real stories. The struggle to Play It Forward Episode 592 With Desmond Child Author Of Livin On A Prayer Desmond Child is the iconic Grammy® Award winning and Emmy nominated songwriter / producer who has contributed to some of the biggest global hits that helped ignite the success of music icons KISS, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Ricky Martin, Katy Perry, and countless others. Desmond is gearing up for the release of his first-ever memoir, “LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS BIG LIFE” (out Sept. 19) – his personal story of anguish and struggle that reveals how he climbed his way to the top and beyond amid extraordinary circumstances. Sharing his very intimate and unbelievable journey that shaped him into an artist of international renown, the book features a foreword by Paul Stanley, in collaboration with legendary music biographer David Ritz.

Desmond Child is the iconic Grammy® Award winning and Emmy nominated songwriter / producer who has contributed to some of the biggest global hits that helped ignite the success of music icons KISS, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Ricky Martin, Katy Perry, and countless others. Desmond is gearing up for the release of his first-ever memoir, “LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS BIG LIFE” (out Sept. 19) – his personal story of anguish and struggle that reveals how he climbed his way to the top and beyond amid extraordinary circumstances. Sharing his very intimate and unbelievable journey that shaped him into an artist of international renown, the book features a foreword by Paul Stanley, in collaboration with legendary music biographer David Ritz. Having co-written over 80 Top 40 hits and selling over 500 million records worldwide, Desmond's contributions to the music industry have earned him induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame, and multiple prestigious awards. For over half a century, Desmond has collaborated with the world's most celebrated artists creating timeless classics, such as Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" and "You Give Love A Bad Name," as well as Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" and "The Cup Of Life," amongst his vast catalog. But in "LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS BIG LIFE," Desmond himself takes center stage to share his transformational story of a misfit outsider to cultural pacesetter. In the upcoming title, Desmond recounts his unconventional upbringing as his colorful family fled revolutionary Cuba for Florida in the 1960s and fell into poverty. He details his shocking discovery at age 18 that the man he called "dad" was not his biological father after all, and he courageously bares his soul about navigating the trials of being a Latino gay man in the macho world of Rock 'n' Roll. His is a story of willing himself to succeed and overcoming impossible odds to establish himself as one of the most influential composers and lyricists of all time.

ABOUT DESMOND CHILD AND LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS, BiG LIFEDesmond Child is the iconic Grammy® Award winning and Emmy nominated songwriter / producer who has contributed to some of the biggest global hits that helped ignite the success of music icons KISS, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Ricky Martin, Katy Perry, and countless others. Desmond is gearing up for the release of his first-ever memoir, “LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS BIG LIFE” (out Sept. 19) – his personal story of anguish and struggle that reveals how he climbed his way to the top and beyond amid extraordinary circumstances. Sharing his very intimate and unbelievable journey that shaped him into an artist of international renown, the book features a foreword by Paul Stanley, in collaboration with legendary music biographer David Ritz.Having co-written over 80 Top 40 hits and selling over 500 million records worldwide, Desmond's contributions to the music industry have earned him induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame, and multiple prestigious awards. For over half a century, Desmond has collaborated with the world's most celebrated artists creating timeless classics, such as Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" and "You Give Love A Bad Name," as well as Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" and "The Cup Of Life," amongst his vast catalog. But in "LIVIN' ON A PRAYER: BIG SONGS BIG LIFE," Desmond himself takes center stage to share his transformational story of a misfit outsider to cultural pacesetter.In the upcoming title, Desmond recounts his unconventional upbringing as his colorful family fled revolutionary Cuba for Florida in the 1960s and fell into poverty. He details his shocking discovery at age 18 that the man he called "dad" was not his biological father after all, and he courageously bares his soul about navigating the trials of being a Latino gay man in the macho world of Rock 'n' Roll. His is a story of willing himself to succeed and overcoming impossible odds to establish himself as one of the most influential composers and lyricists of all time.In an interview, Desmond can discuss the following:The triumphs, challenges, and lessons he's learned throughout his career * Inspiring others to embrace their own creative pursuits, overcome obstacles, and live their dreams to the fullestRevealing untold stories about the making of the hit songs that have become the soundtrack of our lives.Recounting the magic and inspiration behind each composition, while shedding light on what it's like to collaborate with music legends.Lessons from a maestro with invaluable resources for aspiring artists and industry professionals alike to understand songwriting, production, and the music industryDESMOND CHILD BIOGrammy-winning and Emmy-nominated songwriter Desmond Child is one of music's most prolific and accomplished hitmakers. He's a film, television, theater and music producer, recording artist, performer, and author. His credits appear on more than eighty Billboard Top 40 singles spanning six decades, including "Livin' On A Prayer," "You Give Love A Bad Name," "I Was Made For Lovin' You," "Dude Looks Like A Lady," "How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends," "I Hate Myself For Loving You," "Livin' La Vida Loca," "The Cup Of Life," "Waking Up In Vegas," "Kings & Queens" and many more.From Aerosmith to Zedd, his genre-defying collaborations also include KISS, Bon Jovi, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Ricky Martin, Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, Michael Bolton, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Garth Brooks, Cyndi Lauper, Christina Aguilera, Ava Max, Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog, selling over 500 million records worldwide with downloads, YouTube views and streaming plays in the billions.Desmond Child was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008 and serves on its Board of Directors as well as the Board of ASCAP. In 2018 he received ASCAP's prestigious Founders Award celebrating 40 years as a proud member of ASCAP. In 2012 he also co-founded the Latin Songwriters Hall Of Fame where he serves as Chairman Emeritus. In 2022, he was inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall Of Fame and "Livin' La Vida Loca" was inducted into the National Archives of the Library of Congress for its cultural significance to America. In 2023, "Livin' On A Prayer" was certified to have reached 1 billion streams on Spotify.Personal HistoryBA in Music Education from New York University 1976AA of Art from Miami Dade Community College 1974Graduated Miami Beach High School 1972Born John Charles Barrett October 28th, 1953Artist HistoryThe single, "Love on a Rooftop" charts Top 40 1990Released, "Discipline" through Elektra Records 19901st Top 40 hit, "Our Love Is Insane" Spring of 1979Musical guest on Saturday Night Live (original cast) Xmas show of 1979First U.S. Tour including legendary performances at The Bottom Line in NYC and The Whisky a Go Go in LA 1979Released first self-titled album, "Desmond Child & Rouge" 1979First signed to Capitol Records with group Desmond Child & Rouge 1978Billboard #1 Hits4th Billboard #1 "Livin' La Vida Loca" 19993rd Billboard #1 "Bad Medicine" Bon Jovi 19882nd Billboard #1 "Livin' On A Prayer" Bon Jovi 19871st Billboard #1 "You Give Love A Bad Name" Bon Jovi 19861st International #1 "I Was Made For Lovin' You" KISS 1979Honors & AwardsASCAP Founders Award 2018Songwriters Hall of Fame Inductee 2008Miami Beach High Wall of Fame (alongside Barbara Walters, Mickey Rourke, Andy Garcia)TAXI Lifetime Achievement Award 2004Emmy Award nomination for "Everyone Matters" The Muppets 2003Latin Grammy Award - Rock Album of the Year Alejandra Guzman 2001NARAS Florida Chapter Heroes Award 2000Grammy Nomination - Best Pop Album, Ricky Martin 2000Grammy Nomination - Record of the Year, "Livin' La Vida Loca" 2000Grammy Nomination - Song of the Year, "Livin' La Vida Loca" 2000Honored with Key Of The City of Miami Beach 1999El Premio Award - Song Of The Year "Livin' La Vida Loca" 1999Official World Cup Song - "La Copa De La Vida", "The Cup Of Life" 1998El Premio Award - Song Of The Year, "La Copa De La Vida", "The Cup Of Life" 1998Songs Recorded By:Aerosmith, Christina Aguilera, Clay Aiken, Animotion, Baha Men, Jimmy Barnes, Robin Beck, Beggars & Thieves, Stephanie Bentley, Petra Berger, Bif Naked, Blackhawk, Michael Bolton, Bon Jovi, Bonfire, Boyzone, Flavio Cesar, Bill Champlin, Chayanne, Judy Cheeks, Cher, Chicago, Kelly Clarkson, Clarence Clemons, Alice Cooper, Carlos Cuevos, Paul Dean, Diana DeGarmo, Desmond Child & Rouge, Dudes of Wrath, Dream Theater, Hilary Duff, Evil Stig, FM, Ellen Foley, Ace Frehley, The Gufs, Haddaway, Hall & Oates, Hanson, Chesney Hawkes, Ty Herndon, INXS, Joan Jett, Cletus T. Judd, KISS, Patti La Belle, Nikki Leonti, La Ley, Dan Lucas, Cyndi Lauper, Mitch Malloy, Amanda Marshall, Ricky Martin, Jesse McCartney, Stephanie McIntosh, Meat Loaf, Megadeth, Mika, Millie, Billie Myers, Alannah Myles, Vince Neil, Ru Paul, Chynna Phillips, Phoenix Down, Iggy Pop, Jason Raize, The Rasmus, RATT, LeAnn Rimes, Kane Roberts, Rosco, Roxette, Jennifer Rush, Richie Sambora, Saraya, Scorpions, Shakira, Sia, Sisqo, Southgang, Billy Squier, Paul Stanley, Barbra Streisand, Swirl 360, 3rd Faze, Bonnie Tyler, Kris Tyler, Carrie Underwood, Steve Vai, Maria Vidal, Anna Vissi, John Waite, Tim Weisberg, Robbie Williams, Peter Wolf and Trisha YearwoodLivin' On A Prayer: Big Songs Big Life available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Livin-Prayer-Big-Songs-Life-ebook/dp/B0BZT9MK68?ref_=ast_author_mpb

