Aretha Franklin’s Astonishing “Dr. Feelgood” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/aretha-franklins-astonishing-dr-feelgood
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The passage (of what, in a black religious context, might be called “tuning up”) extravagantly justifies Franklin’s claim that, although she recorded secular music, she never left the Church; she took it with her. But the very structure of this performance, from blues to prayer, makes an additional case: that a woman’s sexual authority need not compromise her spiritual leadership but might actually fuel it. There is apprehension, too. Franklin “gets a little worried” and “fearful” like everyone else. But she knows that “everything’s gonna be alright.” “Don’t put worry on you before worry gets to you”: she repeats the injunction twice, so that what begins as an admonition becomes an assurance of divine clemency, of a force that might take you beyond where you thought you could go—“You’d be surprised what big bridges you can meet when you get there.”
Franklin often said that she didn’t put her politics into her music, but her public support for black radical figures meant that she didn’t have to. She was a tireless fund-raiser for Martin Luther King, Jr., a family friend; in 1970, she offered to post bail for Angela Davis. These social commitments add depth to her music. They allow us to hear in her reference to bridges, for instance, such tortured, bold crossings as that of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by civil-rights activists marching to Selma. They allow us to hear, in her reference to fear for one’s children, a moment when black youth were on the front lines—integrating schools, joining freedom rides, or simply navigating hostile home towns.
This was the promise of soul: that pain granted depth, and that one was never alone but accompanied by a vibrant community that had crossed too many bridges in order to survive. Franklin was the queen not only of soul music but of soul as a concept, because her great subject was the exceeding of limits. Her willingness to extend her own vocal technique, to venture beyond herself, to strain to implausible heights, and revive songs that seemed to be over—all these strategies could look and sound like grace. She knew that we would need it.