Podcasts about How I Got Over

Music fan and Patron Rory Cox Zoomed-in all the way from Ljubljana Slovenia to discuss The Roots and their ninth studio album 'How I Got Over'. For this 2010 release, Questlove, Black Thought, Dice Raw and company concocted a diverse, slow-build mission statement on how to overcome.  Songs discussed in this episode: A Peace Of Light, The Seed, Walk Alone - The Roots; Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.) - Monsters Of Folk; Dear God 2.0 - The Roots, Dear God - XTC; Radio Daze, Now Or Never - The Roots; How I Got Over - Mahalia Jackson; How I Got Over, DillaTUDE, The Day, Right On - The Roots; Peach Plumb, Pear - Joanna Newsom; I'm Chief Kamanawanalea - The Turtles; Doin' It Again - The Roots; Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 2 - The Flaming Lips; The Fire, Tunnel Vision, Web 20/20, Web, Hustla - The Roots; Lyin'ass Bitch - Fishbone; How I Got Over (Late Night With The Roots LIVE) - The Roots

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

In this chunky episode, we get into the work of The Roots where whilst we would make an effort to bomb through discographies for the sake of time, we simply couldn't for The Roots because they seemed to depart from their past album nearly every time. The subtle switches in their music over time would end up creating a wide reach. From "Jam Session" Hip-Hop to dense concept albums, it was certainly worth taking the time.TIMESTAMPS:Weekly Music Roundup - (1:08) (Ben = Bold / Charlie = Italics) Lil Uzi Vert - Pink Tape The Alchemist - Fly High Curren$y & Harry Fraud - Vices LUCKI - s*x m*ney dr*gs Conway - Drumwork Stu Bangas x Chino XL - God's Carpenter D-Block Europe - DBE World Itee - PAPERS Maeta - When I Hear Your Name Speech Debelle - Sunday Dinner On a Monday Elmiene - EL-MEAN Splurgeboys - Jet Pack Flows Meshell Ndegeocello - The Omnichord Real Book Terrace Martin - Fine Tune Topic Intro/Ben's Research House - (16:56)Organix - (27:12)Do You Want More?!!!??! - (35:17)Illadelph Halflife - (44:37)Things Fall Apart - (57:27)Phrenology - (1:12:59)The Tipping Point - (1:23:04)Game Theory - (1:34:15)Rising Down - (1:40:59)How I Got Over - (1:46:37)"Undun" & "...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin" - (1:50:55)Ranking The Roots - (2:05:31)Lighter Note - (2:08:57)

Justin speaks with Lisa Fields and Dr. CJ Rhodes about the AND Campaign's new docuseries How I Got Over. This series will look into the role orthodoxy played in the establishment of the Black Church and in its social action, education and in its music. How I Got Over premiers February 13th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does it take to be successful in eCommerce?   With so many different businesses, products, customers, business owners, and variables... there is no ONE right way to grow a 7-figure eCommerce business.   But after working with and talking to so many eCommerce business owners there are 7 common characteristics and habits that the most successful ones have. And this isn't necessarily just about those who were making 7 figures in revenue - because revenue doesn't mean anything without profit and happiness.   Links Mentioned 127.How to Launch a New Product or Promotion in Your eCommerce Business 104. How Many Emails a Week Should You Send 78. How I Got Over my Fear of Live Video 20. Power of the Pre-Launch & How to Thrive in a Crowded Market 186. How to Optimize Your Marketing with Megan Tellez The Lounge eCommerce Membership   Get the Full Show Notes eCommerceBadassery.com/189   FREE Resource Library  Every freebie I've created to help you grow the traffic, sales, and profit in your eCommerce Business, all in one place! http://ecommercebadassery.com/freestuff   Want More Badassery? Join the eCommerce Badassery Facebook Group and connect with other eCommerce entrepreneurs just like you!  http://ecommercebadassery.com/facebook Let's connect on Instagram @ecommercebadassery https://instagram.com/ecommercebadassery   Ready to Level Up Your Email Marketing & eCommerce Business? Try the Klaviyo Email Marketing Platform - Built specifically for eCommerce, serving entrepreneurs, and iconic brands.   https://ecommercebadassery.com/klaviyo Work With Me Interested in getting my brain focused on YOUR business? Learn more about my services…   Email Marketing Help: https://ecommercebadassery.com/email-marketing eCommerce Help: https://ecommercebadassery.com/ecommerce-help   Rate, Review, & Subscribe Like what you heard? I'd be forever grateful if you'd rate, review and subscribe to the show! Not only does it help your fellow eCommerce entrepreneurs find the eCommerce Badassery podcast; it's also valuable feedback for me to continue bringing you the content you want to hear.    Review Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ecommerce-badassery/id1507457683 This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:  Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

November is National Adoption Month, but adoptee (those who are adopted) voices are often missing from the conversation. We're talking about Speaking Life & Adoption with Iris Bryant, an adoptee and adoption advocate! Her adoption journey as well as her gifts as a writer, speaker, educator, and podcast host have created space for her to help women with hidden hurts find purpose on the other side of pain. Iris Peterson Bryant and her husband are the parents of four children and have one adorable grandchild. She has served as an educator in the public schools of North Carolina since 1998. In addition to serving as the chief encouragement officer for those who follow her on social media. She also co-authored the book, How I Got Over, with four other inspiring women. She loves coffee, milk chocolate, and watching the sunrise—preferably at the beach! She firmly believes God's promise in Romans 8:28, and she desires to help others believe and apply that truth to their lives. She desires to help women maximize each moment and season they encounter and show them God doesn't waste any of our experiences--whether good or bad. Iris and her husband, David, reside in eastern North Carolina. Connect with Iris on Facebook and Instagram @irispbryant, her website irispbryant.com, and via email at iris@irispbryant.com. Join the conversation as she shares her adoptee experience and valuable insight about how we can speak life to those impacted by adoption. Are you ready to speak life? Let's get started! This episode was broadcast live on November 4, 2022. I would love to connect with you live on Fridays at 9 PM EST. Follow me on Facebook and YouTube @SherrySpeaksLife to join the live broadcast. I hope to see you soon! Also, follow me on Instagram @sherryspeakslife. Let me know our thoughts about today's episode at sherry@sherryspeakslife.com. Listen to my adoption story on Iris's podcast Hidden Jewels Podcast at irispbryant.com or adopteesinarms.com. Adopteesinarms.com is an amazing resource for adoptees. It's where we support and encourage each other through our stories, our faith, and the Word of God. Please connect with us there! Register for my FREE Overcoming Self-Sabotage Workshop on November 19, 2022, at 10 AM EST at bit.ly/overcomesabotage. Visit sherryspeakslife.com/book-me to learn about my coaching program for women. It is designed to help you get unstuck, take action, and fulfill your God-given assignment. Book your free initial consultation to see how I can partner with you to reach your goals. Visit sherryspeakslife.com to learn more about me, my books, and other services, and to join the 7-Day Speak Life Prayer Challenge.