"Your creation gives you feedback on where to go." - Michaell MagrutscheToday's featured bookcaster is multimedia Artist, creativity-awareness educator, and human behavior expert, Michaell Magrutsche. Michaell and I had a fun chat about his book, “The Smart of Art: A New Art Consciousness To Awaken Our Enthusiasm For Art”, the power of human dialogue, and tons more!! Key Things You'll Learn:Why play is important when it comes to creativityWhy does art & creativity always bring us closer to humanityThe importance of adaptabilityThe importance of staying present in the moment Michaell's Site: https://michaellm.com/Michaell's Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B01JGZIRW2/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=46aa6b99-39af-4686-9700-913b14039ee3&store_ref=ap_rdr&ref_=ap_rdrMichaell Podcast, “THE SMART OF ART”: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michaellart The opening track is titled “I Feel It” by Bosnow from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/bosnow/i-feel-itLicense code: OLUCPMP4LR8AQ2XC Please support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmon You May Also Like… Ep. 602 – “How to Unlock Your Creative Potential” with Robin Landa (@rlanda): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-602-how-to-unlock-your-creative-potential-with-robin-landa-rlanda/ Ep. 301 – “Transformative Creativity” with Firdaus Kharas (@Culture_Shift): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-301-transformative-creativity-with-firdaus-kharas-culture_shift/ Ep. 609 - "The Film Director's Bag Of Tricks" With Mark W. Travis (@MarkWTravis): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/the-film-directors-bag-of-tricks-with-mark-w-travis-markwtravis/ 173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/ 110 - "Self-Intelligence" with Jane Ransom (@TheJaneRansom): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/110-self-intelligence-with-jane-ransom-thejaneransom/ 148 - "Everyday Magnificent" with Gabriela Masala (@onelovealliance): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/148-everyday-magnificent-with-gabriela-masala-onelovealliance/ Ep. 618 – “A Book About You” with David Green: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-618-a-book-about-you-with-david-green/ #Host2Host Bonus Ep. - “Innuendo City” with Michelle Nedelec (@michellenedelec): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/host2host-bonus-ep-innuendo-city-with-michelle-nedelec-michellenedelec/ Ep. 330 – “A Long Way from Ordinary” with Ann Charles (@AnnWCharles): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-330-a-long-way-from-ordinary-with-ann-charles-annwcharles/ Ep. 582 – “Shaping the World Through Great Stories for All Ages” with Natasha Deen (@natasha_deen): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-582-shaping-the-world-through-great-stories-for-all-ages-with-natasha-deen-natasha_deen/ Ep. 606 – “Crowdfunding Your Comic Books Into Reality” with Morgan Quaid (@morgan_quaid): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-606-crowdfunding-your-comic-books-into-reality-with-morgan-quaid-morgan_quaid/

