All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men, but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin

All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men,but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin

Roses for Aretha
by Mark Anthony Neal

“A Rose is Still a Rose,” released in 1998, was Aretha Franklin’s last major hit single. Produced by Lauryn Hill, who was poised to release the generation defining The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill later that year, the song represented a metaphoric passing of the torch—a torch that was also passed to Mary J. Blige, when Franklin appeared on the latter’s “Don’t Waste Your Time” from Blige’s Mary. Unspoken in both of these performances is that Franklin remains the most important Black Woman artist that the Unites States has ever produced and few among current fans of American popular music really have an appreciation of what that means.

In the annals of American Pop music, to paraphrase Barbara Smith, Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, “All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men, but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin.” It is simply too easy to forget that Aretha Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. That Ms. Franklin wasn’t included among the 16 men who were inducted in the first class (The Everly Brothers, really?) in 1986 only illustrates the point that Ms. Franklin’s achievements are often taken for granted, even among so-called fans of Black music.

Though the term “Diva” existed well before Aretha Franklin walked across a stage, in many ways she is the ultimate embodiment of the term. More than simply a celebrated vocalist, at her commercial peak in the late 1960s, Ms. Franklin could have legitimately been called the most popular Black woman of the 20th Century. The 18 Grammy Awards, including eight straight years in the Best Female R&B/Soul category (1968-1975) tell only a part of the story.

Ms. Franklin’s stature existed well beyond the Pop charts that she dominated in the 1960s and 1970s as she is part of a handful of African-American artists responsible for mainstreaming Black spirituality at a time when the ethos of that spirituality was at the cutting edge of progressive politics in the United States.

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'When I'm Called Home': Remembering Abbey Lincoln

Obscured by time, this jazz singer leaves behind an impressive legacy.

When I'm Called Home: Remembering Abbey Lincoln
by Mark Anthony Neal

“I’ve always been concerned with the story I’m telling. This music is social. Our music is social. Nobody cares whether it sounds pretty or not. Can you tell the people what its like to be here?”—Abbey Lincoln in LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft

When Abbey Lincoln gave her last breath on the morning of August 14, 2010, she left a legacy, that though obscured by time and ignorance, marks her as one of the most singular Black artists of the 20th Century. Though it is important to remember Lincoln as one of the truly original jazz vocalists ever, there are few artists who could claim to have been as obsessed with using her art—as singer, songwriter, essayist (she contributed to Toni Cade’s groundbreaking anthology The Black Woman), painter and actress—as a vessel to explicate the full humanity of herself and the people, that she often claimed, were inside of her.

Born Anna Marie Wooldridge in August of 1930 in Chicago, Lincoln came of age on a farm in Calvin Center, Michigan. Like many aspiring artists from that era, Lincoln was profoundly affected by the music of Billie Holiday. As Lincoln recalled with journalist Lisa Jones in a 1991 New York Times interview, “My father worked in the houses of wealthy people who gave him recordings. The first singer I heard on record was Billie Holiday when I was 14.” Two decades later Lincoln would be favorably compared Holiday, though she would struggle throughout much of her early career to escape the shadows of both Holiday and the formidable mythology that has been erected in her name.

After apprenticing in various places including Honolulu and California, where she had initially moved after graduating high school, and taking the name Gaby Lee, Lincoln began to be managed by lyricist Bob Russell. It was Russell who suggested another name change—Abbey Lincoln—and who helped Lincoln sign with the noted Jazz label Riverside, where she recorded four albums beginning with Abbey Lincoln’s Affair: A Story of a Girl in Love (1956), That’s Him (1957), It’s Magic (1958) and Abbey is Blue (1959). On Lincoln’s debut, recorded with the Benny Carter Orchestra, Riverside tried to position Lincoln as the sexy, girl-next-door torch song singer and it was in that vein that Lincoln appeared in the film The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), wearing the same dress that Marilyn Monroe once wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). When Lincoln appeared on the cover of Ebony Magazine—in Monroe’s red dress—her fate as yet another “silent” pretty face seemed assured. But like her contemporary Eartha Kitt, Lincoln had another vision for herself.

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