We had the pleasure of interviewing “Captain” Kirk Douglas over Zoom video.The Roots guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas issues a brand new single and music video entitled “We Can Be One” under his solo imprint Hundred Watt Heart. The New York-based GRAMMY® Award-winning guitarist and vocalist steps into the spotlight with this introspective and infectious anthem. The track hinges on a wah-pedal drenched funk riff, simmering beat, and boisterous horn section. It locks into an Afrobeat-infused strut as he repeats an undeniable and uplifting mantra on the hook, “We can be one.” The Alexander Fischetti-directed accompanying video captures this spirit and highlights Kirk's powerful presence as a frontman in his own right. It harnesses the track's psychedelic sound and influences from funk to jazz to jam and everything in between, establishing Kirk as a genre-defying master of his craft. Most importantly, “We Can Be One” paves the way for his anxiously awaited new full-length solo LP—due out very soon. Stay tuned for more from “Captain” Kirk Douglas. Audiences worldwide recognize “Captain” Kirk Douglas's scorching singular style as a six-string powerhouse. Joining The Roots back in 2003, he has supplied guitar and background vocals for a series of critically acclaimed Top 10 albums on the Billboard Top 200, including The Tipping Point [2004], Game Theory [2006], Rising Down [2008], How I Got Over [2010], and Wake Up! [2010] with John Legend. The latter garnered a pair of GRAMMY® Awards, namely “Best R&B Album” and “Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance” for “Hang On In There.” In addition, his guitar powered The Roots's tastemaker-approved …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin in 2014. Between countless sold-out live shows, he holds down guitar duties for the band nightly on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. He also notably forces with Gibson Guitars to release his own signature SG model. We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com. www.BringinitBackwards.com #podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #TheRoots #HundredWattHeart #CaptainKirkDouglas #NewMusic #zoom Listen & Subscribe to BiB https://www.bringinitbackwards.com/follow/ Follow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpod

La mayoría de nosotros tiende a basar su vida en lo que hacemos, nuestras obras, no la gracia como un favor inmerecido. Nos retamos a nosotros mismos a "hacerlo mejor", convencidos de que el "éxito" depende de nosotros mismos, nuestra entrega, esfuerzo y disciplina. Es cierto, nos dicen, que hace falta algo de suerte, quizás incluso la ayuda de Dios o quien sea, pero como dice la canción del grupo de Liverpool con la que empezamos este programa,Echo & The Bunnymen "tienes que ser tu propio salvador" (Silver, 1984)... La gracia no es un complemento, algo que se añade a nuestras obras. Si como dice la cantautora estadounidense Sharon Van Etten, estamos "intentando salvarnos a nosotros mismos" (Save Yourself, 2020) desconocemos que la salvación es por la gracia de Dios, un regalo que recibimos libre e inmerecidamente. Stephen Stills descubrió que "Jesús dio su amor gratis" (Jesus Gave Love Away For Free). Así se llama la canción que grabó con el grupo que formó después de Buffalo Springfield y CSNY (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), Manassas en 1972. Uno de los secretos mejor guardados hoy, incluso entre los mismos cristianos, es que Jesús hace todo. No sólo somos salvos por gracia, sino que vivimos por gracia. Todos pensamos que si nos esforzamos, seremos recompensados. La historia de Jesús en la que hoy nos detenemos en nuestro viaje en nuestra Ruta por los 66 libros de la Biblia es la de los obreros de la viña (Mateo 20:1-16). Nos enseña que Dios trata con nosotros sobre la base de la gracia, no en consideración a nuestros méritos o falta de ellos. Cada jornalero recibe el salario completo del día, independientemente del tiempo que ha trabajado. Ya que igual que no podemos ganar nuestra salvación, sino recibirla como un regalo, tampoco podemos ganar las bendiciones de Dios, sino recibirlas como un regalo por medio de Jesucristo. Esta parábola nos enseña que el Reino de Dios no se basa en los méritos, sino en la gracia. Dios no nos debe nada. El no nos necesita. Somos nosotros los que le necesitamos a Él. Una de las películas que mejor ilustra la gracia de Dios es el film danés "El festín de Babette" (1988). Basado en un cuento de Isak Dinesen, el seudónimo de la autora de "Memorias de Africa", Karen Blixen, se desarrolla originalmente en un ambiente pietista luterano de Noruega. El director Gabriel Axel la traslada a la región danesa de Jutlandia, Escuchamos escenas de la película, comentadas por José de Segovia con la banda sonora original, para descubrir con el personaje del general Lowenhielm que: "el hombre en su debilidad y miopía cree que tiene que tomar decisiones en la vida; temblamos ante las opciones; y después de haber elegido, tememos habernos equivocado; pero cuando se nos abren los ojos, descubrimos que la gracia de Dios es infinita; sólo tenemos que esperarla con confianza y recibirla con gratitud". Si la gracia de Dios no nos sorprende es porque no creemos realmente que seamos tan malos. "El tigre de Galés", Tom Jones, se pregunta ahora al comienzo su álbum de "Alabanza y culpa" (2010), "¿Qué hay de bueno en mí?". El clásico del góspel afroamericano que hizo Clara Ward en 1951 y popularizó Mahalia Jackson, "¿Cómo lo superé?" (How I Got Over), lo versiona ahora en 2018, una banda británica de rock alternativo llamada Reef. Nos dice que es "mirando a Jesús, que murió por mí, sangró y sufrió, colgado en el Calvario". Acabamos el programa con el conmovedor tema de Bob Dylan, "¿Qué puedo hacer por ti?" (What Can I Do For You?) de su álbum "Salvado", contando la historia que ha revelado ahora el baterista Jim Kelter a la revista inglesa Mojo de cómo dejó el estudio de grabación, después de trabajar con los Beatles, para seguir al actual Premio Nobel de Literatura en su gira como "cristiano nacido de nuevo". Es el asombro de la gracia cuando uno se da cuenta que si Cristo ha "dado su vida por mí, ¿qué puedo hacer yo" por Él? En nuestra próxima parada seguiremos considerando este capítulo 20 de la Buena Noticia según Mateo...

