The new Aretha Franklin mini-series, Genius, aims to underscore the singer’s singularity, even as it soaps up her family story. Its portrait of Franklin is animated by an impulse to undo the influence of takes on the rise of the Queen of Soul that overplayed the role of “record men.” No doubt, there was a time when tributes to Jerry Wexler or Ahmet Ertegun made it harder to pick up on Franklin’s own matchless gifts. Yet Genius‘s acts of redress here seem labored, especially when Franklin is depicted as whipping it to studio musicians. (By all accounts, Franklin was pretty recessive when she was making records.) There are moments when Cynthia Erivo—the Nigerian-born actress who plays Franklin—manages to enact a woman thinking. Erivo’s alive to the falsity of conflating smarts with verbal fluency and, as a singer, she’s capable of hitting unobvious notes, but the “genius” aspect is just not in this picture. What’s worse is the series is too privatized to be worthy of Franklin’s knack for channeling changing times. (Charles O’Brien’s evergreen account of how Franklin defined the Sixties never grows old, but if you want something fresh on that front, try Franklin’s piano-first cover of Bobby Womack’s “That’s the Way I Feel About Cha,” which beats the good version produced by Quincy Jones on Hey Now Hey ((The Other Side Of The Sky)). Three minutes in, Aretha gives us something we still can feel—
“Please baby when you hear my love knocking on your door,
Open up for me baby
Cos the world don’t give a fuck no more”
It was late 1973—the Sixties were well and truly over.)
Genius’s makers seem to have taken their arc from David Ritz’s 2015 biography of Franklin, Respect—his unauthorized follow-up to his first stilted version of her life story. The making of the album (and documentary) Amazing Grace—a sequence in which Aretha returned to recording gospel for the first time since her debut as a 14 year old prodigy—serves as a climatic triumph in Genius as it does in Respect. But Genius‘s lens is much narrower than Respect‘s. Ritz placed Franklin within a blue-black musical context that gave her and so many other African-American talents their equipment for living. (Franklin came to him originally because he’d been amanuensis of choice for black stars of jazz, blues and R&B ever since he worked with Ray Charles in the 70s on Brother Ray.) Ritz’s truer version of Franklin’s story quickly morphs into a tribute to the roots culture that nurtured her. That what’s makes Respect a national resource (as I’ve argued here.)
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It was Charles Keil who steered this reader to Respect. (Keil taught Ritz back in the 60s when they were at the University of Buffalo and Keil’s ethnography, Urban Blues, provided one template for Ritz’s life’s work.) Keil was on it again when Ritz published The God Groove: A Blues Journey to Faith (2019)–his memoir detailing how black music brought him to Jesus, despite resistance bred in him by his secular Jewish family.
Keil addresses The God Groove below and his musings are followed by Ritz’s own riffs on Jimmy Reed and B.B. King.
Notes on the God Groove
coming to some similar conclusions in my 80th year
joy of groove brings faith to vanquish fear
so many fears have festered in 2019
spirit in the dark is still our dream
the queen of De Nile visits norman v. peale in purgatory
constant flash of positive thinking one way to parse same old story
Jimmy Reed left teen david in the waiting room
John Lee Hooker sang “Boom Boom Boom Boom”
ghost writer becomes Holyghost writer
it’s all one soultrain groove & Ritz writes in it
–Charles Keil
God Groove x 2
As editor of the Thomas Jefferson Reveille, my high school paper, I convinced the faculty advisor to let me interview Jimmy Reed, the great bluesman who bridged the gap between backcountry and big-city blues. Even the white boys with crew cuts had Reed’s “Big Boss Man” and “Baby What You Want to Do” blasting from their Chevy Bel Airs.
In April l958 I set out to meet Reed at his gig at LuAnn’s, a cold and characterless dance hall that smelled of Lone Star beer, Fritos and refried beans. That night he rocked hard. His hypnotic, mantra-like groove, his slurry, sassy, nasty, nasal voice, his crying harmonica, his visceral pain, his hallelujah, tonight’s-the-night jubilation–I loved it all, along with his astounding look: leopard-skin guitar at his chest, gleaming gold harp at his mouth, slicked-back hair, razor-thin mustache, sky-blue suit, fire-engine-red tie, white buck shoes. “Got me running, got me hiding,” he sang. “Got me dizzy,” he sang. Song after song, every note sounding the same yet different, tougher, louder, lewder and cruder. He had me crazy.
After his last song, I made my way to the bandstand, gathered up my courage, and faced the man himself.
“Excuse me, Mr. Reed, but could I interview you?”
“Come on,” he said.
He motioned me to follow him and a curvaceous lady in a pink skin-tight velvet gown. We all got into the back of a limo, which quickly pulled away. I had no idea where we going and didn’t care. I was with Jimmy Reed.
l had my questions prepared. What was it like growing up in rural Mississippi? What was his relationship with legendary guitar players such as Elmore James? What was the methodology of his songwriting? How did he process his success among white teenagers? As I prepared to ask my first query, he fished a flask from his suit pocket and drained it dry before asking the driver for a beer chaser.
