Podcasts about NAACP

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

Remember, you can watch the Superpowers for Good show on e360tv. To watch the episode, download the #e360tv channel app to your streaming device–Roku, AppleTV or AmazonFireTV–or your mobile device. You can even watch it on the web.When you purchase an item after clicking a link here, we may earn a commission. It's an easy way to support our work.Devin: What do you see as your superpower, Kevin?Kevin: I see my superpower as diversity of experience. I was born in a very small and very poor suburb of Detroit called Highland Park, and now I work–outside of Proximate– as an investment analyst for Gutter Capital. So, I have been in situations where I've had $0, and I can speak that language. Now, I'm the middleman for people to get investments of $1 million.Devin: Ben, what is your superpower?Ben: I think it has something to do with helping people tell their stories.My guests today, Ben Wrobel and Kevin McClendon, are co-founders–along with Meg Massey–of the nonprofit media company Proximate.“Proximate is a media platform that amplifies and connects movements for participatory problem-solving,” says Kevin. “We're a home for stories about creative community-driven models that shift power to people with lived experience or those proximate to the problem.”The company grew naturally out of a book that Ben wrote with co-founder Meg called Letting Go. The book built on their experiences. Ben says, “I worked for a participatory investing nonprofit called Village Capital that shifted decision-making power away from investors and towards entrepreneurs closer to the problem.”The team employs a solutions journalism lens, focusing on solutions when discussing societal challenges. Proximate narrows its aperture to primarily consider innovations in participatory philanthropy, investing and budgeting. The goal is to amplify the voices of those closest to and most impacted by problems.I'm excited about their work, in part because it recognizes the fundamental value of the crowd in crowdfunding and the value of investors who deploy relatively small amounts of money but bring perspective from the front lines of problems.Kevin highlights the uniqueness of the Proximate approach to news, “We're the only platform where you can find how a sex worker film festival and a food bank are solving for the same variables.”Ben and Kevin each bring superpowers to the game. Ben leverages an ability to help others tell their stories, and Kevin shares his unique diversity of experience to the work.AI Episode Summary* Kevin McClendon and Ben Wrobel are co-founders of Proximate, a media platform that amplifies and connects movements for participatory problem-solving.* They focus on stories about creative community-driven models that shift power to people with lived experience or those proximate to the problem.* Their work extends beyond capital and includes areas such as climate change, medical care, citizen science, and equity in the creative economy.* Proximate produces journalism and solutions journalism specifically, conveying information in a compelling way.* They hire local journalists to write about solutions in communities, such as locally-led disaster response in Puerto Rico, and cover different sectors like philanthropy, government, and impact investing.* Their goal is to be a clearinghouse for participatory problem-solving stories and create collections of stories for specific topics with the help of partner nonprofits.* Kevin's superpower is diversity of experience, having been in situations of poverty and also working as an investment analyst for Gutter Capital.* Ben's superpower is helping people tell their stories, finding people with big ideas and helping them communicate their work in a universal language.* Kevin suggests breaking silos and identifying similarities as a way to increase diversity of perspective, while Ben recommends speaking out loud and recording to overcome writer's block and improve storytelling.* To learn more about Proximate, visit their website, subscribe to their newsletters, and connect with them on social media. For Kevin, connect on LinkedIn and Instagram, and for Ben, email him or connect on LinkedIn. They are also looking for content, platform, and funding partners for collaboration.How to Develop a Diversity of Experience As a SuperpowerKevin shared an example that illustrates his superpower:So in writing for the participants, The Rise of Participatory ESOs, our most recent project that we've announced, because I've worked with a lot of the different industries that we covered, I had the insider look, so to speak, that I'm not writing as someone who's lived on the outside. I'm writing as someone who has both worked inside of these organizations and as well been a person who has been in a position to receive the results of what these organizations are attempting to accomplish.Kevin also offered some tips for expanding your own perspective. He suggests:* Break the silos and identify the similarities. * Stop creating these false barriers between groups. * Learn from what another person is doing. By following Kevin's example and advice, you can broaden your perspectives. In time, you may be able to make this a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.How to Develop Storytelling As a SuperpowerBen shared an anecdote to illustrate the power of storytelling:One of the participatory grantmaking funds that we profiled in Letting Go had been doing this work for ten years and just had a website and were well known in their small community but were not on the radar of a lot of other folks in philanthropy or beyond.We wrote a whole chapter about them in the book. Shortly after that, their founder and CEO left. She said, “I feel like my legacy is more secure now. Our story has been told.”I know that since then, they've been able to raise a good amount of money. I don't think that is entirely because of Letting Go.That's what I'm hoping to accomplish with Proximate. Every time we write an article about somebody, we hope that it will be used so that they can share it and talk about themselves and the work they're doing in a way they can be proud of.Ben offers a powerful storytelling tip:What I've often seen when people try to write an op-ed or write an essay, write about their work, they often are intimidated by a blank screen. Say the words out loud. Describe what you're doing to someone in your life and your family, and then take that–there is some great AI recording software out there, like Otter.ai. Turn on Otter and start talking. This is something people used to do way back in the day. Take a recorder; speak into it. That is one of the best ways to write: speak into your computer and then figure out what you just said.By following Ben's example and suggestion, you can improve your storytelling. With practice, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Guest ProfilesAbout Proximate: Proximate is a media platform that aims to amplify and connect movements for new models of participatory problem-solving. We're a home for stories about creative, community-driven models that shift power to people with lived experience or those proximate to the problem.Website: proximate.press/Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/proximate-pressCompany Facebook Page: facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091509354018Kevin McClendon (he/him):Co-Founder, ProximateBiographical Information: Kevin is a writer and strategic professional in the early-stage investment and philanthropy ecosystems. He is driven to create a more equitable world for his son through avid support of sustainable capitalism.Kevin serves as a Co-Founder of Proximate, helping forward a mission of shifting power to those with lived experience. He is also an investment analyst for Gutter Capital, investing in software companies tackling the world's biggest problems. Kevin began his career in marketing for a diversity of industries, including entertainment, real estate, and health care. Kevin was a member of Transforming Power Fund's 2023 Giving Project cohort.Kevin has a BA from Wayne State University. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.Personal Facebook Profile: facebook.com/kvnmcclendon/Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/kevin-mcclendon/Instagram Handle: @kvnmcclendonBen Wrobel (he/him):Co-Founder, ProximateBiographical Information: Ben Wrobel is a writer and an independent communications consultant. Before co-founding Proximate, he was Director of Communications at Village Capital, a pioneer in participatory investing. He started his career as chief speechwriter for the NAACP and later raised money for voter registration campaigns, including Stacey Abrams' New Georgia Project.In addition to co-authoring Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good By Giving Up Control with fellow Proximate co-founder Meg Massey, Ben has edited two best-selling books: REACH: 40 Black Men on Living, Leading and Succeeding and The Innovation Blind Spot.Ben has a BA from the University of Rochester and an MBA from Georgetown University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.Twitter Handle: @benwrobelInstagram Handle: @benwrobel Superpowers for Good is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at www.superpowers4good.com/subscribe

