Stevie Wonder - Living for the City

 #Stevie Wonder #Motown #soul #R&B #pop soul #funk #rock #gospel #jazz #progressive soul #1970s

Inspired in part by the fatal shooting in New York of a ten-year-old black boy by a white plain-clothes policeman, the audacious centerpiece of Stevie Wonder’s experimental 1973 album was a seven-and-a-half-minute meditation on the brutality of black America: Living for the City. Just as Wonder’s saccharine, middle-of-the-road smash hit You Are the Sunshine of My Life was selling millions around the world, the virtuoso former child star was busy in the studio pioneering the sound of black music by recording a concept album: Innervisions. Expanding on the ambitions of Talking Book the year before, it would secure his transformation from Motown pop star to legendary artist and activist.
Meanwhile, early on the morning of April 28th, 1973, Clifford “Cleophus” Glover was walking with his 51 year-old stepfather along New York Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens, New York when a white Buick Skylark drew up alongside them and a white man got out of the car shouting “You black son of a bitch!” and started shooting at them. They ran for their lives, but Cliffie did not make it. Police Officer Thomas Shea claimed that Add Armstead and his stepson resembled two known thieves – thieves who had been described as around 24 years of age and about six feet tall. Shea, who became the first police officer in almost 50 years to be charged with committing murder while on duty, claimed that the child had reached for a gun. Forensic evidence proved that the ten-year-old had been shot in the back; no evidence of a gun was ever found. Thomas Shea lost his job on the force, but in June 1974 a jury of 11 white men and one black woman found him not guilty of murder and he walked away a free man. Riots had followed the initial shooting and worse still came when the verdict was announced. Hundreds took to the streets. White children playing baseball were attacked by angry rioters on a local playing field. Cars were turned over and burned and two police officers were injured by rioters.
Stevie Wonder attended the funeral of Cleophus Glover, and sang for the congregation as the procession left the church. “I have followed the case,” he told Jet magazine. “It brings America down another notch in my book. I hope that black people realise how serious things are and do something about it”. This was the burning issue on Stevie Wonder’s mind as he wrote the epic Living for The City. With an infectious funk swagger – and complete with authentic street noise sound effects, spoken dialogue and the poignant slamming of a jail door – Living For The City contains a cinematic intermission that tells the fictional story of a wide-eyed innocent who comes to the big city to make his fortune and finds himself quickly duped into becoming a drug runner, arrested by the police and sentenced to ten years behind bars. There is not a lot of hope in this tale of the boy from “Hard Times, Mississippi” – his dreams are crushed and any prospects of a productive future along with them. Far from finding a welcoming community and useful work, he is plunged into a heartless ghetto populated by unscrupulous gangsters in a city controlled by a draconian white establishment. As the story concludes we hear a jailer yelling: “Get in the cell, nigger!” brutally underlining the unfeeling institutionalized racism. There is no happy ending in this potted saga. As Stevie gruffly sings: “If we don’t change, the world will soon be over.”  From: https://www.musicto.com/active/fight-evil/living-for-the-city-stevie-wonder/

Dr. John - Desitively Bonnaroo

 #Dr. John #Allen Toussaint #The Meters #blues #jazz #soul #funk #R&B #New Orleans #psychedelic voodoo rock #1970s

Dr. John further defines an ass-shaking new synthesis on Desitively Bonnaroo. Even today, there’s really no roadmap for the crazy-eyed co-mingling of R&B, jazz, island beats, blues, boogie funk and hoodoo splashed across this LP, recorded alongside fellow New Orleans legends Allen Toussaint and the Meters. At the same time, the grooves here are so sleekly ingratiating as to be therapeutic. Desitively Bonnaroo doesn’t aspire to the brash, edgy soul of contemporaries like George Clinton or the Ohio Players. No, it’s too sophisticated, too mysterious, for that. Which is probably why this 1974 cluster-funk didn’t sell nearly as well as its predecessor, Dr. John’s break-though In the Right Place. Stirred together at Allen Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans, Desitively Bonnaroo is the sound of a group of musicians in perfect sync. And, yeah, having a ball. Dr. John has rarely sounded more loose, more committed. “High steppin’ mama!” he crows at one point, with a singing voice like a knotty live-oak knee. “Better keep on foxin’ with your foxy self!” Nearby, the slinky, coolly salacious backup singers match Dr. John and Co., wail for wail: “Give me what you got for me!” (Named after a south Louisiana expression meaning roughly “better than the best,” ‘Desitively Bonnaroo’ later gave a Tennessee-based music event its name).  From: https://somethingelsereviews.com/2011/02/19/dr-john-with-the-meters-desitively-bonnaroo-1974/