The unknown Messiahs of Glory deliver a devastating rendition of the gospel classic, "How I Got Over."

In Part 3 of their opening series on The Great Speeches of History, Sam and Nick discuss perhaps the definitive speech on equality in America, Martin Luther King's classic "I Have A Dream." How did King's experiences as a Black child in Atlanta, including losing one of his best friends and being sent to the back of a bus, shape his worldview? How did he end up writing a classic text about his philosophy of nonviolent resistance on scraps of paper in a jail cell? And how did the Queen of Gospel help him improvise the most famous section of his March on Washington address? Join us as we break down what Sam thinks is the greatest speech ever delivered. Show notes: MLK, "I Have A Dream" (1963; text; video) MLK, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963) MLK, "I've Been To The Mountaintop" (1968; text; video) MLK, Autobiography (1998) MLK, Why We Can't Wait (1964) Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (1849) Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) Samarth Desai, "Looking Back: Nullification in American History" (2022) Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation (2005) James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) Credits: Mahalia Jackson, live performance of "How I Got Over" from the Internet Archive

Join us for the Celebration Praise And Worship Service At New Life At Calvary. Pastor Kellie Part 2 The Chosen "Sabbath". Praise and worship lead by the Celebration Praise Team. Special music by Gwen Coats singing "How I Got Over". We lift up the name of Jesus Christ at New Life At Calvary located at 2020 E. 79th St. Cleveland, OH 44103 and online at nlac.tv. Donations to support this ministry can be made on our website at nlac.tv or by Cash App at $2NLAC.

Join us for the Celebration Praise And Worship Service At New Life At Calvary. Pastor Kellie Part 2 The Chosen "Sabbath". Praise and worship lead by the Celebration Praise Team. Special music by Gwen Coats singing "How I Got Over". We lift up the name of Jesus Christ at New Life At Calvary located at 2020 E. 79th St. Cleveland, OH 44103 and online at nlac.tv. Donations to support this ministry can be made on our website at nlac.tv or by Cash App at $2NLAC.

Join Kristin and her guest Iris Peterson Bryant as she shares her life story. Iris gives us the prospective of one who was adopted and bravely shares with us the struggles she had along the way. Although she was raised in a very loving home, her reunification did not go as she had hoped. Iris is now being used by God to minister to adoption families and you won't want to miss this show.   About Our Guest: Iris Peterson Bryant is a writer, speaker, educator, podcast host, and adoption advocate. She and her husband are the parents of four children and have one adorable grandchild. She has served as an educator in the public schools of North Carolina since 1998. Currently, she serves as a district-level Instructional Coach, providing support for high school English and Social Studies teachers. ​ In addition to serving as the chief encouragement officer for those who follow her on social media. She also co-authored the book, How I Got Over, with four other inspiring women. She loves coffee, milk chocolate, and watching the sunrise—preferably at the beach! ​ She firmly believes God's promise in Romans 8:28, and she desires to help others believe and apply that truth to their lives. She desires to help women maximize each moment and season they encounter and show them God doesn't waste any of our experiences--whether good or bad. ​ Iris and her husband, David, reside in eastern North Carolina.   https://www.irispbryant.com

Request Episode #2Intro/Outro: Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N' Roses (requested by Steve)1. Walk With You by Edwin McCain (requested by Barrett)2. It's Been Awhile by Staind (requested by Jessica)3. Song for Zula by Phosphorescent (requested by Steve)4. How I Got Over by Aretha Franklin (requested by Gene)5. Indian Outlaw by Tim McGraw (requested by David)

A tribute to the extraordinary life of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson...possibly the greatest singer you've never heard of. Music (all performed by Mahalia Jackson): “I’m On My Way,” author and origin unknown. Traditional gospel song. “Didn’t It Rain,” author unknown. Traditional gospel song. First arranged by Henry Thacker Burleigh in 1919. “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” first published in 1927 in the hymnal, “Spirituals Triumphant Old and New.” Traditional African-American spiritual. “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” author and origin unknown. Traditional gospel song. “Move On Up a Little Higher,” written by Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, 1946. “How I Got Over,” composed and published by Clara Ward, 1951. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” music from a traditional gospel song. Lyrics by Thomas Dorsey, 1932. “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” lyrics by Civilia Martin, music by Charles Gabriel, 1905. “Elijah Rock,” author and origin unknown. Traditional spiritual. Interview Clips: “Mahalia Jackson Interview 1971,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-UwQMkWLKE). “How Martin Luther King went Off Script in ‘I Have a Dream’,” on Wall Street Journal YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxlOlynG6FY).