Dr. Valerie Parker is an educator, administrator, parent and wife, and serves as the Education Committee Chair for the Howard County Branch of the NAACP. She's a self-proclaimed “fierce advocate for black boys everywhere,” and her research focuses on teacher perception of behavior that leads to student misconstruction. Dr. Parker firmly believes that changes in our perception can help address much larger, systemic issues: particularly the school to prison pipeline. Essential Takeaways: • Changes in perception can positively address and affect systemic problems. • Self-regulation and building relationships with black youth isn't optional, it's crucial. • Identifying your own implicit biases and triggers is essential to stopping the school to prison pipeline. Important Links: • Seven Powers: Powers of Perception: https://consciousdiscipline.com/seven-powers-power-of-perception/ • Four Elements of Connection: https://consciousdiscipline.com/resources/four-elements-of-connection/ Related Resources: • Conscious Discipline with Excellence 2023: We Run This Shift: Ways Conscious Discipline Helps Circumvent the School to Prison Pipeline with Dr. Valerie Parker Available to Premium Resources Members only: https://consciousdiscipline.com/resources/we-run-this-shift-ways-conscious-discipline-helps-circumvent-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/ • Handling Upset: The Adult-First Mindset Shift: https://consciousdiscipline.com/product/team-registration-handling-upset-the-adult-first-mindset-shift/ Show Outline: :00 Introduction 1:30 Becoming creative and curious about seeing behavior as communication. 3:00 Introduction to Dr. Valerie Parker 4:50 The school to prison pipeline 8:12 Implicit bias, ADHD, and autism 13:00 Big feelings, wishing well and what isolation teaches others 13:45 Building relationships 15:40 Autonomy, choices, and assertiveness 19:42 Calming strategies to inspire a love for learning 21:00 Being curious instead of judgmental 22:00 The Power of Perception 23:00 Helping teachers shift their perception 23:52 Identifying your own bias and triggers 25:32 How do I contribute to the school to prison pipeline? 27:51 Mindful moments for dysregulated students 30:52 Why Conscious Discipline matters 31:07 Changing the trajectory of the lives of adults and children 32:23 Self-regulation and building relationships for black boys isn't optional, its crucial 33:45 Takeaways Thank you for Listening! Thank you for choosing to spend your precious time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please share its valuable information with others via your favorite social media platforms.