Hosts Nate Wilcox welcomes back Brooks Long to discuss David Ritz' oral history "The Brothers: An Autobiography" co-written with the Neville Brothers. Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Nate Wilcox welcomes back Brooks Long to discuss David Ritz' oral history "The Brothers: An Autobiography" co-written with the Neville Brothers. Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Nate Wilcox welcomes back Brooks Long to discuss David Ritz' oral history of the Neville Brothers "The Brothers Neville: An Autobiography." Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marvin Gaye was such a talented musician and singer known for his soulful, sensual, and romantic music. However, his personal life was not always as harmonious as his songs. Marvin had two marriages: one to Anna Gordy and the other to Janis Hunter -- both of which ended in divorce. In addition to that, there were other relationships that definitely impacted and heavily influenced his life. We're going to be talking about all of that this week on Aisle Tell You What. References & Resources: To learn more about these couples, look into the following: After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye by Jan Gaye and David Ritz - https://tinyurl.com/yde98dj5 Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz - https://a.co/d/hElJSWm Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye by Michael Eric Dyson - https://a.co/d/7UIeTQv "Marvin Gaye Shocks Public with Record About Ex-Wife" - https://tinyurl.com/mvdfuxtv "Marvin Gaye's White Live-In Mate Suffers Miscarriage" - https://tinyurl.com/4edn76kc Aisle Tell You What is a weekly podcast that shares the weddings, marriages, and romances of notable Black figures throughout time. We bask on these relationships to remind you of the passion in our past and to give grace to the individuals we put on pedestals. Basically, it's all love Black History. Aisle Tell You What is brought to you by Hueido. Hueido is a media brand that adds color to Black weddings and marriage from yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Listen to Aisle Tell You What wherever you listen to podcasts: https://bit.ly/HueIDoPod Talk to me https://bit.ly/HueIDoContact Follow on Instagram https://bit.ly/ATYWinsta Follow on Twitter https://bit.ly/ATYWTwitter Follow on TikTok https://bit.ly/ATYWtiktok Donate/tip https://tinyurl.com/5e9b7rtd Shop aisletell.com ATYW Amazon Wish List https://tinyurl.com/53edh8uj Email Aisle Tell You What at aisle[at]hueido.com

"Writing is an endurance sport." - Amelia ForczakToday's featured author is mom, wife, entrepreneur, content strategist, New York Times Bestselling Ghostwriter, and the Founder of Pithy Wordsmithery, Amelia Forczak. Amelia and I had a fun chat about her writing journey, getting the most mileage you can out of your content, and more!!! Key Things You'll Learn:How she became interested in ghostwritingHow she transitioned into full-time entrepreneurshipWhat to keep in mind about writing the back jacket/"about the book" text for your bookHow did her modeling experience transfer to her entrepreneurial pursuits Amelia's Site: https://pithywordsmithery.com/Amelia's Course/Field Guide: https://pithywordsmithery.mykajabi.com/field-guide The opening track is titled “Check It Out” by Mountaineer from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/check-it-outLicense code: AR6DFPGVXQ9Q1SSY Please support today's podcast to keep this content coming! CashApp: $DomBrightmonDonate on PayPal: @DBrightmonBuy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dombrightmonGet Going North T-Shirts, Stickers, and More: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmon You May Also Like… Ep. 614 – “Serve No Master” with Jonathan Green (@ServeNoJonathan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-614-serve-no-master-with-jonathan-green-servenojonathan/ 173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/ Ep. 421 – “How to Write Your Book In 21 Days” with Wendy Scheuring (@AuthorsWriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-421-how-to-write-your-book-in-21-days-with-wendy-scheuring-authorswriter/ Ep. 472 – “From Academia to Entrepreneurship” with Dr. Emily Crookston (@EMCrookston): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-472-from-academia-to-entrepreneurship-with-dr-emily-crookston-emcrookston/ Ep. 442 – “Jungle Jean” with Geralyn Gendreau (@geralyngendreau): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-442-jungle-jean-with-geralyn-gendreau-geralyngendreau/ 18 - "Inspirational Stuff" with Amy Brooks (@AmyReneeBrooks): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/18-inspirational-stuff-with-amy-brooks-amyreneebrooks/ #Bonus Ep. – “From Idea to Finished Manuscript” with Chandler Bolt (@self_pub_school): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/bonus-ep-from-idea-to-finished-manuscript-with-chandler-bolt-self_pub_school/ 216 – “The Write Way” with Amy Collins (@askamycollins): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/216-the-write-way-with-amy-collins-askamycollins/ 279 – “Peak Performance Ghostwriting” with Kathrin Hutson (@ExquisitelyDark): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/279-peak-performance-ghostwriting-with-kathrin-hutson-exquisitelydark/ Ep. 387 – “How to Demolish Imposter Syndrome & Create an Online Course” with Mark Kumar (@mark2kumar): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-387-how-to/ Ep. 473 – “How to Write a Bestseller” with Vikrant Shaurya (@VikrantShaurya): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-473-how-to-write-a-bestseller-with-vikrant-shaurya-vikrantshaurya/ Ep. 615 – “Champion Martial Artist to Award-Winning Novelist” with Danielle Orsino: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-615-champion-martial-artist-to-award-winning-novelist-with-danielle-orsino/ #Bonus Ep. – “From Prizewinning Dystopian Thrillers to Prizewinning Historical Fiction” with Alice McVeigh (@astmcveigh1): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/bonus-ep-from-prizewinning-dystopian-thrillers-to-prizewinning-historical-fiction-with-alice-mcveigh-astmcveigh1/

Drummer Paul English, a Texas tough guy/artist/best friend and virtual alter ego to Willie Nelson is remembered by his buddy and not-so-ghostly ghostwriter David Ritz in the book "Me and Paul: Untold Stories of a Fabled Friendship."

Hosts Nate Wilcox and Brooks Long discuss the career of Rick James with an emphasis on his early years in Toronto, Detroit and Los Angeles, working with the likes of Neil Young and trying his hand at folk-rock, jazz fusion and finally funk.Buy the book and support the show.Download this episode.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

On what it takes to ghost writer another person's autobiography; of what it's like to see musicians you love and admire self-destruct; on his contributions to Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing"; on the impact stuttering has had on his career.