On the occassion of our 800th episode, hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot look back on the show with past producer and listener feedback. They also review new albums from Tune-Yards, serpentwithfeet and La Femme.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3rozD7uBecome a member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/36zIhZK Record a Voice Memo: https://bit.ly/2PaahgL Featured Songs:Tune-Yards, "nowhere, man," sketchy, 4AD, 2021Tune-Yards, "hold yourself.," sketchy, 4AD, 2021Tune-Yards, "be not afraid.," sketchy, 4AD, 2021Tune-Yards, "make it right.," sketchy, 4AD, 2021serpentwithfeet, "Heart Storm," DEACON, Secretly Canadian, 2021serpentwithfeet, "Malik," DEACON, Secretly Canadian, 2021serpentwithfeet, "Fellowship," DEACON, Secretly Canadian, 2021La Femme, "Paradigme," Paradigmes, Disque Pointu, 2021La Femme, "Cool Colorado," Paradigmes, Disque Pointu, 2021La Femme, "Disconnexion," Paradigmes, Disque Pointu, 2021Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Live on Sound Opinions)," The Suburbs, Merge, 2010David Bowie, "Rebel Rebel," Diamond Dogs, RCA, 1974Talking Heads, "Once In A Lifetime (Live)," Stop Making Sense, Sire, 1984Thom Yorke, "I Want None Of This (Live on Sound Opinions)," Help - A Day In The Life, Independiente, 2005Radiohead, "The National Anthem (Live at Lollapalooza)," Kid A, Parlophone, 2000Bob Dylan, "Moonshiner," The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991, Columbia, 1991Wilco, "Ashes of American Flags (Live on Sound Opinions)," Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Nonesuch, 2002Wilco, "She's A Jar (Live on Sound Opinions)," Summerteeth, Reprise, 1999Carole King, "I Feel the Earth Move," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Home Again," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Amythyst Kiah, "Black Myself," (Single), Rounder, 2021Steely Dan, "Reelin' In the Years," Can't Buy a Thrill, ABC, 1973Bob Gibson, "Ballad of Fred and Mark," Bob Gibson, Capitol, 1970King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, "K.G.L.W.," L.W., Flightless, 2021Aretha Franklin, "How I Got Over," Amazing Grace, Atlantic, 1972Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter," Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969

Includes I Can’t Turn You Loose, Chain of Fools, Ain’t No Way, Think, Do Right Woman, How I Got Over (with choir), Day Dreaming, Rock Steady(alternate mix) I Never Loved A Man, I Say A Little Prayer, Since You’ve Been Gone, Natural Woman, Respect, and Don’t Play That Song.

This week we’re discussing Black Thought and Questlove’s The Roots. While they are known these days for being the house band for the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Roots have a long, diverse, and fascinating discography. This is a rare artist for us to cover because they are still active and releasing albums, but an important band nonetheless. Dig it.Closing track: “You Got Me” from Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005)Check out our episode playlists on Spotify!https://open.spotify.com/user/motherpuncherincJoin our Patreon for bonus episodes, early access to shows, and more!https://www.patreon.com/everyalbumeverMerch available now!https://teespring.com/stores/pandermonkeyInstagram:Follow Mike @popejesseventura for show updates and @pandermonkey for original musicFollow Alex @motherpuncherMike’s Picks:Game Theory (2006) — Best Album…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin (2014) — Personal FavoriteRising Down (2008) — Worst AlbumIlladelph Halflife (1996) — Least FavoriteAlex’s Picks:Things Fall Apart (1999) — Best AlbumPhrenology (2002) — Personal FavoriteOrganix (1993) — Worst Album, Least FavoriteAlbums we discussed this episode…Organix (1993)Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995)Illadelph Halflife (1996)Things Fall Apart (1999)Phrenology (2002)The Tipping Point (2004)Game Theory (2006)Rising Down (2008)How I Got Over (2010)Undun (2011)…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin (2014)

Season 1 of the CC: America Podcast was titled "How I Got Over." I decided to wrap up season 1 in the 9th month after launching because it's symbolic of the catalyst for me to start this show, a month long miscarriage. CC: America has been a dream of mine since August 2010 but after a series of fits and starts I finally mustered up the courage to proceed and not let anything stand in the way. Eighteen episodes later we are heading into season 2 with the first episode airing on Sunday, December 13th with special guest, KimaniAmor. Listen to this recap to get a high level overview of each episode in season 1 so you can get caught up on how the CC: America Podcast is helping you get mentally FIT. It's the FAITH, INSPIRATION & TRANSFORMATION for me!  S2 EP 1: KimaniAmor, She's a Goal Getter! Tune in to hear how KimaniAmor makes crushing her goals look easy. What's her secret sauce? How does she do it all? This is a show that you don't want to miss. Connect with KimaniAmor Website: www.kimaniamor.com IG & Twitter: @LoveMoreKi Facebook: Shima Latrice and KimaniAmor Rate, comment, subscribe & share Follow our blog at ccamericapodcast.com The CC: America Podcast is available for replay on Apple Podcasts, Podbean, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Amazon.  New episodes are added every other week. On occasion a new show will be added weekly.   Be sure to also follow the show on IG @ccamericallc and Facebook at Confidence Centers of America (@ccamericallc). Season 1 guest bios are included in their respective episodes.  Opening Music Surface by Loxbeats | https://soundcloud.com/loxbeats      Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com        Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Your Hosts This Episode: Patrique G.O.Z. In this episode Patrique is joined by G.O.Z. of RYM's Hip Hop discussion scene to discuss one of the most eclectic but also at times mislabelled groups in Rap: The Roots (and also Black Thought solo). The boys discuss everyone nook and cranny of The Roots expansive career and try to determine the perspectives many hold and have created for the self-instrumented group and also the continued rise of Black Thought as a prominent solo artist and force in the world of rap. Intro Music: Junclassic - "Borrowed Time (Instrumental)" Outro Music: Kankick - "Stagnated Pace" Edited / Produced by: Kittenpuke Find us on RYM through our provided Profile names! Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro Discussion 11:59 - Organix 23:38 - Do You Want More?!!!??! 36:22 - Illadelph Hallife 47:54 - Things Fall Apart 58:55 - Phrenology 1:09:56 - The Tipping Point 1:19:05 - Game Theory 1:28:43 - Rising Down 1:44:44 - How I Got Over 1:57:50 - Wake Up! w/ John Legend 2:00:48 - Kanye Time! and Joe Rogan Discussion 2:06:26 - Betty Wright: The Movie w/ Betty Wright 2:07:46 - Undun 2:16:48 - Money Making Jam Boys 2:21:04 - Wise Up Ghost w/ Elvis Costello 2:21:38 - Discussing Roots Members 2:26:08 - ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin 2:33:43 - Black Thought's Solo Career 2:34:52 - Streams of Thought Vol. 1 2:42:04 - Streams of Thought Vol. 2 2:51:11 - Streams of Thought Vol. 3 2:57:50 - Where Does Black Thought Rank? and Wrap Up

