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On Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace & Bearing Witness
Author’s Note: This piece was inspired by Harmony Holiday’s Performance Review series: micro-reviews of live performances that illustrate the beauty of music and the pleasure of bearing witness to it
The first thing you think to yourself is that you shouldn’t be watching this. Better yet, you can’t believe that you’re watching this: a previously unreleased gem that the artist involved didn’t want to see the light of day. But here you are, watching Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace as a form of Sunday morning entertainment. A way to make up for not getting yourself to church on time.
You see the crowd of people and it gives you flashbacks of the services that you used to attend as a kid, the different kinds of hairstyles that you used to see on a weekly basis: a melanated clergy adorned with afros, perms and curls.
The choir procession starts and everything seems to have a glow about it, their silver vests reflecting the lights above and giving these proceedings a heavenly sheen.
The main attraction shortly arrives after them, her hair neatly cropped into a perfect fro, dressed in white and wearing earrings that look like grapes carved out of the finest marble. A brief glance of nervousness passes across her face until she sits down at the piano and presses those black and white keys, singing the words of “Wholy Holy”.
You hear her sing and you can feel the soul drip through: honeyed, thick and full of warmth. The audience intermittently claps and cheers the singer on as she closes her eyes and her voice slowly becomes the vessel of the divine.
Formerly a preacher’s kid, you can tell that the singer is built for this moment. All those days performing in front of her father’s congregation have now come to bear fruit. These are the sounds that have been passed down generations, songs that have survived centuries of slavery and segregation and become something new, invocations of pain and misery turned into psalms of praise and glee.
There’s usually a moment during service where you’re caught off-guard, the songs you’re listening to briefly lull you into a hum of gentle compliance as you slowly tilt your body side-to-side and give some quiet claps for additional effect. And then you hear it. The sound that feels like a thousand angels saying “He Is Risen” but instead of those words being said verbatim, it is a guttural wail. The wail that comes from having known strife but successfully lived through it, the wail that is caked with the dust that we will all return to one day.
You hear this sound and notice that other people have heard it too. You see everybody from the minister to the usher egging the singer to go on, wanting to scream louder as they struggle to maintain their composure. Words like “save” and “me” become longer as the singer raises her head to the heavens and her cheeks form into a cherubic smile. You see people close their eyes as she sings, you see people start to cry as she sings, you see people stand and holler as she sings – like watching an Olympic runner about to break a world record.
You see the singer break the boundaries of transcendence and reach into the depths of something elemental, something primal, something rooted within the very fibers of your DNA. It is a feeling you are unable to articulate but this is what they mean when they say ‘take ‘em to church’. Take them to the place where the spirits dwell. The place filled with ancestral understanding. The sonic embodiment of Heaven on Earth: The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, singing “Amazing Grace”.
Further Watching
[1] Amazing Grace (2019)
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Lovely to see this up here. As LA is easing back into live events hope to have you on Performance Review this year.
While I have my issues with the book overall, David Ritz covered the making of this album really well in his unauthorized biography of Aretha Franklin. I enjoyed the angle you took on this.