The Temptations - (I Know) I'm Losing You

 #The Temptations #David Ruffin #Eddie Kendricks #Motown #R&B #soul #funk #psychedelic soul #1960s

The Temptations were an American vocal group noted for their smooth harmonies and intricate choreography. Recording primarily for Motown Records, they were among the most popular performers of soul music in the 1960s and ’70s. Originally called the Elgins, the Temptations were formed in 1961 from the coupling of two vocal groups based in Detroit - the Primes, originally from Alabama, and the Distants. That same year they signed with Motown. After a slow start - with the addition of David Ruffin and largely under the direction of songwriter-producers Smokey Robinson and Norman Whitfield - the Temptations turned out a string of romantic hits. Bass Melvin Franklin, baritone Otis Williams, and occasional lead Paul Williams provided complex harmonies, and the two regular lead singers, David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, strikingly complemented each other. Ruffin had a remarkable sandpaper baritone and Kendricks a soaring tenor. Paragons of sleek fashion and practitioners of athletic choreography, the Temptations epitomized sophisticated cool. In the late 1960s they shifted to a more funk-oriented sound and to more socially conscious material when Whitfield became the group’s producer and principal songwriter.  From: https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Temptations

The list of Motown songs based around a guitar riff is a short one, but this masterpiece should be at the top of that one and several others. Producer Norman Whitfield wrote the song with Edward Holland of Holland-Dozier-Holland, but the Temps’ road manager Cornelius Grant supplied the signature guitar line. Grant’s contribution not only got him co-writing credit, but earned him the spot to play on the record – that’s him you hear on guitar in the song. The Temptations’ classic line-up was in full effect for this number. David Ruffin nails the vocals. The rasp in his voice makes it sound like he’s been up all night drinking, smoking and thinking about where this relationship has gone. When the rest of the Temps chime in with “looosing you” it sounds like a desperate cry echoing out of the abyss. The subtleties in Whitfield’s arrangement take center stage in the last minute of the song, as the playing of Eddie “Bongo” Brown and the Funk Brothers horn section take over. Check out that great trombone line and how the long low note underscores the desperate feel of the song. You can hear Ruffin’s world collapsing as the horns ramp up and dance with the voices as the song fades out. The gravity of the situation would be dire if it weren’t so easy to dance to. Seizing on the rock elements of the song, Rare Earth cut a 10 minute cover for their 1970 “Ecology” album. Motown cut the track down to three minutes and released it as a single that summer where it peaked at No. 7 on the pop charts, one slot higher than the Temptations’ original. The greatest bar band of all time, the Faces, cut their version a year later. It was also released as a single and appeared on Rod Stewart’s blockbuster “Every Picture Tells A Story” album.  From: https://joelfrancis.com/2009/06/17/the-temptations-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Ci-know-i%E2%80%99m-losing-you%E2%80%9D/