Song Title: He's Got the Whole World in His HandsSong by: Mahalia JacksonPodcast Vocals: Gail NoblesKeyboard: Gail NoblesInfo: WikipediaHello! I'm Gail Nobles and today's topic is Mahalia Jackson on The Gospel Greats. A show about great gospel singers. Did you know Mahalia Jackson once appeared on Sesame Street? It was 1969 when she sung the gospel "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands". (singing) ......... Mahalia would sing something like that, and she would never sing a song the same way all the time. Mrs. Jackson was a great gospel singer, and I was surprised to find out that she had appeared on Sesame Street.Mahalia would refuse to sing any but religious songs or indeed to sing at all in surroundings that she considered inappropriate. But she sang on the radio and on television. With her mainstream success, Jackson was criticized by some gospel purists she complained about her hand-clapping and foot-stomping and about her bringing "Jazz into the church". She had many notable accomplishments during this period, including her performance of many songs in the 1958 film St. Louis Blues, singing "Trouble of the World" in 1959's Imitation of Life, and recording with Percy Faith. At the March on Washington in 1963, Jackson sang in front of 250,000 people "How I Got Over" and "I Been Buked and I Been Scorned". Martin Luther king Jr. made his I Have a Dream speech there. She also sang "Take My Hand Precious Lord" at his funeral after he was assassinated in 1968. Mahalia made many performances and recorded about 30 albums (mostly for Columbia Records) during her career, and her 45 rpm records included a dozen "gold" - million sellers. Jackson's last album was What The World Needs Now (1969). The next year, in 1970, she and Louis Armstrong performed "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" together. She ended her career in 1971 with a concert in Germany and the she returned to the U.S., she made ne of her final television appearances on The Flip Wilson Show. There is a quote left from Mahalia Jackson. She said, "I sing God's music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues." When I hear Mahalia Jackson sing, I'm reminded to remember this song ......

Dr. Pia L. Scott is a Counselor, Speaker, Consultant, Community Servant, and Educator. As Principal Consultant of the P L Scott Group, she delivers services in the areas of counseling, workforce development, and more.As a Licensed Professional Counselor she focuses on providing comprehensive counseling services to the clients she serves. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated and the host of the “How I Got Over” podcast which provides a platform for guests to speak on topics that impact the community. Referred to as “Dr. P” she has presented at Columbia University, University of North Carolina at Durham, South Carolina State University, Drexel University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Georgia State University. After listening to "Dr P" you will discover ,"How To Profit From Your Loss."

These guys are super talented. Make sure you watch this video as it was artfully done. https://youtu.be/zI4D1QOLGuM

De net uitgekomen film met de registratie van het gospelconcert door Aretha Franklin in januari 1972 in de Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is meesterlijk, alsof je bij het concert zit. Franklin was 29 jaar oud, zong beter dan ooit, opgezweept door het het Southern Californian Gospel Choir van de swingende dominee James Cleveland. Franklin laat horen dat blues en soul schatplichtig zijn aan de gospel. Zo zingt ze Wholy Holy van Marvin Gaye. Amazing Grace, het titelnummer een prachtige gospel traditional uit 1772 is een tien minuten durend nummer - Felix draait het in zijn geheel. De gospel zangeres, jarenlang the Queen of Gospel genoemd, Carla Ward, zit vooraan in de kerk, van haar horen we in Stormy een opname uit 1960: How I Got Over. Mick Jagger en Charlie Watts waren op het zelfde moment in Los Angeles om Exile on Main Street af te mixen; ze staan achterin de kerk, Jagger klapt fanatiek mee, daarom in de rubriek ‘Music of My Live’, het nummer 'Shine a Light' waarvan gezegd wordt dat het beïnvloed is door Aretha’s gospelconcert. De band die Franklin begeleidde bestond uit musici die jarenlang met haar samenspeelden, waaronder de uitstekende bassist Cornell Dupree, van hem horen we een mooie blues met gospel-tinten van zijn album ‘Doin’Alright' uit 2011.

In this installment of the Detroit Worldwide Podcast, Marquis connects with Grammy-nominated, international recording artist and producer, Brandon Williams about his development as a  musician and the inspiration behind his latest album, "The Love Factor".    Brandon also discusses what it means to be an independent artist in the recording industry and how looking within helped him to define his sound as a multi-instrumentalist and producer.    About Brandon:   Brandon Williams is a multi-instrumentalist, artist, and Grammy-nominated producer. Raised in Detroit, Michigan, his love for music was cultivated at early age after learning to play several instruments during his formative years in the city. Under the tutelage and mentorship of Grammy and Billboard super producer, Michael J. Powell (Anita Baker), he has honed skills as an engineer and arranger becoming a "go-to guy"  for artists in a variety of genres.  As a musician and producer he has worked alongside and  has lent his hand to many artists including Pharoahe Monch, Bobby Creekwater, Jadakiss, Dr. Dre, Jazmine Sullivan, Foley (Miles Davis), Alchemist, Xzibit, Lin Rountree, Barrett Strong, Jay Electronica, Leon Ware,  Eminem and countless others.  In 2009, he collaborated with Vickie Winans on “How I Got Over”. The album earned him nine Stellar Awards nominations (winning one), a Grammy Award nomination, and a NAACP Image Award. In 2014 he released his full-length debut album titled XII which featured a variety of artists including Robert Glasper, Jesse Boykins III, Alex Isley, and Pharoahe Monch. The follow up to his debut album XII is a continued homage to the “producer album” a’la Quincy Jones, and features noteworthy collaborations from emerging and enduring artists like Alex Isley, Brian McKnight Jr., and Eric Roberson.  The Love Factor was released on September 13, 2019 and debuted on iTunes R&B charts at number 7 before ending the weekend at the number one spot. The album's warm reception is due in large part to the success of The Love Factor’s 2nd single “Don’t Give Up On Love” a collaboration between Williams and Eric Roberson that has been a long time in the making.   Connect with Brandon: Website: www.bwilliamsmusic.com Facebook:  Brandon Williams  Instagram:  @bwilliamsmusic Twitter: @bwilliamsmusic Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bwilliamsmusic

Tónlistin sem hljómar í þættinum: Nana Mouskouri: In The Upper Room; The Pilgrim Travelers: Mother Bowed; The Soul Stirrers & Sam Cook: Jesus Gave Me Water; Soul Stirrers & Johnny Taylor: God Is Standing By; Famous Ward Singers: Surely God Is Able og How I Got Over; Mahalia Jackson: Walk Over God's Heaven; Swan Silvertones: Mary Don't You Weep; Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock; Harmonizing Four: Wade In The Water; Gospel Hummingbirds: Safety Zone og Step Out.