Ever wondered why, despite increasing safety concerns, major cities struggle to staff their police forces adequately? This episode unfolds the realities of San Francisco where, despite Mayor London Breed's strong advocacy, a recent police academy class graduated a mere six new officers. We dissect the challenges of police recruitment in urban areas, the implications for public safety, and the credentials that set apart these six brave individuals who chose to serve.Strap yourself in as we navigate the tumultuous political climate and its impact on police recruitment. It's a harsh reality that can be likened to the inelasticity of the housing market. Amidst these challenges, we examine the audacious proposal by the NAACP of Oakland: a 10-point plan to immediately recruit a thousand police officers. But is this feasible? And what about the integral role of community and family in maintaining public safety? This episode is an intriguing exploration into the complex dynamics of city safety, the courageous few who step up to protect, and the community that supports them.Support the show

Newly elected President Sheley Secrest of Alaska, Oregon and Washington comes on to share her vision and plan.

If you don't know what “Glitter Moms” do to kids, you need to hear this.In today's episode, we explore what sadly appears to be a tactic of the people advising President Trump to politically triangulate--pushing Trump to the middle-left--and positioning DeSantis to the Right on abortion. This leads us to a critical topic that must be discussed: the dismantling of sexual boundaries for children. It has become clear that MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, is apparently fully aware that individuals visit their site to access child sex abuse material, as effectively proven by an undercover investigation from Sound Investigations. In an online rant, a preschool teacher says she encourages students not to seek help from their parents, which prompts us to discuss a shocking phenomenon called 'Glitter Parents'.What does God's Word say? Matthew 18:6 Causing to Stumble6 “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.Episode Links:Trump says that it's a “terrible thing” to sign a heartbeat abortion bill such as the ones passed in FL, IA, OH, GA etc. Where are the alleged pro-life groups/leaders on this?Democrats are running a prostitute for the Virginia House, Susanna Gibson, who did sex acts for money on a website called Chaturbate (yes, online prostitution is still prostitution). In response to being called out for this lifestyle, Gibson says her critics are invading her privacy (everything she did was public, for the whole planet to see) and that they broke the law. The New York Times is repeating this joke of a claimBREAKING: Pornhub Exec Reveals Rapists & Traffickers Use Site “Loophole” to “Make a Lot of Money” C-Suite won't fix “They would lose a lot of money” Says government doesn't “know sh*t… not qualified to identify the loophole”The Biden DHS has lost 85,000 children, and the ACLU doesn't care… Meet DeDe Duffy. A preschool teacher in Cape Coral, FL. She says she teaches her students that if they don't like their parents, they can find another family. She also says she teaches them to be gay.The NAACP issued a travel advisory in May that called Florida “openly hostile for African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals.” 2024 Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to the warning in a sit-down interview with @NorahODonnellPresident Trump Vs. Ron DeSantis on men becoming women4Patriots https://4patriots.com Protect your family with Food kits, solar generators and more at 4Patriots. Use code TODD for 10% off your first purchase. Alan's Soaps https://alanssoaps.com/TODD Use coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price. BiOptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/todd Use promo code TODD for 10% off your order. Bonefrog https://bonefrog.us Enter promo code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your subscription. Bulwark Capital http://KnowYourRiskRadio.com Find out how Bulwark Capital Actively Manages risk. Call 866-779-RISK or visit KnowYourRiskRadio.com Patriot Mobile https://patriotmobile.com/herman Get free activation today with offer code HERMAN. Visit or call 878-PATRIOT. RuffGreens https://ruffgreens.com/todd Get your FREE Jumpstart Trial Bag of Ruff Greens, simply cover shipping. Visit or call 877-MYDOG-64. SOTA Weight Loss https://sotaweightloss.com SOTA Weight Loss is, say it with me now, STATE OF THE ART! Sound of Freedom https://angel.com/freedom Join the two million and see Sound of Freedom in theaters July 4th. GreenHaven Interactive https://greenhaveninteractive.com Digital Marketing including search engine optimization and website design.