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive” (Lk. 20). Haggai 1:15b-2:9 Psalm 149 Luke 20:27-38 What happens after you die? Jesus cares so intensely about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death influences how we live.   As a freshman at Harvard College my old teacher Cornel West hung two pictures on his wall: Malcolm X and Albert Einstein. His roommate James Brown, (not the singer but the man who later became the famous sports journalist) asked him, “I thought you were more of a Martin Luther King type.” Cornel replied, “I am but one doesn't cancel out the other. I'm loving them both, just the way they both loved us.”1   In his second year The Nation of Islam came to Harvard and black students packed the hall. “Hefty Fruit of Islam guards, the paramilitary wing of the Nation [were] stationed at all the doors.” It had only been six years since Malcolm X's assassination and when the speaker referred to Malcolm as a dog, Cornel felt startled. The speech went on. When the speaker did it again, Cornel moved to stand up and reply but his friends restrained him.   Finally, the speaker called Malcolm X a dog one more time and Cornel leapt up. He said, “Who gives you the authority to call someone who loved black people so deeply a ‘dog'?” After a brief exchange the speaker said to the 18 year old Cornel. “Young brother, you'll be lucky to get out of this building alive. And if you do manage to slip out, you'll be gone in five days.” In his memoir Cornel writes, “from there, it got worse. The crowd went dead silent…” as everyone looked at him. Friends had to negotiate with the guards and then escort him out of the building.   For the next week Cornel went underground going from dorm room to dorm room, too afraid to attend class, hardly sleeping. Finally he went to talk to someone in the Nation. They began by arguing but then Cornel really began to listen, to listen from the heart. For hours they had a wonderful conversation because they gave each other “space to be heard.” His new friend told him he didn't need to be afraid anymore.   Intense conflict, fear and looming death characterize the atmosphere as Jesus takes up a debate with leaders of the temple. After a long journey to the capitol Jesus arrives in triumph to cheering crowds who wave palm branches. Jesus weeps over the terrible future of Jerusalem. He angrily drives out people who are selling things in the temple. Then he returns there every day to share the good news with the “spellbound” crowds.   Behind the scenes the authorities, “[keep] looking for a way to kill him” (Lk. 19:47). But Jesus' popularity protects him and so the religious leaders try to discredit his teaching. They want to embarrass him, to get him tangled up in his own words, to provoke him to say something offensive that they might use against him. They have three different debates, the first one about authority, the second on taxes and our story this morning about the resurrection.   Remember, Jesus is only days away from being killed on the cross. The tension and fear among his friends cannot be understated. Jesus wisely avoids the traps that his persecutors set for him. In fact he changes this antagonism into a chance for genuine learning to happen. He is teaching both the people who love him and those who hate him so that some of his enemies even say, “Teacher, you have spoken well” (Lk. 20).   In those days Sadducees were part of the upper class and had an influential role in the temple's worship.2 They differ from the Pharisees, Jesus and the authors of the Gospels in two main ways. First, they do not believe in resurrection, or any life after we die.   And second, they were convinced that only the first five books of the Bible were authoritative scripture.3 I have known this for thirty years and do not completely understand what it means. I often wonder what did they make of the psalms and prophets, for instance? In any event apparently in those days it was commonly believed that the first five books did not include references to the resurrection in the way that the other biblical books did.   The question they use to entrap Jesus has to do with an ancient cultural practice described in the Book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 25:5-10) called “levirate marriage.” The word levir is Latin for a husband's brother. The idea is that when a woman's husband dies, his brother will marry her, they will have children and those children will carry on the deceased person's name.   So in order to make Jesus stumble in his defense of resurrection, the Sadducees ask what would happen if each of seven brothers married one woman and all died childless. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? It's what a friend of mine who is a lawyer would call a gotcha question. Their goal is to make the idea of resurrection seem absurd and to expose Jesus as a fake.   But Jesus has a brilliant answer. He says in essence. “You mistakenly assume that the cultural conventions of our time will continue to determine our lives in the coming age of resurrection. Unlike today in that time beyond death we will neither marry nor be given in marriage. We will not be able to die anymore.”4   Why does Jesus refer to death here? Greek uses two different words for “to marry” and “to be given in marriage.” In that world of the Bible men marry and women are given in marriage. Jesus looks at the marriage arrangements of his time as a way of dealing with the insecurity that follows death, almost as a kind of insurance policy.   Since in the next world there will be no more death, a widow will no longer need a new husband or a child to provide for her. At that point she will not be someone's wife, or someone's property. She will simply be a child of God, a child of the resurrection.   Jesus declares that in the resurrection, we will not have power over other people. No one will have power over us. We will all be free. If this were not enough he even goes on to give the Sadducees a reason for why they might change their mind and experience the liberating influence of the resurrection. He gives them an idea taken from the portion of the Bible that they regard as authoritative.   When Moses experiences God after seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed by flame. God tells him, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6), not “I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In that time when Jesus was surrounded by death and the fear of death he says that God is, “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).   And so today we experience again the way of Jesus. He does not hate or attack his enemies. He listens from the heart. He firmly responds to their arguments in the way that my teacher Cornel west did as college sophomore. Jesus wins them over with love so that they say, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”   Jesus also warns us to be careful of expecting God to be limited by our cultural conventions and our intelligence. Even in our moments of greatest imagination, we cannot grasp the beautiful mystery of the holiness that is our deepest desire.   And yet we have these moments of insight. Do you ever feel as if someone you loved but has died is near? Your intuition may be right because, to God “all of them are alive.”   Today we celebrate All Saint's Day by baptizing fifteen people into the church. They will join this mystical community of people who are liberated from the fear of death and straining to live in love. They will be joining you and me, and all the people of all times and places who are still alive in God.   What happens after you die? Jesus cares so much about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death does not have to constrain how we live and that one day we will be free of the social structures that diminish us. Jesus might ask, “Whose poster would you put up on your dorm room wall? Who would you be willing to stand up for and defend in public even at the risk of your life?”   Let us pray: You know our hearts O God, you see the challenges we face. Help us to listen from the heart and give us a space to be heard. And let us find our hope in the presence of those who have gone before us and in the love of your son Jesus. Amen. _______________ 1 There is so much more to this story and to Professor West's connections with the Nation of Islam. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (New York: SmileyBooks, 2009) 63, 67-70. 2 I don't know if it is true but the Wikipedia article claims that the Sadducees name was related to Zadok the High Priest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees 3 Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. 4 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/11/5/whats-resurrection-for-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-second-week-after-pentecost  

Brooks Long is back and that means he and Nate are talking about a book written or co-written by the great David Ritz. While at Billboard magazine in the 1940s, Jerry Wexler coined the term Rhythm & Blues. He went on to become one of the great "record men" at Atlantic Records in the 1950s, 60s and 70s where he produced career-peak recordings by legends such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin. He also found time to be a villain in the stories of Stax Records, Bert Berns and FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.Buy the book and support the podcast.Download this episode.Don't miss Nate's interview with David Ritz.Don't miss Nate & Brooks discussing:Aretha FranklinRay CharlesDon't miss Nate's interview with Bert Berns biographer Joel Selvin.Don't miss Nate's interviews with Robert Gordon about Stax Records:Part 1Part 2Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.  