Edwin Starr - War

#Edwin Starr #Norman Whitfield #Motown #soul #R&B #protest #1960s

An anti-war anthem deemed a little too forthright for one of Motown’s biggest acts hit the top of the charts for one of its finest soul singers in August 1970. Edwin Starr, who arrived at Motown with a fine track record but had never quite dined at Tamla’s top table, had the USA’s hottest single as “War” started its three-week run atop the Billboard Hot 100. The song was written by Barrett Strong and producer Norman Whitfield, who recorded the first version of it with the Temptations. But even though that creative combination was producing some real cutting-edge social commentary, Motown felt that to release their version as a single would alienate their more conservative fan base. Many politically engaged students lobbied the label to release the Temptations’ recording, but Motown decided on a different tactic. Whitfield recorded a new version with Starr, the soul man born Charles Hatcher in Nashville in 1942 and raised in Cleveland. He’d made his name at Detroit label Ric-Tic in the mid-1960s with such gems as “Agent Double-O-Soul” and “Stop Her On Sight (S.O.S.),” before transferring to the Gordy label when Motown bought Ric-Tic outright. The result of the new interpretation was a soul classic, with a lyric that was clearly anti-Vietnam but has remained sadly relevant throughout the world ever since. Starr’s powerful vocal delivery brought a real sense of anger and frustration to the recording.  From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/edwin-starr-war-song/

The New Respects - Trigger

 #The New Respects #alternative rock #indie rock #blues rock #soul #R&B #funk #folk rock

The New Respects are a high-energy throwback rock and soul quartet comprising siblings Alexandria, Alexis, and Darius Fitzgerald, and their cousin Jasmine Mullen. The children of a Nashville preacher, twins Alexandria (guitar) and Alexis (bass) and their brother Darius (drums) grew up on gospel music, and while Mullen (vocals) heard a wider range of influences in the house, her parents were both songwriters in the Christian music industry, with her mom, Nicole C. Mullen, having established herself as a prominent recording artist in the early 2000s. Forming in high school as the John Hancock Band, the quartet was initially based around more of an indie folk sound. As they became more established, the influences of early rock, R&B, blues, and soul began to inform their sound, and their music became more dynamic. By 2016, they'd signed with Capitol CMG and changed their name to the New Respects. Following a pair of singles later that year, they made their debut in early 2017 with the Here Comes Trouble EP.  From: https://www.isrbx.me/3137661009-the-new-respects-before-the-sun-goes-down-2018.html

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage

 Smokey Robinson & The Miracles #Motown #R&B #rock & roll #soul #funk #1960s

The most underrated Miracles LP of the '60s, Make It Happen featured a spate of great songs, including three or four that really should've been hits (plus one that only became the group's biggest hit three years after release). Opening with "The Soulful Shack," a grooving dance number that would've fit perfectly on the previous year's Away We a Go-Go, the album featured plenty of near-misses, including a pair of delightful good-times dance songs, "My Love Is Your Love (Forever)" and "It's a Good Feeling," plus a great choice for a cover, a tender version of Little Anthony & the Imperials' "I'm on the Outside (Looking In)." The hits really did shine more than any of the other songs, though, marking yet another leap in the level of Smokey Robinson's compositional sophistication. "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" is a brilliant twist on a romantic novelty in the Motown mold (with a production that deftly references the British Invasion), while "More Love" is the most sincere lyric and most emotive performance in the group's catalog, a song of reassurance occasioned by several miscarriages suffered by Robinson's wife (and fellow Miracle), Claudette. The capstone, however, was the last song, "The Tears of a Clown," originally written as an up-tempo instrumental groover by Stevie Wonder and his producer, Hank Cosby. Robinson's lyric is witty yet sublime, and his lead vocal is one of the best performances of his recording career. One of the biggest misses by the notoriously hit-conscious Motown organization was failing to release this as a single before it became an album hit on British radio in 1970, three years after it first appeared. It shot to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and prompted Motown to re-release Make It Happen under a new title, The Tears of a Clown.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/make-it-happen-mw0000873287

William "Smokey" Robinson's high tenor is his calling card, but he's also one of the most important songwriters and producers of the 1960s. The only Motown artist to write and produce his own recordings from the beginning, he also wrote and produced many of the most memorable songs for Motown's other acts: "Ain't That Peculiar" for Marvin Gaye; "My Guy" for Mary Wells; "My Girl" and "Get Ready" for the Temptations. He kept plenty of top material for himself, from early hits like "Shop Around" and "Ooh Baby Baby" to the Sound Of Young America classics "The Tracks Of My Tears" (which inspired the Zombies' "Time Of The Season") and "The Tears Of A Clown" (co-written with Stevie Wonder). Smokey has an ear for catchy melodies and was a perfectionist producer and arranger, but his most important contribution was his lyrics: probably the most cleverly written love songs of the period, often working an extended metaphor to death: listen to "The Way You Do The Things You Do" by the Temptations or the Supremes' "The Composer" or Smokey's own "More Love" or "I Second That Emotion" and you'll see what I mean. Bob Dylan once called him America's greatest living poet, and I suspect he wasn't kidding. (Dylan later said it was a slip of the tongue and he'd meant to say Artur Rimbaud, who was neither alive nor American, but whatever).  From: http://www.warr.org/smokey.html