Yo what's up y'all! We got something special coming to you on this week's TOP BILLIN'! Actor, comedian, and NAACP award winner Juhahn Jones is a viral sensation out here shaking up the game. This new generation of internet talent are GO GETTERS! Get ready for a dose of inspiration as we continue to bridge the gap for new talent and creators. This episode is a game-changer – don't miss it!Executive Producers for Breakbeat: Dave Mays & Brett JeffriesExecutive Producers: Bill Bellamy & Barry KatzProduction: TRDMRKD ProductionsRecorded: DASH Radio, Hollywood, CAIG: @BreakbeatMedia @BillBellamyComment, like and subscribe on the Breakbeat Media YouTube channel, subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever podcasts are available, and visit us at www.breakbeatmedia.com

The Oakland Chapter of the NAACP is once again calling for LeRonne Armstrong to be reinstated as the city's police chief. This comes after an arbitrator found that a report issued before his dismissal was problematic. While the Police Commission says it plans to consider him for a shortlist for the position, Mayor Sheng Thao is sticking to her guns, saying she believes her decision to fire him was correct. For more, KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart and Patti Reising spoke with KCBS Insider Phil Matier.

And the NAACP claims Oakland didn't apply for the Retail Crime grants on purposeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host Ben Rice travels to Santa Cruz, CA, to talk to Woodhouse Blending & Brewing's do-it-all guy Tim Carpenter and Santa Cruz-based comedian Mac Ruiz. We'll tackle Woodhouse's support of Santa Cruz's local arts community, tap line cleanliness, and second-hand pop culture when we're not busy figuring out what our ages are again, where we were on 9/11 (this episode was recorded on 9/11), and discovering just how severe our tinnitus is. Plus! Mac gets accused of killing the Santa Cruz comedy scene, we come up with a million-dollar beer idea, we figure out why Mac's stomach hates beer right now, Tim delves into the blending of Woodhouse Blending & Brewing, and we try to figure out how to help crying children when there are no parents in sight. Yes, this is a beer podcast. This is episode 176 of Barley & Me. You're gonna love it.Learn what's going on RIGHT NOW at Woodhouse Blending & Brewing by following them on IG @woodhousebrewsGet more intel on the Santa Cruz scene and Mac's career path @itsmacruizBarley & Me can be found across social media @barleyandmepod. Check out our fancy new website barleyandmepod.comEmail questions/comments/concerns/guest ideas/brewery ideas to barleyandmepodcast@gmail.com or barleyandmepod@gmail.comBen is also posting #Chugs4Charity videos semi-regularly on Instagram (@barleyandmepod), to help raise funds for various local and national charities with goals of making our world a better place. You can Venmo Ben ($comedianbenrice) or hit his PayPal (@barleyandmepod) and all money will go to support the NAACP, ACLU, Black Lives Matter, and other civil rights helpers. Charities will change with the times and as emergencies arise. But the point is: all donations will go to help those who need it. It's now been over a year since Brienne Allen's revelations about the beer industry's treatment of women and minorities. If you have stories about change (or lack thereof), please submit them (anonymously if you wish) and your story may be featured on a future episode. Simply go to https://forms.gle/2QNebCn7NHHjsEbg6 Intro Music: “Functional Alcoholism” by Be Brave Bold Robot (@bebraveboldrobot)Interstitial Music: "JamRoc" by Breez (@breeztheartist)Logo by Jessica DiMesio (@alchemistqueen)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4698161/advertisement

