It's frustrating how little well recorded live soul music there is from the 1960s and 1970s. Even for big names like Aretha Franklin, you're lucky if you get an official live album or two, usually short and flawed, and quality bootlegs are extremely rare. But this is one of those nice rare instances. Franklin became a big star in 1967, and arguably had an even bigger year in 1968. A lot of Europeans discovered American soul music in the late 1960s. When soul stars toured Europe then, they usually were surprised by the size and passion of the fans there. Franklin was so big in 1968 that she was given her own entire episode of a German TV show called "Swing In."
This show has its plusses and minuses. A minus is that there was a very talkative MC who spoke in German a lot. He also did a short interview with Franklin right in the middle of the show (with everything being painstakingly translated in German and English in real time). One other minus is that Franklin pretty much never says a word between songs. I'm guessing this is because she surmised the German audience wouldn't understand her, as well as the fact that she only had an hour for the concert and couldn't afford to waste any time.
One minus is also a plus in the sense that the German audience was unusually polite and subdued for a soul music audience at the time. They were even subdued compared to other European audiences, because one can see video on YouTube of a much more lively Aretha Franklin concert in Amsterdam in 1968. But this is a plus because one can clearly hear the music instead of lots of screaming and cheering. Also, it's a big plus that the recording exists at all, since this sort of soul bootleg from the time is so rare. From: http://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2020/04/aretha-franklin-swing-in-wdr-studio-l.html