Sly & The Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

 #Sly & The Family Stone #psychedelic soul #funk #funk rock #progressive soul #R&B #1960s

Sly Stone wrote "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" because he felt listeners were not hearing the messages in his songs even though the band was more popular then ever. Sly & the Family Stone were an integrated band and tried to spread the message of racial harmony, but Stone thought that message was getting lost. Larry Graham played the innovative bass line using a technique where he thumped the strings. He learned this technique when he was playing in a duo with his mother, who played the organ - with no drummer, he had to create the percussion with his bass. This style became very popular on funk records for years to come and was a big influence on artists like Prince and The Red Hot Chili Peppers.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/sly-the-family-stone/thank-you-falettinme-be-mice-elf-agin

In the beginning, Sly & The Family Stone were pop’s great utopian experiment: A band where the musicians were black and white, male and female, drawing on hard R&B and way-out psychedelic rock, playing for every audience that would have them. In 1969, the Family Stone hit #1 with “Everyday People” and played one of the standout sets at Woodstock. Their wild, freaked-out take on soul music helped birth funk and set the Motown aesthetic on a whole new trajectory; the Temptations and the Jackson 5, especially, built on what they’d done. But for Sly Stone and his bandmates, things turned dark quickly.
Around the time that they blew up and became huge stars, Sly & The Family Stone left their San Francisco home for Los Angeles. They all started doing harder drugs — PCP was reportedly a favorite — and hating each other. Sly insulated himself from his bandmates, some of whom were his actual siblings, and he surrounded himself instead with dealers and gangsters. There are stories about how he’d carry around a violin case full of nothing but drugs. He started missing shows and putting on chaotic performances at TV tapings. And he stopped releasing music. At a time when popular artists were expected to crank out albums at a dizzy rate, Sly & The Family Stone only put out one single in the more than two years between their 1969 breakout Stand! and the dark, nasty 1971 epic There’s A Riot Goin’ On. And that single went to #1.
On a purely sonic level, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” sounds like a total celebration. It’s sharp, sprightly, upbeat. All the band members share lead vocal duties, singing as one, like they’re an army. Larry Graham hammers his bass hard, popping the strings and treating his instrument like it’s percussive. Sly and Freddie Stone’s guitars do a wah-wah strut, and Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson’s horns stab through the mix. The hook sounds celebratory — like the Family Stone is thanking America’s public for latching onto their bugged-out sound.
But that is not, of course, what the Family Stone were doing. Instead, the lyrics are both sardonic and freaked the fuck out. The first verse may or may not be a story about a dangerous fist fight with a cop, or with a white man: “Looking at the devil, grinning at his gun / Fingers start shaking, I begin to run.” The second is an admission of defeat, a statement of futility: “Thank you for the party, but I could never stay / Many things on my mind / Words in the way.” On the third verse, the band reels off the titles of past hits, turning those words into pure gibberish. It’s a whole song of heavy notes, and it ends on the heaviest one: “Dying young is hard to take / Selling out is harder.”
So: A stark fuck-you hidden within the disguise of a great party song. And it will remain a great party song, since most of us never pay attention to the lyrics, which is the whole problem that those lyrics tried to address. (Technically, “Thank You” shared its #1 with the ballad “Everybody Is A Star,” which would’ve been a 7.) “Thank You” is a remarkable song, a possibly-ironic work of unity from a band that wasn’t even close to being unified. It’s messy, since everything the Family Stone did was messy. And Sly would find sharper, more direct ways to say the things that he wanted to say. But the intensity was already there, if you knew where to look.
From: https://www.stereogum.com/2026526/sly-the-family-stones-thank-you-falettinme-be-mice-elf-agin-review/columns/the-number-ones/