“What about me?” asked his woman. She was only a few years older than me yet was stunningly self-assured. As she crossed her legs and locked eyes with Jimmy, I felt her heat.
“Nothing for you,” said Jimmy. “I saw you dancing out there.”
“Dancing with the promoter,” she said. “Gotta be nice to the promoter.”
“Gotta be nice to no one but me,” he shot back before turning his attention to me. “Now, what is it you want to know, youngblood?”
Before I could answer, the lady broke in with more sass, saying, “I’ll be nice to whoever I wanna. That’s how you work it. No reason for me not to work it that way too.”
Rather than reply, Reed whipped out a razor and in one quick motion cut the woman on her upper arm.
She screamed and went after him with her fingernails, long as knives, and caught his chin. He smacked her back. She landed on the floor. Blood gushed from her arm. Blood dripped down Jimmy’s chin.
Next thing I knew, we were pulling up to the emergency room of a hospital. The driver was completely cool, as though this were a common occurrence. He and I sat in the waiting room for hours. Finally, at three in the morning, Jimmy and his lady emerged. They wore bandages and were also holding hands.
Reed acknowledged my presence by saying, “Let’s have breakfast.”
At an all-night diner, we sat in a booth, the four of us facing a mountain of bacon and biscuits.
“Now, what is it you wanna know?” he asked.
I couldn’t remember any of my prepared questions and instead simply confessed, “I guess I just wanna know about the blues.”
Taking a big bite of pancake soaked in egg yolk, Jimmy Reed answered, “You don’t know ’bout the blues, you live ’em.”
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B.B. King had stopped playing gospel music–his first love–so he could make money singing the blues.
I was a boy when I met Jimmy, John Lee and Lightnin’, but a man when I met B.B. In the nineties, I traveled with him the world over when I ghosted his autobiography Blues All Around Me. No matter how long the arduous journey, no matter how many overeager fans sought his attention, B.B. embraced patience like a preacher embraces prayer.
Touring the United States, he loved riding the bus from gig to gig. Most of our discussions took place in his back bedroom, where he’d set up a couch. Every afternoon, he stopped our interviews to listen to the music he loved best. It was a religious ritual. He played bluesmen T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Lead Belly for hours on end.
Our most moving set of interviews ensued while driving through the Mississippi Delta, B.B.’s home turf. At the time, I was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace and was especially touched by the novelist’s depictions of the changing landscape of agrarian Russia. He wrote of the peasants’ love of the land.
When I mentioned this to B.B., he related immediately.
“I was a sharecropper chopping cotton in those very fields,” said B.B., nodding toward the window. “I knew it was the system left over from slavery. I knew the system was cheating me and my people, but the work itself…well, I actually liked it. Liked being close to the land. Liked seeing that white world of freshly bloomed cotton sprouting out every summer. A new crop was like a new life. I could see God’s hand in the creation of the natural world. That made me wanna sing about him. Thank him for my life. Thank him for the rain that brought out the blossoms. Thank him for giving me the get-up-and-go to find a guitar and start plucking.
“Next thing I know, people are liking what I’m playing. So I’m sitting there on a wooden crate on a dirt road in Indianaola, Mississippi singing these gospel songs that got me through. Mind you, this is the thirties–the deep bottom of the Depression, when no one’s got a nickel. But folks are liking the way my songs are sounding, so they stop and say, ‘That’s it, son. You keep on praising God.’ They say it and move on. I’m thinking, Maybe they’ll give me few pennies, but they don’t.
Then comes the day when I’m in that same spot, and, out of nowhere, I start singing a song by Lonnie Johnson, my favorite blues guy, called ‘Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere.’ Not five minutes go by before a man I know as a church deacon stops to listen. Don’t say a word, but, man, that smile on his face says everything. Next thing I know, he puts his hand in his pocket, fishes out some loose change, lays out the coins in front of me, and, though he don’t know it, the deacon changes my life.”
B.B. became a bluesman because, as he said, “Blues meant money. And money meant a better life.”
“And what about praising God?” I asked. “It sounded like a burning desire.”
“It was,” said B.B. “Still is. But then I figured something out. I ain’t saying I’m a great thinker, but I did see my way clear to one idea that rings true clear as a bell.”
“What is it?”
“This notion that God’s got the blues.”
“How do you know that?”
“Look at the story of Jesus. I’ll be damned if that ain’t blues story. And I’ll be damned if Jesus wasn’t a bluesman. Wandering around. No home. No money. Yet all that time talkin’ ’bout love. But not everyone loving on him. Some folks be hating on him. Try as he might, he ain’t winning over the world. World’s on his back. Sitting in that garden, he knows the world’s about to do him in. That’s the blues, son. The sure-enough blues.”
“But didn’t he lose the blues when he supposedly went up to heaven?”
“To me–and remember, I’m just a country boy–he wouldn’t love us, and we wouldn’t love him if he ever lost the blues. That’s the part of God that’s human. Fact is, you could say that Jesus came down to earth to get the blues. You could say that’s why God understands us.”
I loved B.B.’s explanation but heard it as spiritual poetry–spiritual storytelling–as opposed to spiritual truth. Either way, his words stuck.