One of the most crucial but often overlooked aspects of American democracy is voter registration. Host Simone Leeper speaks with expert guests that provide a comprehensive view of the challenges that ordinary citizens face in registering to vote, from convoluted registration processes to restrictive laws and administrative hurdles. Julie Hilberg tells her story of how her name was illegally purged from the voting rolls  along with 100,000 other voters in Texas. CLC's Senior Director of Voting Rights, Danielle Lang, guides listeners through the labyrinth of barriers that many Americans encounter when attempting to register to vote. And Nimrod Chapel Jr. shares how his work with the NAACP in Missouri examines the on-the-ground challenges faced by voter registration groups across the country. With a sobering yet hopeful perspective on voter registration, this episode also explores the efforts being made across the U.S. to modernize this fundamental democratic process. Host and Guests: Simone Leeper litigates a wide range of redistricting-related cases at CLC, challenging gerrymanders and advocating for election systems that guarantee all voters an equal opportunity to influence our democracy. Prior to arriving at CLC, Simone was a law clerk in the office of Senator Ed Markey and at the Library of Congress, Office of General Counsel. She received her J.D. cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 2019 and a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University in 2016.Julie Hilberg is a resident of Atascosa County, Texas. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2015 and serves as the Democratic Chairwoman for Atascosa County. Voting and civic engagement are important to Julie and she has enjoyed being able to exercise her freedom to vote since she first registered in 2015.Danielle Lang is Senior Director, Voting Rights at Campaign Legal Center. She litigates in state and federal courts from trial to the Supreme Court, and advocates for equitable and meaningful voter access at all levels of government. Danielle has worked as a civil rights litigator her entire career. At CLC, she has led litigation against Texas's racially discriminatory voter ID law, Florida's modern-day poll tax for rights restoration, Arizona's burdensome registration requirements, North Dakota's voter ID law targeting Native communities, and numerous successful challenges to signature match policies for absentee ballots.Nimrod Chapel, Jr. is president of the Missouri State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He is an experienced trial attorney with over a decade of practice ranging from work in law firms to state government and covering a wide range of legal issues. Nimrod was responsible for a broad array of complex litigation regarding enforcement of civil rights, discrimination, consumer protection, and wage and hour and accessibility laws throughout Missouri. Links:I've Been a U.S. Citizen Since 2015. My State is Threatening to Purge Me From the RollsModernizing Voter RegistrationCLC Represents Missouri Civic Engagement Groups in Challenge to Anti-Voter LawIn Win for Voters, Missouri Judge Blocks Law Restricting Voter Engagement Activity About CLC:Democracy Decoded is a production of Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization which advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American's right to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process. Learn more about us. Democracy Decoded is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.We want to hear from you! Thank you for taking a few minutes to complete our survey. Your feedback helps understand what you love about Democracy Decoded and how we can make it even better. To show our thanks, you'll be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $50 American Express gift card. We appreciate your time!

