Buffalo News (New York), March 6, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The Buffalo News
Buffalo News (New York)

March 6, 2005 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: BOOK REVIEWS; Pg. G7


HEADLINE: EDITOR'S CHOICE

BYLINE: JEFF SIMON

BODY:
Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, The Black Church and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore (Little, Brown, 419 pp., $27.95). In late May 1944, Reverend C. L. Franklin, of Memphis' New Salem Baptist Church, came to Buffalo's Friendship Baptist Church on Hickory Street for the same reason that so many of his colleagues and compatriots left the South and traveled north. Writes Cornell University professor Nick Salvatore in "Singing in a Strange Land," "the economic opportunities for blacks in Buffalo meant that Friendship had many union workers attending and they could respond to the church financially better than the people of Memphis could. This translated into concrete improvement for the Franklin family: a higher salary, a comfortable house provided by the congregation, and the prospect of a new model car. . . . Buffalo had the added attraction of not being Memphis when it came to race. How many times in Memphis had Franklin been called 'boy?' How many times in Memphis had he been forced to quiet or suppress his own voice at such moments? Black Memphians faced persistent harassment, beatings and the threat of much worse on the city's segregated buses and in the city's factories and plants. Buffalo was no paradise, as C. L. would discover, but the city's absence of thoroughly segregated facilities loomed large from a distance."
The family C. L. Franklin eventually brought with him to Buffalo included three daughters, one of whom would grow up to be 90 percent of the reason Rev. Franklin is known today -- Aretha Franklin, the magnificent queen of soul, the woman who followed Ray Charles into the marriage of church and pop music and equalled (sometimes perhaps even surpassed) him in expressive power.
And that's, perhaps, the most important bit of historic surgery performed by this remarkable new book -- the 400-page separation of an enormously influential father from his (now) vastly more famous daughter. C. L. Franklin was, before Martin Luther King, the country's best-known African-American preacher. His recorded sermons and services -- with their fire, ecstasy and freedom calls -- were best-selling advances in a long-struggle for racial assertion and rights.
The family lived at 177 Glenwood Ave., right next door to a white family. Writes Salvatore: "it was during these years on Glenwood that the family sensed that Aretha might possess a special musical talent, her interest in singing and picking at the piano at age three already causing comment within the family."
C. L. Franklin's life within the black church and the civil rights movement is thoroughly and punctiliously documented for the first time in this exemplary book. From birth in the Mississippi Delta to his death 69 years later after a five-year coma caused by his being shot in a home invasion in Detroit, this is, to most of us, a little-known life and a milieu infinitely less known than it ought to be.
Schlock Value: Hollywood at its Worst by Richard Roeper (Hyperion, 218 pp., $16.95). If Richard Roeper -- who sits next to Roger Ebert's left arm on weekly TV -- is a movie critic, then John Ashcroft is a rap star and Camilla Parker-Bowles is a superstar model. Whatever it is that he does for a living, though, you have to admit he usually has an awfully good time doing it. He certainly does here in this fly-by-night personal scrapbook of Roeper's TV babbler's life and his reflections on Hollywood's current ignominy and inanity. He knows how to entertain, sling facts and snap judgments and get offstage in a hurry before anyone comes after him with a hook. There are worse strategies for putting a scrapbook together.