Amazing Aretha
This Week: Amazing Grace — with Ed Pavlic, Wesley Morris, Shana Redmond and Rev. William Barber. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Go see this movie, folks, and catch it on the big screen if you can. The film footage from Aretha Franklin’s recording of Amazing Grace at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in 1972 was lost, and now it’s found.
Over the course of two January nights, Aretha Franklin, age 29, made her biggest hit (and the biggest gospel hit of all time) accompanied by the gospel giant James Cleveland at the piano and the Southern California Community Choir. Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts were in the audience along with Aretha’s father, the Reverand C.L. Franklin and Aretha’s mentor, Clara Ward. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records wanted a film record of it and signed up the Hollywood director Sydney Pollack to shoot it with 4 cameras from 40 angles.
Only problem was that Pollack didn’t use a clapper to sync the audio and video, which made the project nearly impossible to complete. Warner Bros. eventually gave up on it after missing the release of the album, and Pollack’s 20 hours of footage was almost lost to history.
But revelations! Just in time for Easter, former Atlantic Records producer Alan Elliott resurrected this cinematic treasure. He bought the rights to the footage in 2007, and with digital technology finished syncing it with the audio recordings in 2010. It was a 28-year long odyssey that included Aretha Franklin suing a couple of times to prevent the film’s release, and Elliot mortgaging his house several times to pay for the footage and the editing as well as insurance and lawyers.
After Aretha’s death last year, Franklin’s niece and the executor of her estate, Sabrina Owens, helped Elliot get the deal done. It’s a heck of a yarn.
Seeing this miracle is to believe it, but hearing it on the radio or on a podcast is the next best thing, thanks specially to Open Source producer Conor Gillies who did a beautiful job editing our show.
Thanks too to our friend Ed Pavlic who gave us the early warning about the film and got us some screening copies. Ed came to town a few weeks ago and walked us through the music and the film, which he’d already seen a couple of dozen times. He wrote a beautiful piece about it for The Boston Review “Aretha Franklin’s Soul.”
My first reaction to watching the film Amazing Grace was it was like Hubble Telescope images into the origins of the universe. Through this performance and all of the black spiritual tradition in song, my strong sense is that one gets a kind of glimpse into the origins of black speech — you know of the kind of language that it took to accompany experience here: black experience in North America, which like [James] Baldwin is saying, when he goes to West Africa to investigate his own origins. And he gets to the coast and looks westward over the Atlantic thinking, “There’s just no words for this.” When folks made these trips they were embarking into an experience which to say in the most mild terms no language existing at that time could cover, could describe…
And so you had people transported into a situation that Baldwin describes as speechlessness, which isn’t the whole story but I think allows us to imagine a dimension a kind of volcanic need for creativity, for molten action in language in real time, by people under pressure.
I think it’s indexed and catalogued in the tradition of of black song as well as in the tradition of black gesture and you know black laughter and I think nowhere more or more copiously and powerfully indexed than in those couple hours there in those churches.
The New York Times’ Wesley Morris talked us through “Mary Don’t You Weep,” calling it “one of the greatest moments of singing in recorded history.” UCLA musicologist Shana Redmond, who’s a vocalist herself, gave us a feminist take on “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “Wholly Holy,” and we reached Reverend William Barber on the Poor Peoples Campaign bus on a swing through the Carolinas. He ended the show channeling Aretha with a message for us today:
We ought to keep on holding the note of justice, love, righteousness until in fact things change… and so as you listen to this, don’t just hear with your ears of your head; hear with the ears of your soul, the ears of your heart, and if you feel like it right where you are let Aretha take you to church. Let her take you to transformation. Let her remind you of this amazing grace that is available to all of us and be blessed in a mighty and powerful way. We need to sing now. We need to sing now. And let that singing be a part of the rhythm of our movement in this moment.
Where in the World is Christopher Lydon?
Can you guess?
Watch: Knock Down the House
You can see this terrific doc on Netflix. Director Rachel Lears followed four progressive women challenging powerful incumbents in the 2018 midterms. Each was a great story; one insurgent made history. If you weren’t swooning over AOC before, you’ll be slobbering by the end of this film.
Listen:
Our pal Tamar Avishai reminded us about this joint production of 99 Percent Invisible and Reply All: the strange case of why you can’t play Roman Mars’ show on the car stereo of a 2016 Mazda sedan.
We’re Reading: “And How Are You, Dr Sacks?”
Chris and I are loving New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler’s memoir of his friendship with the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, which will be published later this summer. Weschler spent years collecting material for a profile of Sacks, until his subject told him not to publish it. But then when Sacks was dying, he said : “Now….You have to. Here’s the epigraph from Ren Weschler’s book:
During the four years in the early eighties
that I spent in his often near-continuous company,
Oliver Sacks would sometimes refer to himself
as a clinical ontologist,
by which I came to understand
he meant a doctor whose entire practice
in relation to his patients
revolved around the question,
How are you?
Which is to say,
How do you be?
For, as he had come to understand:
Being is Doing.
From around the Web:
The Guardian has started publishing the Mauna Loa carbon count, the climate change global benchmark, on the weather page of the paper every day. If we’re going to keep below 1.5C of warming, we need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach zero by mid century, so we better start keeping careful track of it.
For context: at the dawn of the industrial revolution, CO2 was at 280 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. By 1958, when the first measurements were made at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, it had reached 315ppm. It raced past 350ppm in 1986 and was 400ppm in 2013. (Thanks to Katherine Bidwell)
Sally Rooney on Superheroes and the Myths of American Power. Nathan Robinson on Joe Biden, Everybodys’ Chum and Pete Buttigieg, All About Pete. MoDo on Bill Barr’s baby, and how he schooled his old buddy Bob Mueller.
Open Source Comings and Goings
We say goodbye and thank you to producer Rebecca Panovka who’s off to grad school (you’ll be reading about her someday), and hello and welcome to the newest member of our squad: Adam Colman. Adam has done some reporting for one of our favorite podcasts, The Organist; he’s a published author and teaches journalism at UMASS. Think he can help us raise our game?
See you next week! Tweet, share, donate, listen, like, follow, subscribe. Did I forget donate?
Mary