The NAACP is gathering signatures to petition the resignation of Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. Then, FEMA has expanded disaster public assistance to 12 counties affected by the June tornados.Plus, there have been several major cyber attacks across businesses and government bodies in Mississippi within the last month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stories we're following this morning at Progress Texas: Impeachment Day 6: Outside lawyer Brandon Cammack, central to Ken Paxton's questionable relationship with Nate Paul, appears to have ended up a victim himself: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/09/12/ken-paxton-impeachment-trial-takeaways-day-6/ ...While former Travis County DA Margaret Moore testifies that she found Nate Paul's claims of law enforcement persecution "ridiculous": https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article279239704.html Texas lawmakers involved in the two Trump impeachments find no parallel in new impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-congress-biden-impeach-trump/ A trial is underway over Texas voting laws that could have monumental implications in the 2024 election: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/texas-politics/trial-begins-over-texas-voter-laws-that-sparked-38-day-walkout-by-democrats-in-2021/3335152/ A police shooting amidst a mental health emergency in McKinney draws the scrutiny of both the Texas Rangers and the local NAACP: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/texas-dps-investigating-officer-involved-shooting-that-left-mckinney-man-dead/3336590/ Law enforcement officials in San Antonio say the permitless carrying of guns in Texas has increased crime and made law enforcement more dangerous: https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2023/09/12/texas-constitutional-carry-law-impacts-highlighted-during-district-4-public-safety-town-hall/ The Texas Education Agency is delaying its annual rating of Texas schools, which could affect the upcoming special session on school vouchers: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-education-accountability-ratings/ Texas DPS and the Texas Rangers promote a woman to the rank of Texas Ranger Major for the first time: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2023/09/12/unbelievable-honor-dps-selects-first-woman-to-serve-as-texas-ranger-major/ The oysters that recently killed a 30-something man came from a Galveson restaurant: https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/texas-man-dies-after-eating-raw-oysters-over-labor-day-weekend/ Thanks for listening - please consider helping us continue our important work at Progress Texas by joining our ongoing membership drive! More at https://progresstexas.org/.

In this episode of URMIA Matters, host Julie Groves, Director of Risk Services at Wake Forest University, and guest Rachel Pluviose, Senior Director of Risk Management and insurance at Johns Hopkins University, talk to Derrick Johnson, the President and CEO of the NAACP, about his upcoming session in Baltimore at URMIA's Annual Conference. Rachel and Derrick also discuss the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at colleges and universities, and how the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action affects institutions of higher education. Derrick shares his insights on the challenges and opportunities for advancing racial justice and social change in the academic sector. Tune in to hear his advice for risk managers who want to make a difference in moving DEI efforts forward on their campus.Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join-Email | contactus@urmia.org Give URMIA Matters a boost:-Give the podcast a 5 star rating-Share the podcast - click that button!-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!

Barry Goldwater Jr. grew up in politics as the son of the influential Senator and '64 GOP Presidential Nominee. He has a one-of-a-kind story of witnessing his father's political rise and then his own political career with his House tenure spanning parts of 3 decades. In this conversation, he talks his early memories in a political household, key moments in his father's career, his own political trajectory in Southern California, and the difficulties and opportunities he's found in life after leaving office. IN THIS EPISODEBorn into a political family in Phoenix, AZ…The story of Goldwater's Department Store and the rise of his father's political career…The surprise that took him to a different state and different profession than expected…The coin flip that set Barry Goldwater Sr. on a path in Republican politics…Memories of the '64 Goldwater presidential campaign…The Goldwater / JFK relationship and what a JFK vs Goldwater '64 campaign might have looked like…The story behind Senator Goldwater urging Nixon to resign at the height of Watergate…His read on Senator Goldwater's late-in-life pro-choice and pro-LGBT sentiments…Barry Goldwater Jr's first race for office in a 1969 House special election…Memories of the House of the 70s and 80s…The leadership skill he witnessed of Speaker Tip O'Neill….Barry Goldwater Jr and Ed Koch team up to pass a bipartisan Privacy Act…An important lesson learned from his mother…The story behind his race for US Senate in California in 1982…His read on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger….How he approached being out of office for the first time in 14 years in his mid 40s…The story of being on the ballot in Louisiana as Ron Paul's VP candidate in 2008…His early thoughts on the 2024 GOP primary field…The story of Senator Goldwater's surprisingly close connection to President Clinton…Time spent around both President Reagan and Nancy Reagan…The guerilla tactic that helped Barry Goldwater Jr win his first election…The importance of a Higher Power in his life… AND apron pockets, Arizona State University, Best Always, brickbats, William F. Buckley, Burbank, John Burton, Phil Burton, cold calls, The Conscience of a Conservative, John Dean, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, S.I. Hayakawa, Carl Hayden, hiding in the bushes, Jewish peddlers, Lyndon Johnson, Chiang Kai-Shek, Jack Kemp, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lockheed-Martin, the Mayflower, Mitch McConnell, Mike McCormack, the NAACP, Northrup-Grunman, nylon, the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, Nancy Pelosi, raylon, John Rhodes, Hugh Scott, shenanigans, Janet Travell, Donald Trump, the Urban League, John Van De Kamp, the wild west, Mao Zedong…. & more!