Tónlistin sem hljómar í þættinum: Nana Mouskouri: In The Upper Room; The Pilgrim Travelers: Mother Bowed; The Soul Stirrers & Sam Cook: Jesus Gave Me Water; Soul Stirrers & Johnny Taylor: God Is Standing By; Famous Ward Singers: Surely God Is Able og How I Got Over; Mahalia Jackson: Walk Over God's Heaven; Swan Silvertones: Mary Don't You Weep; Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock; Harmonizing Four: Wade In The Water; Gospel Hummingbirds: Safety Zone og Step Out.

Tónlistin sem hljómar í þættinum: Nana Mouskouri: In The Upper Room; The Pilgrim Travelers: Mother Bowed; The Soul Stirrers & Sam Cook: Jesus Gave Me Water; Soul Stirrers & Johnny Taylor: God Is Standing By; Famous Ward Singers: Surely God Is Able og How I Got Over; Mahalia Jackson: Walk Over God's Heaven; Swan Silvertones: Mary Don't You Weep; Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock; Harmonizing Four: Wade In The Water; Gospel Hummingbirds: Safety Zone og Step Out.

Tónlistin sem hljómar í þættinum: Nana Mouskouri: In The Upper Room; The Pilgrim Travelers: Mother Bowed; The Soul Stirrers & Sam Cook: Jesus Gave Me Water; Soul Stirrers & Johnny Taylor: God Is Standing By; Famous Ward Singers: Surely God Is Able og How I Got Over; Mahalia Jackson: Walk Over God's Heaven; Swan Silvertones: Mary Don't You Weep; Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock; Harmonizing Four: Wade In The Water; Gospel Hummingbirds: Safety Zone og Step Out.

On episode 17 of the No Vaseline Podcast, the guys discuss How I Got Over? And is this country the way it is now because people bought their way to the top? What are your thoughts? Drop a comment below!

Tonight, on Proper Propaganda: new tracks from People Under the Stairs, Sean Price & Small Professor, and John River. But first, new from Derek Minor featuring Deraj and nobigdyl, “All Hail the King.” “All Hail the King” Derek Minor feat. Deraj & nobigdyl “Refrigerator P!” Sean Price & Small Professor feat. Rock & DJ Revolution “The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas” People Under the Stairs Interlude: Stephen Colbert BG Music: “Tall Tales” by Marlowe “Exposed” Martell Webster “The Academy” John River “The Latin American Dream” Mr. Criminal “Life in Crooklyn” Planit Hank feat. Jeru the Damaja, Buckshot, & AZ “From the 718” Pete Miser “Deep Cover” Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg “Brooklyn” Mos Def Interlude: Michael Che “We Run This” Missy Elliott “How I Got Over” The Roots “I’m Black and I’m Proud” Brand Nubian “Work That” Mary J. Blige “Keep it Locked” Pete Miser “Old School” Tupac

How I Got Over by Pastor Charlie Dates

On today's Faith podcast, Craig, Deb and I draw on John 13:35 and the Qur'on (Chapter 49, Verse 13) and both of their messages of looking upon each other as a family. In the gospel, Jesus talks to Peter and implores him to love one another – it's through your love and fellowship with others that people will know you are my disciple. We revisit the Reclaiming Jesus Project (http://www.reclaimingjesus.org), founded by Bishop Michael Curry, to spread love and compassion to all, especially those who don't agree with you. We also share the story of the ex-Klansman, Abdussalam Sipes, who moved away from racism to Islam and love. You can read his story here: https://www.soundvision.com/article/interview-with-an-ex-racist-from-the-kkk-to-islam. We also reflect on the great Aretha Franklin, who passed away this Thursday – she was not only the Queen of Soul, she was a deeply personal singer who brought emotion and the power of the church to secular music in a way no one has ever done before, and brought empowerment to women, especially black women. We share a gospel recording of hers, How I Got Over, that she did with the James Cleveland Chorus. As always, let us know what you think and feel on this podcast, via on facebook, Twitter or Instagram (@Reg_Clay) and Deb Carriger (@DLCarriger) and we hope you have a blessed week.

More highlights from the National Recording Registry. Records by: Merle Travis, Clara Ward, Benny Goodman, The Mississippi Sheiks, Will Rogers, Victor Herbert,  The Ink Spots and the ivory-billed woodpecker. Records include: How I Got Over, Sitting On Top of the World, The Man I Love, If I Didn't Care, Luck Be A Lady, the Moonlight Sonata, Sixteen Tons and The Dream Medley.

A tribute to musicians who died in 1973, Including: Clara Ward, Gene Krupa, Ben Webster, Kid Ory, Memphis Minnie, Vaughan Monroe, Joseph Szigeti, Willie the Lion Smith and Noel Coward. Music includes: Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Drum Boogie, Brahms Violin Concerto, How I Got Over, The Things We Did Last Summer and Ory's Creole Trombone.