Some art is so of-the-moment that looking back on it even a few years later can be confusing and disappointing. Some art ascends the era of its making to become timeless. On this episode, we deal with both. First, it's the indie comedy that made Jon Heder a star and made every teenage boy in 2004 ask: does the chicken have large talons? It's "Napoleon Dynamite"! Then, we spin up the records of one of the most influential, talented, and emotionally haunted male recording artists of the twentieth century: Marvin Gaye!This episode contains explicit language, as well as discussions of depression, drug addiction, self-harm, and murder.Co-Hosts: Sydney Painter and Anthony PinggeraTheme music by Dana Wilentz.Additional reading: Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, by David Ritz.If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a rating, review, and/or subscribe wherever you catch your pods! If you leave us a review, we'll be sure to read it on the air in a future episode. We truly appreciate all of you for listening.Follow the show on Twitter at @SophisticatePod. Sydney is on Tiktok at @trashanalysis. Anthony is at @AnxiousArchfey on both TikTok and Twitter. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nobody stays on top forever, but the most interesting artists in music history have made the most admirably crazy kinds of noise on the way down. And what better example, really, than Marvin's batshit-crazy 1978 double album divorce masterpiece “Here, My Dear.” Featuring special guest David Ritz, author of “Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye” and co-author of Marvin's biggest hit "Sexual Healing,” in Marvin Gaye Part III we are treated to a staggering, almost Zapruder-like reconstruction of the very moments that wound up leading to the career comeback he was fortunate to experience before his untimely end. Not to be missed. - Official playlist curated by Dave on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/57Whwams7VM3fOjkkEvzyz?si=e0b9483f3cc0429d - “Distant Lover” Live in Amsterdam, 1976: https://youtu.be/AQSzgDOz7sg - “Since I Had You” Live from the same Amsterdam gig: https://youtu.be/Fi7ZHcSZOKw - July 7, 1980 Montreaux Jazz Festival “What's Going On” throwdown: https://youtu.be/TpGPBoS5nTE - A sad, soul-barer of a 1983 Marvin interview touching on depression and his suicide attempts: https://youtu.be/L63XR2hFgpg - “Marvin Gaye: The Final 24” documentary about the man's last day on the planet, featuring the requisite amount of British talking heads that grate, but also plenty of David Ritz, too: https://youtu.be/27UN_59f7H0 CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/discograffiti Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ CONTACT JOE Email: joe@discograffiti.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeyKInLA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joekennedyjr/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/discograffiti/message

Berättelsen om en artist som bevisade att hon var mer än sin familjs kändisskap. En stor ikon som sen tystades och föll i glömska över en bröstvårta. En måndag i mars 2004 kliver Janet Jackson in i studion hos David Letterman. Janet som i princip föddes in i underhållningsbranschen har gjort intervjuer sen hon var fem år gammal. Men den här intervjun är annorlunda. Janet slår sig ner i en brun fåtölj, framför kulisser som visar vyn över New York. Hon rättar till sin röda klänning som lämnar höfterna och magen bar. Det här är första TV-intervjun hon gör sen den stora skandalen - den som kommit att kallas Wardrobe malfunction eller Nipplegate. Skandalen då 140 miljoner tittare fick se Janets ena bröst i live-TV under Super Bowls halvtidsshow. Janet gör intervjun för att få prata om sitt åttonde album som precis släppts, men David Letterman har ett annat syfte. Han vill veta allt om Nipplegate och ställer fråga efter fråga om det. Janet ber flera gånger om att få prata om något annat och ser allt mer obekväm ut. Under tio långa minuter fortsätter han ställa frågor om skandalen innan han tillslut går vidare, men inte heller nu för att prata om Janets musik. Som så många andra gånger får hon istället frågor om sin bror. Michael Jackson står nämligen just nu åtalad för sexuell övergrepp mot barn.P3 Musikdokumentär om Janet Jackson är en berättelse om kampen för att ta sig ur sin Jackson-familjens skugga och ta kontrollen över sin egen karriär. Om att lyckas och hyllas som en av 90- och 00-talets största ikoner, för att sen se allt det hon byggt upp försvinna.Dokumentären är gjord av Linnea Beijer våren 2022. Producent Hanna Frelin. Exekutiv producent Anna Johannessen. Tekniker Fredrik Nilsson. Programmet görs av produktionsbolaget Tredje Statsmakten Media.Medverkande: James Francis och Aretha Bergdahl.Dokumentären Janet Jackson av Janet Jackson och Rick Murray och biografin True You av Janet Jackson och David Ritz, är två av de främsta källorna i programmet.Ljudklipp i dokumentären kommer ifrån Good Morning America, American Bandstand, The Late Late show, Lifetime, A&E, CNN, The Mike Douglas show, Hollywood's Leading Ladies, Entertainment tonight, CBS, MTV, CBS News, Abc News The insider, The Oprah Winfrey Show, BET Networks och Rock and Roll hall of fame. 

Berättelsen om en artist som bevisade att hon var mer än sin familjs kändisskap. En stor ikon som sen tystades och föll i glömska över en bröstvårta. En måndag i mars 2004 kliver Janet Jackson in i studion hos David Letterman. Janet som i princip föddes in i underhållningsbranschen har gjort intervjuer sen hon var fem år gammal. Men den här intervjun är annorlunda. Janet slår sig ner i en brun fåtölj, framför kulisser som visar vyn över New York. Hon rättar till sin röda klänning som lämnar höfterna och magen bar. Det här är första TV-intervjun hon gör sen den stora skandalen - den som kommit att kallas Wardrobe malfunction eller Nipplegate. Skandalen då 140 miljoner tittare fick se Janets ena bröst i live-TV under Super Bowls halvtidsshow. Janet gör intervjun för att få prata om sitt åttonde album som precis släppts, men David Letterman har ett annat syfte. Han vill veta allt om Nipplegate och ställer fråga efter fråga om det. Janet ber flera gånger om att få prata om något annat och ser allt mer obekväm ut. Under tio långa minuter fortsätter han ställa frågor om skandalen innan han tillslut går vidare, men inte heller nu för att prata om Janets musik. Som så många andra gånger får hon istället frågor om sin bror. Michael Jackson står nämligen just nu åtalad för sexuell övergrepp mot barn.P3 Musikdokumentär om Janet Jackson är en berättelse om kampen för att ta sig ur sin Jackson-familjens skugga och ta kontrollen över sin egen karriär. Om att lyckas och hyllas som en av 90- och 00-talets största ikoner, för att sen se allt det hon byggt upp försvinna.Dokumentären är gjord av Linnea Beijer våren 2022. Producent Hanna Frelin. Exekutiv producent Anna Johannessen. Tekniker Fredrik Nilsson. Programmet görs av produktionsbolaget Tredje Statsmakten Media.Medverkande: James Francis och Aretha Bergdahl.Dokumentären Janet Jackson av Janet Jackson och Rick Murray och biografin True You av Janet Jackson och David Ritz, är två av de främsta källorna i programmet.Ljudklipp i dokumentären kommer ifrån Good Morning America, American Bandstand, The Late Late show, Lifetime, A&E, CNN, The Mike Douglas show, Hollywood's Leading Ladies, Entertainment tonight, CBS, MTV, CBS News, Abc News The insider, The Oprah Winfrey Show, BET Networks och Rock and Roll hall of fame. 