Robin Carey Boyd,  president of the East St Louis NAACP sits down with Dr. Dudley.Sometimes leadership finds you, you don't find it.  in those moments you have to be prepared and ready to seize the moment.  It's not whether opportunity will knock but will you be ready, willing and able.  Robin gives you the 1, 2, 3's of humility, vulnerability and how to step into your leadership moment. Robin's Bio:Email Address: robin.careyboyd@gmail.comA native of East St. Louis, IL, Robin is married to Michael A. Boyd. She is the proud mother of 2 children, Ashley E. Carey and Austin R. H. Carey and Nana to 4 beautiful girls, Autumn, Aubrey, Addison and Alyssa.Robin is a member of St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church where Fr. Carroll Mizicko is Pastor.She is a 1984 graduate of Lincoln University of Jefferson City, MO where she received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Communication Disorders; two Master of Science Degrees: Speech Pathology and Education Administration, both from Southern Illinois University- Edwardsville.She is the decedent of Lincoln University – MO Alum, where her Mother, Dr. Edna Rowery Allen, 2012 Distinguished Alumni Awardee. As a member of the 2011 L.U. Family of the Year the Allen Family collectively they have 14 members that have attended Lincoln University-MO.Robin is the Past President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. where she has over forty year of uninterrupted membership.She is a Past President of Jack and Jill of America, Inc., East St. Louis Chapter.She is a Past President of Lincoln University –MO Alumni Association, great St. Louis Chapter.Robin recently finished her term as a member of the Violence Prevention Center Board of Southwestern Illinois where she served for the past eight years. She has volunteered with the American Heart Association with the Minority Council to promote Healthy Lifestyles particularly for people of color.Currently, she is serving her eighth year as the president of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) of East St. Louis, IL. She serves as the chair of the NPHC for her Chapter and has been a delegate for over 25 years working on various community service projects (Juneteenth, Clothes Drives, food drives, Relay for Life Cancer Drive). During her tenure as president of the NPHC the Council has held 5 week long summer enrichment camps for youth in the metro-east area promoting, academic, social, cultural enrichment and S.T.E.M. activities and served as host to the Annual Halloween Trunk or Treat in conjunction with the City of East St. Louis serving over 500 people.If that is not enough, Robin has added an additional commitment to her service record in her most recent position as president of the NAACP, East St. Louis Branch 3013 where she leadsover 200 members to promote, advocate and increase opportunities for people of color, specifically Black People. Robin is the First Female President since 1966. Under her administration, she has reignited the Branch and activated ten committees into action in an effort to motivate the community into utilizing the power of the people. Under her leadership, the Branch has hosted multiple Political Forums, food drives, shoe drives, Black Business initiatives, Covid Clinics, Health fairs, and Blood Drives and voter registration drives. The Branch members advocate for issues that adversely affect the community.Professionally, Robin has been employed by the East St. Louis School, District #189 for the past 21 years, first as a Speech Pathologist and currently as a Special Education Administrator. She was previously employed by the St. Louis Public Schools for 16 years as a Speech Pathologist. She serves as a membSupport the showDevelop the Leader in YOU - Enroll in Classes on www.ileadacademy.net IG @BishopDudleyPHDFB @BishopDudleyPHDhttps://linktr.ee/bishopgvd

 On the Friday September 1st edition of Georgia Today: Five people have died in the Fulton County Jail in the past month and the NAACP is demanding answers; A proposed new data center means more jobs and tax revenue for Bartow County; And Ronald Acuna of the Atlanta Braves hits a grand milestone.