Viemos com algo que todo Wander gosta: uma edição com mais de duas horas de duração! Hahahaha. No #Wanda115, estamos com a Maíra Medeiros do canal "Nunca Te Pedi Nada" para jogarmos o game do Spotify aleatório, dar um grande lotus à eleição do Trump e falar do trailer de A Bela e a Fera que está belíssimo! Ahhhh e ainda tem receita Wanda para a felicidade de todo mundo! Essa é uma edição com muito amorzinho! Hahahaha. ASSINE O PODCAST NO ITUNES LINK > bit.ly/AssineWandaNoItunes RSS FEED DO MILKSHAKE LINK > bit.ly/RSSdoWANDA WANDA NO FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PodcastWanda WANDA NO TWITTER: @PodcastWanda WANDA NO INSTAGRAM: @podcastwanda VEM CONTRIBUIR COM O WANDA! Patreon: www.patreon.com/podcastwanda Padrim: www.padrim.com.br/podcastwanda ME AJUDA, WANDA "Não sei como partir pro beijo, me ajuda!" "Estou sendo paranoíco pelo boy estar seco?" "Minha ficante gritou com minha mãe! E o climão?" "Tô ficando com um cara e minha amiga também" "Moro no interior, estou presa e quero me libertar!" LOTUS "Trollei minha mãe, sou lésbica" Pessoas que falam "vida que segue" Café espresso escrito "expresso" Cobertura do divórcio da Mariah "Colombiana" Azealia Banks apoiando o Trump MERYL Mannequin Challenge O trailer de "A Bela e a Fera" Série "Youtube Negro" da Nataly Neri David Blaine no Jimmy Fallon INTERESSANTENEY LIVRO: Zaralha YOUTUBE: TretaNews SÉRIE: River APP: MemRise APP: Moda Livre RECEITA: Omelete cozida MÚSICAS "Luxury" - Azealia Banks "How I Got Over" - The Roots "Born This Way" - Lady Gaga "O Pinto" - Raça Pura "Cheap Thrills" - Sia Podcast #115 apresentado por: TWITTER / INSTAGRAM @papelpop @santahelena @samsworld @mairamedeiros_ SNAPCHAT papelpop marinastahelena samirduarte mairamedeiros13 Quer ter seu caso lido em nosso podcast? Mande um desabafo, uma rapidinha, ou pergunte curiosidades para o e-mail redacao@papelpop.com. Coloque qualquer coisa com "Wanda" no assunto! ASSINE O PODCAST NO ITUNES (E, se curtiu, avalie a gente!) LINK > bit.ly/AssineWandaNoItunes RSS FEED DO MILKSHAKE LINK > bit.ly/RSSdoWANDA Toda semana um episódio novo: Às quintas-feiras, às 13h17, no papelpop.com e também no blog dontskip.com

“It ain’t that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t really care.” -Bishop Glen A. Staples About: We live in a strange time, at least that’s what the story of the praise break reminds us. It’s the tale of an ecstatic dance rooted deep in race, religion and American history. It traveled centuries of oppression and made its way to present times where it’s been rejected by today’s social elites. Maybe because it looks crazy? Or maybe it’s dismissed because it unearths some dark reality that we’re not comfortable dealing with? You be the judge.   Show Notes: [03:03] “Clap Hands” by Tom Waits [03:20] “Temple of Praise ~ Praise Break” [04:45] The Temple of Praise [05:10] @bishopstaples [08:20] “Parade Shoes” by Blue Dot Sessions [09:40] “Slow Strutt” by Blue Dot Sessions [14:00] @cornelwest [14:02] More on the late Marion Barry (Washington Post, 2014) [14:04] @tdjakes [14:06] Pastor Sherman Watkins [17:10] “When We Set Out” by Blue Dot Sessions [20:35] Dr. Harold Dean Trulear [21:10] The Triangular Trade [21:25] “The Silver Hatch” by Blue Dot Sessions [21:45] On Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden (Wikipedia) [22:00] More on slaves and Christianity (Christianity Today, 2014) [22:10] And another worthy read (PBS, 2004) [23:30] “Shout” by the Isley Brothers [25:00] On Daniel Alexander Payne and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia) [25:38] “Transit Vidal” by Blue Dot Sessions [26:25] “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers Another video of Mahalia Jackson worth watching [26:40] “How I Got Over” by Mahalia Jackson [28:28] “Streamer” by Blue Dot Sessions [29:53] Joshua Lazard [31:15] C. Erick Lincoln [31:20] The Uppity Negro A recent sermon Lazard gave on the praise break [31:40] “This is Why Folks Don’t Take Church Seriously” [35:05] Related: Neil Postman writes on this topic in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” [35:20] Joel Osteen on 60 Minutes (CBS News, 2007) [35:30] The Real Preachers of Atlanta [40:45] “Is God a White Racist?” [42:45] On Rachel Dolezal. (Vanity Fair, 2015) [48:10] Send your thoughts, questions or complaints to info@thisissomenoise.com.

This week we’re pleased to welcome Detroit based musician and producer, Brandon Williams to the show. Brandon is one of the premiere drummers on Detroit’s live music scene and is well known in the industry for his ability to play play numerous instruments and for his versatile repertoire. In 2009, he collaborated with Vickie Winans on How I Got Over. The album earned him 9 Stellar Awards nominations including one win, a Grammy Award nomination, and a NAACP Image Award. As a producer he has lent his hand to such artists as Jazmine Sullivan and Jay Electronica, and his production work can be heard in commercials such as the 2015 “Honda Fit” TV commercial featuring Questlove of the Roots. His debut solo album XII reached #1 on the UK Soul Charts in February 2015, and has received much critical acclaim. Highlights: - Brandon is all about the love - When it comes to production, the song is most important - We talk about the role of a producer vs a beatmaker and how the lines have become blurred - You can’t... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Selections from The Roots albums Illadelph Halflife, Things Fall Apart, Game Theory, Phrenolgy, Undun, Rising Down, and How I Got Over. Classic-ish!! Peace!