Nina Simone - Pirate Jenny (The Black Freighter)

#Nina Simone #folk #gospel #blues #jazz #R&B #soul #1950s #1960s #The High Priestess of Soul #The Threepenny Opera #Kurt Weil #Bertolt Brecht

Lotte Lenya’s terrific performance of “Pirate Jenny” in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera might be the most enduring version of the song. One wonders what Brecht might have made of Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” which he co-wrote with Kurt Weill in the late 1920s. Simone makes the song her own, not just in the idiosyncrasies of her performance, but in her substantive alterations to the song’s setting, to it's title character and to it's politics. Simone’s version is found on her 1964 LP Nina Simone in Concert.
In Pabst’s film, Jenny sings soon after learning that her erstwhile lover and pimp Mackie Messer has married Polly Peachum - and immediately after accepting a bribe from Polly’s mother, Mrs. Peachum, to betray Mackie to the London cops. Jenny takes the money, tips off the cops and sings. It seems like a desperate, nihilistic moment: an abject woman, amid turbid emotional and ethical crises, articulates a violent fantasy of absolute power. Whose side is Jenny on? Her own, of course, but operating at such an alienated distance from the social is never a good thing in Brecht. 
Simone’s performance feeds off Jenny’s anger and abjection, but the social politics of Simone’s revision are more emphatic, even didactic. The import of Simone’s relocation of the song - from The Threepenny Opera’s Victorian London, to “this crummy southern town, in this crummy old hotel” - wouldn’t have been obscure to anyone in the Carnegie Hall audiences in front of whom she recorded Nina Simone in Concert, in March and April of 1964. The American south was then embroiled in civil rights struggle and mounting violence: Medgar Evers had been executed in his Mississippi driveway in June of 1963, and just a few months later, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, AL. Collins, Robertson and Wesley were 14 years old; McNair was 11. 
Simone addressed that violence in another, more famous song on Nina Simone in Concert, “Mississippi Goddam”: “Alabama’s got me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” It’s rightly noted to be a watershed song, signaling Simone’s forceful transformation into protest singer, activist and cultural radical. Her version of “Pirate Jenny” may lack the referential specificity of that other, more storied song (and “Mississippi Goddam” gets pretty direct; at one point in the song, she intones, “Oh, but this whole country is full of lies / You’re all gonna die, and die like flies / I don’t trust you anymore” - in Carnegie Hall). But “Pirate Jenny” is a lively complement to the indignation of “Mississippi Goddam,” and tonally it’s even more bitter, even more violent. 
You can hear that implicit violence in the horrific cackle Simone produces at the 3:27 mark, immediately after the infantilizing image of the ribbon in Jenny’s hair. It’s a stirring contrast: the feminine innocent become vengeful fury. You can hear the bitterness in the final “Ha!” that bursts from her throat as she imagines herself disappearing over the horizon line with the ship. You can feel it in one of Simone’s other revisions to the song. In The Threepenny Opera, the song climaxes with Jenny’s shocking order that all the men in London (“Alle!”) should be killed for her pleasure. In Simone’s version, there’s never any doubt that all of her prisoners should be killed, it’s only a matter of how quickly. She hisses, rapaciously, “Right now / Right now!” 
In another notable change, Simone’s Jenny isn’t a prostitute, but a maid, cleaning up after “you people” in the aforementioned “crummy hotel.” Jenny is still marginalized, but there’s nothing subterranean or metaphorical about the economic environment she moves through. It’s all culturally sanctioned. Her oppression is a transparent element of her southern lifeworld, and she is thus sharply conscious of the manifest power of those transactions: “Maybe once you tip me, and it makes you feel swell.” It’s an important change to Brecht’s original lyrics, focusing on a set of economic relations that indicate Jenny’s racially charged plight. She’s a maid in a southern hotel, a laboring black woman, who’s made recognizable as such precisely because of the larger Jim Crow-period matrix of law and social practice that determined who did what work for whom. 
That economic register makes some of the song’s subsequent images even more resonant. The people on the receiving end of Jenny’s rage are “chained up” on the “dock.” The spectacle of terrified, chained bodies by the seaside evokes the slave auction block, even as the image wants to invert the slave economy’s racialized logic, of white oppressing black. And Simone repeatedly calls the ship in the harbor a “black freighter.” Black freight. It’s another marker for the slave trade, and perhaps Jenny is trying to run the film in reverse. Perhaps she wants to board the vessel, to sail all the slave ships back across the Atlantic, to neutralize the horror of the Middle Passage. That sounds like a utopian desire, a triumphal image that the song’s tone cannot sustain, or even create in the first place. Too much misery and violence has already happened. American history has already insisted that blackness and capital are inextricably bound. Utopian longing is beside the point. What’s needed is critique, sharpened by righteous rage. 
The historical period that we call “the Sixties” ground on for another ten years after Simone’s 1964 Carnegie Hall gigs. She became increasingly militant in her public rhetoric and performative style. She claimed once to have looked Martin Luther King in the face and said, “I am not non-violent.” Her voice throughout “Pirate Jenny” is a sort of corroborating evidence for that assertion.  From: https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/183632765267/why-brecht-now-vol-ii-nina-simone-sings-pirate 

Wilson Pickett - In the Midnight Hour

 #Wilson Picket #soul #R&B #Southern soul #rock & roll #deep soul #Stax/Atlantic #1960s

Wilson Pickett was an American singer-songwriter, whose explosive style helped define the soul music of the 1960s. Pickett was a product of the Southern black church, and gospel was at the core of his musical manner and onstage persona. He testified rather than sang, preached rather than crooned. His delivery was marked by the fervor of religious conviction, no matter how secular the songs he sang. Along with thousands of other Southern farm workers, Pickett migrated in the 1950s to industrial Detroit, Michigan, where his father worked in an auto plant. His first recording experience was in pure gospel. He sang with the Violinaires and the Spiritual Five, modeling himself after Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales, a thunderous shouter. Pickett’s switch to secular music came quickly. As a member of the Falcons, a hardcore rhythm-and-blues vocal group, he sang lead on his own composition “I Found a Love” (1962), one of the songs that interested Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler in Pickett as a solo artist. “Pickett was a pistol,” said Wexler, who nicknamed him “the Wicked Pickett” and sent him to Memphis, Tennessee, to write with Otis Redding’s collaborator, guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T. and the MG’s. The result was a smash single, “In the Midnight Hour” (1965). From that moment on, Pickett was a star. With his dazzling good looks and confident demeanor, he stood as a leading exponent of the Southern-fried school of soul singing. His unadorned straight-from-the-gut approach was accepted, even revered, by a civil-rights-minded pop culture.  From: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wilson-Pickett

Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man (the Way That I Love You)

 #Aretha Franklin #soul #R&B #gospel #pop #jazz #blues #rock #Atlantic soul #Southern soul #pop soul #Muscle Shoals #1960s

In 1967, Aretha Franklin signed to Atlantic Records after the expiration of her recording contract with Columbia. She had not had the breakthrough success that she was hoping for on her previous label, and was eager to make a new start at a new home. She was immediately paired with legendary producer Jerry Wexler, and at his request, headed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record at the town’s F.A.M.E. Recording Studios. Wexler wanted to take Aretha away from the bustle of New York and LA to a sonic incubator to record a sound that was more authentic to her roots. The sessions in Muscle Shoals were successful in establishing the producer-artist bond between Wexler and Franklin, and the pair was able to produce the hit single “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You)” during that time. Franklin would go on to have many chart-topping successes on Atlantic Records under Wexler's guidance. Some notable titles include “Respect”, “Chain of Fools”, "Rock Steady” and “Think”.  Franklin would later recall, “Coming to Muscle Shoals was the turning point in my career.” Franklin remained with Atlantic Records from 1967-1979. This period is regarded as her most prolific and commercially successful. She received 10 Grammy Awards during her tenure for works that she co-produced with Jerry Wexler and the esteemed Atlantic production team in New York and Muscle Shoals.  From: https://www.atlanticrecords.com/posts/aretha-franklin-art-musical-partnership-18201