106. Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (1967)




















Track Listing

1. Respect
2. Drown In My Own Tears
3. I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)
4. Soul Serenade
5. Don't Let Me Lose This Dream
6. Try It Baby
7. Dr Feelgood
8. Good Times
9. Do Right Woman Do Right Man
10. Save Me
11. Change Is Gonna Come

Review

The great Aretha, in what is one of the best Soul albums reviewed here, comparable to Sam Cooke's live album, but little else, except things still to come. Aretha is amazing in all respects, her piano playing here is outstanding as is her delivery.

Aretha has an impressive voice, but more, much more than that she has perfect delivery which possesses such power and conviction that it leaves no one cold. We all know Respect but the rest of the album is equally good. Aretha is a great interpreter and in this album she was released from previous constraints put ot her singing carrer by production companies.

So we have Atlantic to thank for letting us have Aretha uncut. It is really worth a listen, it is deeply emotional and those emotions come from the almost feminist interpreation of Redding's Respect to the beautiful version of Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come, where the civil rights track gains new meaning when sung by Aretha in a much more personal register, as Aretha and as a woman as much as a black woman.

So I am very impressed, the popularity of Respect might have overshadowed the rest of the album but that is actually pretty unfair as the album all stands up to that hit single. You can try to stream it from Napster, but you will get the wrong version of the album, Napster listed a compilation of the songs of the album found at other sources, mainly live ones, as this album. That is wrong. So buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Respect
2. A Change Is Gonna Come
3. Dr. Feelgood
4. Do Right Woman Do Right Man

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia, on Respect:

Franklin's version of the song contains the famous lines:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Take care of . . . TCB

The last line is often misquoted as "Take out, TCP", or something similar, and indeed most published music sheets which include the lyrics have this incorrect line in them. The confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that the entire sequence was an ad-lib by Franklin, not present in Redding's original song. Thus, for that sequence, there were no official written lyrics to quote. As such, "Take out, TCP" likely simply represented someone's best guess as to the words being sung.

"TCB" is an abbreviation that was commonly in used in the 1960's and 1970's, meaning "Taking Care of Business", and it was particularly widely used in African-American culture. However, it was somewhat less well-known outside of that culture, yielding a possible explanation as to why it was not recognized by those who transcribed Franklin's words for music sheets.

Legacy

"Respect" is one of several songs considered to have defined the 1960s. It has appeared in dozens of films, and still receives consistent play on oldies radio stations. In the 1970s, Franklin's version of the song came to exemplify the feminist movement. Although she had numerous hits after "Respect", and several before its release, the song has became Franklin's signature song and her best-known recording.

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You was ranked eighty-third in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time in 2002. Two years later, "Respect" was fifth in the magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time. The song "Respect" is part of the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.

The song was covered by the basque fusion-rock band Negu Gorriak in 1995, translated as "Errespetua" (respect in euskara).