“Your heart has to be ready to handle the weight of your calling,” is what she said casually over Korean BBQ, and for this reason and more I grew up reading bell hooks. ‘Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery’ was my first dance with her mind. In it she taught me how to identify the ways that patriarchy, white supremacy and global capitalism threatened humanity’s well-being. More specifically, she challenged me to examine the ways in which our own families replicate models of oppression, sometimes trumping the need, or the awareness of the need, for self-care. bell hooks called on me to think critically as a strategy to heal from social and emotional trauma, a task that would require a lifetime of unlearning. When commissioned by Dr. Melynda Price, Chair of the African American and Africana Program at the Univ. of Kentucky to make this mix, I was struck by the fact that not a single song came to mind, which is unusual for my process. Typically I have an idea of the direction of the mix, with at least one song to start. But bell hooks has written over 30 books. What could I say musically that would affirm, celebrate and soundtrack her commitment to education, activism, radical openness and feminist scholarship? What music could match ‘the life of her mind?’ The moment I asked that question, Nina Simone appeared. I had a start. I continued to dig deep into the crates of bell hooks’ life in search of clues about music she loved. On one of those days, after a few hours of probing, she mentioned Tracy Chapman in a lecture. My second artist arrived. From there, I recognized that women’s voices would occupy a large amount of space on the mix. And how easy it would be to create a mix using only women to pay tribute to a world-renowned feminist thinker, right? No, this would not be true to the range of music I have access to, or the core of her ideas. bell warns us to not confuse patriarchy with masculinity. Teaching us that patriarchal dominance can only be destroyed when all of us adopt feminist politics. That said, I invited men to be a part of the honoring, particularly men I feel loved by. Would bell love Bilal? In the song ‘Robots,’ he critiques hyper consumerism similarly to the way she critiques the commodification of Black culture in her work. And Lionel Hampton is from Kentucky, did she grow up listening to the sound of his vibraphone? And consistently she’s made the important distinction between misogynistic and ‘conscious’ rap, would she dig Mos Def? And could Gregory Porter, speak to her encounter with desegregation in the classrooms of the Black south? In this moment I decided to put together a compilation of music that would communicate the essence of her message, or at least, my understanding of it. It would be a mix in dialogue form. I’ve learned so much from bell’s refusal to adhere to restrictions about what she could and could not write about, and what topics she could and could not explore. When she shifted her focus from critical gender theory with books like Ain’t I Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics to a series of books focused solely on love (Salvation, Communion and All About Love), I knew she was making the decision to become more accessible to communities, beyond the academy. I knew she wanted to have more nuanced conversations about the revolutionary qualities of love and through this series, I was reminded that love was located at the center of the pursuit of social justice. For this reason, I felt jazz had a place among the songs. Betty Carter’s ‘Open the Door’ and Freddie Hubbard’s ‘Red Clay’ has so much emotional and cultural wealth, and jazz itself provided the soundscape for many social movements and plenty of freedom fighters, Malcolm X included. I discovered the Uptown String Quartet in my college years while working in a record store. I was excited by the fact that they were four classically trained Black women musicians from Harlem and one of them, Maxine Roach, was the daughter of jazz drummer Max Roach. I’ve been listening to their song “JJ’s Jam” for about 20 years and never imagined having the opportunity to add it to one of my mixes. It’s a song from some of the quietest moments in my life; a song with so much space and beauty that I wanted to play with voices and personalities over the music. I thought of the bell hooks book “Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem,” which features the hand of fellow Kentuckian Muhammad Ali, whom bell loves, on its cover. In my research I discovered an interview between Nikki Giovanni and Ali and it fit perfectly between the song’s imaginary lines. Another book that came to mind during my process was Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. It’s a memoir about love, writing and sexuality. Wounds of Passion tells the story of how bell wrestled with an emotionally charged long-term relationship that forced a questioning of her values and worldview. At the same time she was managing the stress of being a black woman academic in hostile predominantly white institutions. She shares that this was one of the most tumultuous romantic partnerships in her life, one that she still refers to, one that still tugs at her heart. Frida Kahlo and Diego came to mind and I used my favorite song from the movie’s soundtrack (Frida), “Alcoba Azul” to express the emotions that give birth to a complicated, transformative and sacrificial love. Finally, I wanted to leave listeners with the opportunity to feel a sense of hope. To operate from a place of abundance and not the despair normally attached to the business of struggle. I selected a song inspired by something I heard bell hooks say in an interview. She shared that through his life as a farmer and with his profound appreciation of the earth, her grandfather taught her about the importance of life beyond suffering. She took from him that people of color needed to move away from what can feel like a commitment to misery and shift our focus towards self-sufficiency, pleasure, joy and self-care. Aretha Franklin’s “How I Got Over” from the “Amazing Grace” album worked perfectly for these words. I had the opportunity to present this mix to bell hooks in person. She attended my lecture at the University of Kentucky’s Finding our Place: A Conference in Honor of the Work and Writing of bell hooks. I was moved beyond words by the level of attention she paid to my every sentence, image and sound. I was almost brought to tears when she cheered me on as an active and vocal member of the audience. She expressed to me a love for my mind, an interest in my work and an excitement about being fully seen by me, through my art. We broke bread and shared intimate stories about our histories and exchanged visions of our future. It’s safe to say we bonded. She invited me to her home and pointed out her most precious possessions; her books, kitchen, and meditation space. Her home was a Frida Khalo inspired sacred place with art collected from her travels around the world. The yellow and red painted wooden benches and chairs brought the African and Latin Diaspora to Berea, Kentucky. I felt instantly that the mix was a success. My selections were true of who I thought she was within and beyond print. bell hooks is a genius. she’s vulnerable and complex, sharp and unashamed of the way she walks the world. And with her courage, discipline and dedication, she’s carved out space for me to exist. Please enjoy “Soulful Critical Thought: bell hooks and the Making of a DJ Scholar,” for it was without a doubt, a labor of love.

On this week's Record Breakers, Patrick brings us the folks that bring you the music of the Tonight Show with The Roots and their 2010 record "How I Got Over". What did the guys think of them? Click play and learn!

Tune in Friday August 23, 2013, at 10:30 PM EST/ 7:30 PM PST as Stacey Brewer of H. Blu's Word remembers The March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Has there been much progress since the date of the march, August 28, 1963? Brewer will discuss.  Listen in for clips from Rep. John Lewis, who will speak on his memories with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as, speak on a meeting with President Kennedy,.  Lastly, Brewer will play a rare and special clip of Mahalia Jackson singing How I Got Over, as heard at the March on Washington, 50 years ago.  Like Hampton Blu

Singer-songwriter Josh Hendrick and his three musical legends attempt to take his baby across a deadly swamp to his wife. Not all of them, if any, can make it. In another of The Journey's favorites, let's play How I Got Over. : Flight Of The Fused Monkeys : Growing Into Fatherhood - Blog : Dallas (The Band) : Bowfoot Peter (Sticks And Stones) : RyoSports.com

Conversations welcomes Vickie Winans to talk about her beginnings, and she introduces her new single HOW I GOT OVER.

Author and Activist Shelley Seale makes her debut on Conversations LIVE! Radio to discuss her beginnings as a writer, her love of traveling and why being in India prompted THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE. At 12:30p.m. CST (1:30p.m. EST) we will be joined by international recording artist Vickie Winans to introduce her new single HOW I GOT OVER.

Recording artist Vickie Winans comes to Conversations LIVE! Radio to debut new music! She will introduce her single "How I Got Over" and talk about the new album. Author Mahonek talks to Conversations LIVE! Radio about his life, new book and what the future holds for him.