Say a Little Prayer Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You know her honorific: Queen of Soul. And heavy is the head that wears the crown. In her lifetime, Aretha Franklin didn’t just want to be revered. She wanted hits. But Franklin made pop come to her, not the other way around. When showtunes and standards didn’t work in the ’60s, Aretha switched to gritty R&B and gospel harmonies—and started topping the charts. When she recorded a live album in a church in the ’70s, it became her best-seller. When the MTV era changed the game in the ’80s, she did New Wave synthpop her way—and topped the charts again. In the ’90s, she tried house, hip-hop and New Jack Swing, scoring hits deep into her fifties. Join Chris Molanphy as he explains how Aretha Franklin earned her regal title, one hit at a time. She won our respect by infusing the charts with a holy spirit and amazing grace—and she always remained a natural woman. Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today.
0:09.3	Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance
0:17.1	companies all at once. Try it at progressive.com.
0:21.8	Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, not available in all states or situations.
0:26.9	Prices vary based on how you buy.
0:59.0	Prices vary based on how you buy. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Popchart from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
1:05.6	I'm Chris Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, we talked about how Aretha Franklin became the Queen of Soul. It wasn't
1:14.6	instantaneous. Despite her background as an acclaimed gospel singer, she spent the first half of the
1:22.2	1960s recording jazzy pop songs for Columbia Records with no big hits. But a switch to R&B-R-N-B-rooted label
1:32.8	Atlantic Records in 1967 brought respect to Aretha's name and made her America's premiere
1:42.5	vocal dynamo.
1:46.7	We're now in the early 70s.
1:51.9	Franklin is fully established as a pop and R&B megastar, and she is about to leverage that clout
1:55.2	by recording a gospel LP that will turn out to be her all-time bestseller.
2:03.1	Since her late 60s imperial reign began, many of Aretha Franklin's fans speculated and even
2:11.7	yearned for her to return to the church. As it was, so much of her secular pop recording was already infused with gospel
2:22.5	style singing that, even when she was delivering love songs, it sounded like she was bearing
2:30.0	witness to the Lord.
2:31.7	I say a little prayer for you. witness to the Lord.
2:55.5	Five years after her pop breakthrough, Franklin finally fulfilled these fans' wishes with Amazing Grace, an ambitious multimedia project that was to Aretha Franklin in 1972, what the
3:05.8	Get Back project had been to the Beatles in 1969.
3:10.9	The making of an album captured live on film, and like the ill-fated get-back,
	...

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