…And here is where the rubber truly hits the road for Marvin Gaye, with his career kicking into frighteningly high gear as a result of the stream of classics that came tumbling out of him, one after the other, colossal works such as What's Going On and Let's Get It On. Featuring special guest David Ritz, author of “Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye” and co-author of Marvin's biggest hit "Sexual Healing,” we stop and smell the roses this go-round, as it's not often you get a full-disclosure interview with a key eyewitness—and contributor—to some of the greatest music ever made. Not to be missed. Next Sunday, 8/21…Part 3: Marvin's Final Decade. - Official playlist curated by Dave on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7j64QRZlsXVdvnHOxRf22v?si=4c27dd985ef645da - American Bandstand from 1970 featuring “California Soul”, his swan song with Tammi Terrell: https://youtu.be/7tkQMTyHHy0 - Magnificent September 27, 1972 performance of “What's Going On / What's Happening, Brother?” from the 1973 documentary Save The Children: https://youtu.be/ppvBWIzvPvU - September 6, 1974 Live at The Midnight Special, the entire performance: https://youtu.be/pVLe2yXXVEE CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/discograffiti Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/discograffiti/message

Discograffiti pivots full Marvin with the 1st of three Marvin episodes, featuring special guest David Ritz, author of “Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye” and co-author of Marvin's biggest hit "Sexual Healing!"  Hear him talk in great detail about how it was written.  Don't miss this incredibly special event—8/7, 8/14, & 8/21! - Official playlist curated by Dave on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6swfPuwgPUMH6iitro0eIu?si=5ccda2ccd27e496b - 1962 “Hitch Hike” with Dick Clark intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGVJDX8XV5E - Marvin from the legendary 1964 T.A.M.I. Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPc8xgmZ35c - Super cool, supper club-vibed late night TV performance from May 30, 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99CsIsC7mig - 1969 black-tie Grapevine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ7BV8eXoGAGrapevine CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/discograffiti Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/discograffiti/message

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. 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/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. 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. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. 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. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. 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. And the I Never Loved a Man 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 Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

Hosts Nate Wilcox and Brooks Long discuss Etta James storied career and stormy personal life in this discussion of "Rage to Survive" the autobiography she wrote with David Ritz.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Hosts Nate Wilcox and Brooks Long discuss Etta James storied career and stormy personal life in this discussion of "Rage to Survive" the autobiography she wrote with David Ritz. Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Nate Wilcox and Brooks Long discuss Etta James storied career and stormy personal life in this discussion of "Rage to Survive" the autobiography she wrote with David Ritz. Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Nate Wilcox and Brooks Long discuss Etta James storied career and stormy personal life in this discussion of "Rage to Survive" the autobiography she wrote with David Ritz.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

You are smarter than you think you are and asking questions is the best way to learn. Today's featured author is ghostwriter, book content specialist, and LinkedIn Content Strategist, Dr. Emily Crookston. Dr. Emily and I talk about her entrepreneurial journey, why LinkedIn rocks for business owners, and more!!   Key Thing's You'll Learn: How the Pocket PhD. Became her business name. 3 Major Lessons Dr. Emily Learned from Being in Business for Over 5 Years What she wishes she knew about business before starting her business. Why LinkedIn is Dr. Emily's favorite social media platform, and the mindset entrepreneurs should have around it.     Dr. Emily's Site: https://www.thepocketphd.com/   Today's Sponsor, “Advance Yourself” Swag: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/dom-brightmon?ref_id=25940   The opening track is titled “Rising Sun Bump” by MadXRuler (formally known as Ruler Inc.). To hear the full track and support the artist, click the following link. https://madxruler.bandcamp.com/track/rising-sun-bump   You May Also Like…   270 – "Forever Employable" with Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/270-forever-employable-with-jeff-gothelf-jboogie/   155 - "Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business" with Laura Pennington Briggs (@sixfigurewriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/155-start-your-own-freelance-writing-business-with-laura-pennington-briggs-sixfigurewriter/   279 – “Peak Performance Ghostwriting” with Kathrin Hutson (@ExquisitelyDark): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/279-peak-performance-ghostwriting-with-kathrin-hutson-exquisitelydark/   Ep. 378 – “Writing Adventures with The Dialogue Doctor” with Jeff Elkins (@Jffelkins): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-378-writing-adventures-with-the-dialogue-doctor-with-jeff-elkins-jffelkins/   Ep. 421 – “How to Write Your Book In 21 Days” with Wendy Scheuring (@AuthorsWriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-421-how-to-write-your-book-in-21-days-with-wendy-scheuring-authorswriter/   173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/   248.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “A Self-Kick of Positivity” with Shelley Knight (@ShelleyFKnight): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/2485-host-2-host-special-a-self-kick-of-positivity-with-shelley-knight-shelleyfknight/   Ep. 382 – “Coming Out as Yourself” with Stephanie Lavigne (@stephlavigne): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-382-coming-out/   Ep. 444 – “Achieve with Grace” with Theresa Lambert: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-444-achieve-with-grace-with-theresa-lambert/   Ep. 371 – “The Power of Pivoting” with Monica Ortega (@monicagoesshow): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-371-the-power-of-pivoting-with-monica-ortega-monicagoesshow/   110 - "Self-Intelligence" with Jane Ransom (@TheJaneRansom): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/110-self-intelligence-with-jane-ransom-thejaneransom/   Ep. 442 – “Jungle Jean” with Geralyn Gendreau (@geralyngendreau): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-442-jungle-jean-with-geralyn-gendreau-geralyngendreau/   Ep. 308 – “Every Day Is A New Day” with Kim O'Neill (@KimsONaMission): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep308-every-day-is-a-new-day-with-kim-oneill-kimsonamission/   18 - "Inspirational Stuff" with Amy Brooks (@AmyReneeBrooks): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/18-inspirational-stuff-with-amy-brooks-amyreneebrooks/   Ep. 359 – “Think Yourself Confident & Successful” with Nathalie Plamondon-Thomas (@thinkyourselfAc): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-359-think-yourself-confident-successful-with-nathalie-plamondon-thomas-thinkyourselfac/   265 – “Hitting Rock Middle” with Sallie Holder (@SallieHolder17): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/265-hitting-rock-middle-with-sallie-holder-sallieholder17/   228 – “From Individual to Empire” with Laura Bull (@TheLauraBull): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/228-from-individual-to-empire-with-laura-bull-thelaurabull/