In this episode we're talking about the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down race-conscious admission and what the implications might be for colleges, students applying to those colleges, and the counselors who advise them. And what better person to talk about it with than Jay Rosner, whose entire career has been devoted to the intersection of law and college admissions. This is the first in a series where we'll be exploring the impacts of the SCOTUS decision from a variety of perspectives.   Jay Rosner and I get into:  What the affirmative action ruling practically means  How it might impact college admissions, including for underrepresented students We address some students' fears about whether or not they should mention their race, or share experiences directly related to their race or culture in their college applications I ask Jay: “Who is the burden on here—students or the colleges themselves?”  We also talked about how counselors should advise students   For those of you who have never met Jay: As the Executive Director of The Princeton Review Foundation, he has developed programs jointly with such organizations as the NAACP, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, College and Graduate Horizons (serving Native American students) and the Asian Pacific Fund. Jay's career has combined education and law, with an emphasis on student advocacy. He has testified before state legislative committees in California, Texas, Illinois and New Jersey, and as an expert witness in cases involving testing. Before attending law school, Jay was a public high school math teacher. Jay holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, a JD from Widener University, and is the proud father of two grown daughters.   Play-by-play: [0:53] Intro [1:30] Who is Jay Rosner?  [2:25] A brief history of race-conscious admission [4:52] Why is the Supreme Court decision such a big deal?  [6:22] What does the ruling actually mean?  [7:31] What colleges can and can't consider after the ruling related to race [9:49] How might diversity and inclusivity be affected on college campuses? [13:00] Should students even mention race at all in their applications? [15:39] Is the burden really on the students or on the colleges? [17:20] How can students speak to the ways race has impacted their lives? [18:50] Advice to counselors on guiding students on their college applications [21:38] Do colleges still want to enroll a diverse population of students?  [23:36] What might colleges learn from the University of California, where race-conscious admission was banned in 1996? [26:45] Jay's thoughts about and hopes for the future  [28:28] What are folks not talking about? [31:03] Final takeaways for students and counselors Resources:  Example of How to Explain (Briefly) Context on Your Testing in the Additional Info Section of Your Common App AP Physics I I was the first student at my school to ever pass the AP Physics I exam. There were two issues during the test: 1) the test began late because the previous test (AP Spanish) ran long and 2) during the AP Physics I exam, the fire alarms went off and continued for about an hour (the second half of the test). Unfortunately, this was the only time the test was offered and I was nonetheless proud of my score. Highest SAT Score in My Class Scored a 1910 on old SAT (570 CR, 730 Math, 610 WR), which was the highest overall test score in my grade.

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Black Panther Hijacks Plane to AlgeriaGuest: Lorenzo Kom' Boa ErvinANARCHISM AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION-Black Panther Party For Self DefenseLorenzo Kom'boa Ervin (born 1947) is an American writer, activist, and black anarchist. He is a former member of the Black Panther Party. He was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has lived in Memphis, Tennessee, since 2010.When he was 12, Ervin joined the NAACP youth group and participated in the sit-in protests that helped end racial segregation in Chattanooga. He was drafted during the Vietnam War and served in the army for two years, where he became an anti-war activist. In 1967 he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and, a short time later, the Black Panther Party.In February 1969, Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba to evade prosecution for allegedly trying to kill a Ku Klux Klan leader. While in Cuba and Czechoslovakia, Ervin became disillusioned with state socialism. After several unsuccessful attempts, the American government eventually extradited Ervin and brought him to the U.S. to face trial. Ervin was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.Ervin first learned about anarchism while in prison in the late 1970s. He read numerous anarchist books, and his case was adopted by the Anarchist Black Cross, a political prisoner support organization. While in prison, Ervin wrote several anarchist pamphlets, including Anarchism and the Black Revolution, which has been reprinted many times and may be his best-known work.Eventually, Ervin's legal challenges and an international campaign led to his release from prison after 15 years.Please SUBSCRIBE!!!!If you like this show you can find more just like it in The Opperman Reporthttps://www.patreon.com/oppermanreportThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies