Dawn of the Soul Diva

This week: Late '60s R&B records, that fertile medium where the cross-over popularity of soul music and the voices of female empowerment and social consciousness were all beginning to intersect in a profound, primordial way. They mingled, they fermented, and not long thereafter something new was spotted emerging from the pop music ooze. She was resplendent in her sequined gowns and diamonds, she looked you directly in the eye, and she shook the rafters in a righteous rain of Spinto soprano notes.

It was the dawn of the Soul Diva.

1. Jean & The Darlings, How Can You Mistreat the One You Love (Volt)
Jean & The Darlings were a group of Arkansas-based, gospel-raised singers which included sisters Jean (also spelled Jeanne) and Dee Dolphus, Jeanne’s daughter Paula, and family friend Phefe Harris. In addition to their service as background studio singers at the seminal Memphis soul label Stax, they released six 45s of their own on Stax’s sister label Volt in the late 1960s.

The boundlessly energetic “How Can You Mistreat the One You Love,” from 1967, was the first of Jean & the Darlings’ Volt releases and it must have given the Stax producers some pause, too, after it only barely grazed the charts. Was it the hand clapping? Too many dBus on the signal levels? They probably puzzled over the possibilities for weeks before finally shrugging their shoulders, chalking another one up to the vagaries of the pop charts.

2. Erma Franklin, Change My Thoughts from You (Brunswick)
Being a relation of the famous comes with its own weird sort of curse. As the son of a popular president, the daughter of a Nobel Prize winner, or, for example, the sister of the Queen of Soul, your accomplishments and aspirations are invariably judged against the fame which preceded you. We’ll likely never know whether Erma’s relative obscurity was due to the comparisons to her ebullient sister, or simply to the whims and injustices of the music business, but it can be fairly said that having Aretha Franklin as a sister probably didn’t make one’s own ambitions as an R&B singer much easier to realize.
Erma Franklin grew up singing with her younger sisters Aretha and Carolyn (also an overlooked singer); like Aretha, she recorded a few tentative major label albums in a poppier vein, none of which aroused much notice upon their release in the early ‘60s. Erma began hitting her stride around 1967, though, with strongly soul-oriented fare for the Shout record label and, a year or two later, for the Chicago-based Brunswick.

From its elemental piano and drum introduction, “Change My Thoughts From You” is one of Franklin’s highlights on the Brunswick label. Her voice sexy and unequivocally in control, it works flawlessly with the production of veteran studio whiz Carl Davis; it’s a quintessentially Chicagoan swirl of Motown-style melancholic hooks, sweet harmonies, and snappy drums. Erma Franklin recorded “Change My Thoughts From You” in 1969, unfortunately the penultimate year of her recording career.

3. Ruby Andrews, You Made a Believer (Out of Me) (Zodiac)
The Detroit songwriting team of Fred Bridges, Richard Knight, and Robert Eaton appropriated the metaphor of religious rebirth for this selection, swapping the language of the devout for the language of the infatuated. Nothing really new there, of course: that’s part of secular soul music’s evolution from gospel. It does take the right singer, though, to prevent lyrics to a song like 1969’s “You Made a Believer (Out of Me)” from sounding merely overwrought. And that’s exactly what Ruby Andrews does - her voice soars, cutting through the song’s low center of gravity and its funky, off-kilter rhythms.

Born in Mississippi, Ruby Andrews’ recording career took shape in Chicago in the late 1960s with a series of 45s and two full-length albums for the Zodiac label, hitting her commercial zenith early on with 1967’s “Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over).” Since a brief return in the late ‘70s with more disco-oriented fare, Andrews has only recorded infrequently, alas, her voice in fine form but generally heard in bluesier settings.