“If you tell a story in the right way, it really has an impact.” – Ira Rosen Today's featured international bestselling author is A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, former senior producer of Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer, and winner of 24 Emmys, 4 DuPont Awards, two RFK Awards, and two Peabodys, Ira Rosen. Ira and I talk about his book, “Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes”, how to be a great journalist, and more!!!   Key Thing's You'll Learn: What got Ira into Journalism. Ira's advice for aspiring journalists. The best question an interviewer can ask. His process for choosing which stories to use in his book. A few interviewing techniques Ira learned from his time at 60 Minutes. Where Ira believes where journalists can find the best stories.   Ira's Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089FVQPLW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1   The opening track is titled, “Greater Purpose (Instrumental)” by Marcus D. Cop the full track by clicking the following link. https://elevationjapan.bandcamp.com/album/greater-purpose-ep   You May Also Like…   Ep. 362 – “Constant Comedy” with Art Bell (@ArtBellwriter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-362-constant-comedy-with-art-bell-artbellwriter/   173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/   #GNPYear2 Episode 1 - "Dream Toolbox" with Ken Aldrich (@dream_toolbox): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/gnpyear2-episode-1-dream-toolbox-with-ken-aldrich-dream_toolbox/   Ep. 310.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “Everyday Awakening” with Sam Liebowitz (@SamLiebowitz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3105-host-2-host-special-everyday-awakening-with-sam-liebowitz-samliebowitz/   Ep. 332 – “Her Perfect Life” with Hank Phillippi Ryan (@HankPRyan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-332-her-perfect-life-with-hank-phillippi-ryan-hankpryan/   Ep. 306 – “Be The SPARK” with Simon T. Bailey (@SimonTBailey): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-306-be-the-spark-with-simon-t-bailey-simontbailey/   Ep. 320 – “See Your Life As a Movie” with Bob Brill (@BobBrillLA): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-320-see-your-life-as-a-movie-with-bob-brill-bobbrillla/   261 – “How Thoughts Become Things” with Douglas Vermeeren (@DougVermeeren): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/261-how-thoughts-become-things-with-douglas-vermeeren-dougvermeeren/   Ep. 412 – “Why Boomer, Xer, Millennial and Gen Z Labels Need Reimagined” with Dr. Rick Chromey (@MyGenTech2020): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-412-why-boomer-xer-millennial-and-gen-z-labels-need-reimagined-with-dr-rick-chromey-mygentech2020/   Ep. 397 – “Make Your Own Break” with Jennifer Lieberman (@iamjenlieberman): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-397-make-your-own-break/   Ep. 373.5 – “Business Secrets for Walking on Water” with Frank Zaccari (@FZaccari): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3735-business-secrets-for-walking-on-water-with-frank-zaccari-fzaccari/   Ep. 392 – “Chasing the Captain” with Terry Shepherd (@TheTShepherd): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-392-chasing-the-captain-with/   Ep. 319 – “The Hunter” with Jim Christina: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-319-the-hunter-with-jim-christina/   253.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “The University of Adversity” with Lance Essihos (@EssihosLance): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/2535-host-2-host-special-the-university-of-adversity-with-lance-essihos-essihoslance/   34 - "Life & The Sunday Series" with Mark Brodinsky (@markbrodinsky): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/34-life-the-sunday-series-with-mark-brodinsky-markbrodinsky/

“Writing is visualizing.” – Wendy Scheuring Today's featured author is ghostwriter, poet, and entrepreneur, Wendy Scheuring. Wendy and I talk about her program to help disciplined people to write their book in 21 days, choosing the right people to read your work and more writing goodness!   Key Thing's You'll Learn: How Wendy got into writing. How Wendy helps her ghostwriting clients to manifest their work. The main obstacle that holds writers back from publishing their books Who you need to choose as beta readers for your book.   Wendy's Site: https://authorswriter.com/   The opening track of this episode is titled “Light Wind” by MadXRuler. Click the following link to hear the full track and financially support the artist. https://madxruler.bandcamp.com/track/light-wind   You May Also Like…   173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/   18 - "Inspirational Stuff" with Amy Brooks (@AmyReneeBrooks): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/18-inspirational-stuff-with-amy-brooks-amyreneebrooks/   279 – “Peak Performance Ghostwriting” with Kathrin Hutson (@ExquisitelyDark): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/279-peak-performance-ghostwriting-with-kathrin-hutson-exquisitelydark/   Ep. 382 – “Coming Out as Yourself” with Stephanie Lavigne (@stephlavigne): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-382-coming-out/   Ep. 378 – “Writing Adventures with The Dialogue Doctor” with Jeff Elkins (@Jffelkins): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-378-writing-adventures-with-the-dialogue-doctor-with-jeff-elkins-jffelkins/   216 – “The Write Way” with Amy Collins (@askamycollins): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/216-the-write-way-with-amy-collins-askamycollins/   Ep. 332 – “Her Perfect Life” with Hank Phillippi Ryan (@HankPRyan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-332-her-perfect-life-with-hank-phillippi-ryan-hankpryan/   172 - "Write to Influence" with Carla Bass (@CarlaDBassWrite): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/172-write-to-influence-with-carla-bass-carladbasswrite/   Ep. 361 – “Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing” with Mark Leslie (@MarkLeslie): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-361-stark-reflections-on-writing-and-publishing-with-mark-leslie-markleslie/   Ep. 401 – “Spellbound Under the Spanish Moss” with Connor Judson Garrett (@GarretJudson): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-401-spellbound-under-the-spanish/   Ep. 311.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “More Than Enough” with Emma Dhesi (@emmadhesi): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3115-host-2-host-special-more-than-enough-with-emma-dhesi-emmadhesi/   Ep. 319 – “The Hunter” with Jim Christina: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-319-the-hunter-with-jim-christina/   120.5 (Local Author Bonus Special) [LABS] - "The Children of Time" with Victory Parsons (@ReadLiftRepeat): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/1205-local-author-bonus-special-labs-the-children-of-time-with-victory-parsons-readliftrepeat/   25 - "Escapism, History, & Good Advice" with Kate Dolan (@KDHays): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/25-escapism-history-good-advice-with-kate-dolan-kdhays/   1 - "Burn the Box" with Shawn Purvis @shawnepurvis: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/1-burn-the-box-with-shawn-purvis-shawnepurvis/   Ep. 349.5 – “Signs in the Rearview Mirror” with Kelly Smith (@kellys_author): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3495-signs-in-the-rearview-mirror-with-kelly-smith-kellys_author/

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back musician and historian Brooks Long for the second installment of their David Ritz book club covering “Divided Soul: The Life Of Marvin Gaye.” The conversation covers Gaye's troubled personal life and his many musical triumphs from the early days at Motown, through What's Going On and Sexual Healing.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

“Don't Lip Sync through life.” – Jim Knight Today's featured bestselling author is award-winning training and development veteran, culture catalyst, and podcaster, Jim Knight. Jim and I have a fun chat about his newest book, his background with Hard Rock International, and more rock star leadership goodness.   Key Thing's You'll Learn: The 2 biggest lessons Jim learned from being a Middle School Music teacher. How Jim survived an Alligator attack from his first hospitality job. Why social media is good for you when you use it correctly. What Jim's book buddies taught him about big books. Jim's advice for intrapreneurs that may want to become entrepreneurs.   Jim's Site: https://www.knightspeaker.com/ Jim's Books: https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Knight/e/B091XFBM5D/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1   The opening track is titled “Vash The Stampede” by Asis Galvin. To listen to the full track and support the artist monetarily, click the following link. https://asisgalvin.bandcamp.com/track/vash-the-stampede   You May Also Like…   128 - “The Adventures of Teacherman” with Brian D. Neal (@BrockSteel1): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/128-the-adventures-of-teacherman-with-brian-d-neal-brocksteel1/   Ep. 299 – “Bus Stop Wisdom” with Jerry Franklin Poe (@jerrypoe): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-299-bus-stop-wisdom-with-jerry-franklin-poe-jerrypoe/   112 – “The Art of Making Things Happen” with Steve Sims (@SteveDSims1): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/112-the-art-of-making-things-happen-with-steve-sims-stevedsims1/   167 - "7 Life Lessons From The Trailer Park" with Clyde Middleton: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/167-7-life-lessons-from-the-trailer-park-with-clyde-middleton/   228 – “From Individual to Empire” with Laura Bull (@TheLauraBull): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/228-from-individual-to-empire-with-laura-bull-thelaurabull/   245 – “Your Epic Life Blueprint” with Rock Thomas (@rockthomas): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/245-your-epic-life-blueprint-with-rock-thomas-rockthomas/   288 – “Be Patient, Be Present, Be Joyful” with Ryan Stanley (@RMS_RyanStanley): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/288-be-patient-be-present-be-joyful-with-ryan-stanley-rms_ryanstanley/   Ep. 336.5 (H2H Special) – “Own Your Career Own Your Life” with Andy Storch (@AndyStorch): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3365-h2h-special-own-your-career-own-your-life-with-andy-storch-andystorch/   104 - "Heart Reconnection" with Lee McCormick (@spiritrecovery): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/104-heart-reconnection-with-lee-mccormick-spiritrecovery/   151 - "The Superstar Paradox" with Keren Eldad (@CoachKeren): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/151-the-superstar-paradox-with-keren-eldad-coachkeren/   131 - "PurposeSearch" with Rob Howze (@Fitworldceo): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/131-purposesearch-with-rob-howze-fitworldceo/   #InspirationNuke – “The Impact of Influence” with Chip Baker, Charles Woods, Chris Holmes, Darius Bradley Sr., & Jeermal Sylvester: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/inspirationnuke-the-impact-of-influence-with-chip-baker-charles-woods-chris-holmes-darius-bradley-sr-jeermal-sylvester/   Ep. 343 – “Thrive” with Andrew Freedman (@afreedmanthrive): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-343-thrive-with-andrew-freedman-afreedmanthrive/   286 – “Leading Beyond A Crisis” with Ben Baker & Claire Chandler (@YourBrandMrktng): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/286-leading-beyond-a-crisis-with-ben-baker-claire-chandler-yourbrandmrktng/       274 – “Honest to Greatness” with Peter Kozodoy (@PeterKozodoy): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/274-honest-to-greatness-with-peter-kozodoy-peterkozodoy/   270 – "Forever Employable" with Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/270-forever-employable-with-jeff-gothelf-jboogie/   173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/   253.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “The University of Adversity” with Lance Essihos (@EssihosLance): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/2535-host-2-host-special-the-university-of-adversity-with-lance-essihos-essihoslance/   222 – “The Journey to Cloud Nine” with Jordan Gross: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/222-the-journey-to-cloud-nine-with-jordan-gross/   84 - "Innovation and Leadership" with Dr. Jeff Standridge: https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/84-innovation-and-leadership-with-dr-jeff-standridge/   278.5 (Host 2 Host Bonus Ep.) – “Key Conversations for Leaders” with John Ryan (@keyconvo): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/2785-host-2-host-bonus-ep-key-conversations-for-leaders-with-john-ryan-keyconvo/

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by musician and music historian Brooks Long to kick off their David Ritz book club with a discussion of his first book “Brother Ray: His Own Story” the classic autobiography Ritz co-wrote with Ray Charles. The conversation covers Charles' difficult childhood, his rise to fame with Atlantic Records, how he combined gospel and R&B to invent Soul music and his move to ABC Records and establishment as an American pop icon.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

“To have a sense of humor is to be human.” – Art Bell Today's featured bestselling author is a former media executive known for creating, building, and managing successful cable television channels, Art Bell. Art and I talk about his memoir chronicling his life when he became the founder of Comedy Central, taking bold action, and more!!!   Key Thing's You'll Learn: How Art came up with the idea for Comedy Central. Why you must be persistent and ready. Especially when you are pushing a new idea. The benefits of having competition. Why you should say yes to more out of life.   Art's Site: https://www.artbellwriter.com/ Art's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Bell/e/B0871PYWZV?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000 Art's Podcast, “Constant Comedy With Art Bell & Vinnie Favale”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/constant-comedy-with-art-bell-vinnie-favale-season-1/id1559804362   The opening track is titled "Morning Light" by Marcus D. Stop by his site and check out some more of his musical goodness by clicking the following link. https://marcusd.net/track/morning-light-2   You May Also Like…   235 – “The 2 Ingredients for Success” with Joe Scacciaferro (@CityFerro): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/235-the-2-ingredients-for-success-with-joe-scacciaferro-cityferro/   Ep. 320 – “See Your Life As a Movie” with Bob Brill (@BobBrillLA): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-320-see-your-life-as-a-movie-with-bob-brill-bobbrillla/   Ep. 310.5 (Host 2 Host Special) – “Everyday Awakening” with Sam Liebowitz (@SamLiebowitz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-3105-host-2-host-special-everyday-awakening-with-sam-liebowitz-samliebowitz/   34 - "Life & The Sunday Series" with Mark Brodinsky (@markbrodinsky): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/34-life-the-sunday-series-with-mark-brodinsky-markbrodinsky/   173 - "The God Groove" with David Ritz (@davidritz): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/173-the-god-groove-with-david-ritz-davidritz/

David Ritz is one of the most prolific biographers of music industry titans, writing about the lives of artists from BB King to Willie Nelson to Janet Jackson. David tells Marc about his obsessive pursuit of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and how chronicling their lives changed his. He also explains why he often enjoys ghost writing for a musician more than writing in his own voice. Plus, David talks with Marc about finding faith through the Blues and writing his own story for a change. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast.