The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), February 27, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The News and Observer
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

February 27, 2005 Sunday
Final Edition


SECTION: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. G4


HEADLINE: The King of soulful salvation;
C.L. Franklin shook the rafters and worshippers' hearts through gospel music

BYLINE: Arthur Kempton, Correspondent

BODY:
Wherever Sunday nights found him along the thorny trail to social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would curtail his business at 10 o'clock to keep an appointment with the radio. "[W]hen sleep was often scarce, and tempers short," a veteran of King's long march recalled, "[Martin] would stop the meeting ... in time for C.L. Franklin to come on."
Though the greatest orator in living American memory had been schooled in high-toned homiletics, he was a big fan of "good church" in the low style, and Franklin, among the ablest of "church-wreckers" in all Afro-Christendom, was "his favorite preacher."
Broadcast from Tennessee on a 50,000-watt, clear-channel radio station whose signal carried for a thousand miles in every direction, the pastor of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church was as much a presence in black American households during the decade that fell between the mid-1950s and '60s as Ed Sullivan was.
In those days, near the end of gospel music's "golden age," church was still a going concern in the marketplace for black popular culture. Franklin's 75 recorded sermons sold by the millions.
He was the epitome of a "whooper," and thus a textbook master of America's greatest homegrown oratorical tradition. "Whooping" -- for black preachers who work in the unbuttoned old-country style -- is the overdrive the preachers shift into when they've finished engaging a congregation's head and are bearing down on its heart -- a kind of rhythm singing: half speech, half melody.
Franklin's voice, stilled now for a quarter-century, was an instrument as majestic -- and well-employed -- as his famous daughter's. These days, his former celebrity is considered a part of Aretha's back story.
Nick Salvatore, a professor of American Studies at Cornell University, has lately redressed this imbalance of perspective in a biography of Franklin called "Singing in a Strange Land." In it, he documents a life lived at the confluence of tidal pulls and social currents that shaped black America's experience of the 20th century.
Born in 1914, Clarence Franklin was a sharecropper's son from Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. He forsook the fields at 18 and within 10 years had pastored his way from the cotton patch to Memphis, then on to Buffalo, and finally, into Detroit. There, nestled in a deepening pocket of black America's most prosperous industrial laborers, as Jesse Jackson later put it, "a flower blossomed."
By 1953, Franklin led a congregation nearly 8,000 strong that had built him a new church, and was already launched on his meteoric rise as a sacred entertainer. Once his records got national exposure, he followed them onto the church music performance circuit known as the "gospel highway," where he was as much an attraction as any singer.
In 1956, when Elvis Presley was paid $7,500 to perform on television, C.L. Franklin commanded $4,000 a night preaching in churches and municipal auditoriums across black America. By then, he'd propelled himself into the money-getting elite of those in the business of saving black souls. Some among his 4,500 tithing congregants dubbed him "the Black Prince."
He had the conveyance of Cadillac Eldorados, and the look of Sugar Ray Robinson. Franklin was a paragon of ghetto style; silk-and-mohair-suited, alligator-shod, bejeweled indiscreetly, hair slicked and sculpted in the manner of outlaws and entertainers but rarely sported by dues-payers to the National Baptist Convention. Known in some circles as "the jitterbug preacher," Franklin appeared an embodiment of the street's wry dictum that preaching and pimping were two sides of the same coin.
His parsonage was "a showplace. ... built in the early years of the century by European craftsmen ... on a half-acre of floodlit landscaping." His "gracious home" on the city's west side was a salon where Art Tatum played the piano whenever he stopped by, Clara Ward or Nat "King" Cole or Dinah Washington might be singing in the parlor and all the stars of the black church world would come to pay their respects.
After Jackie Wilson moved east and before Berry Gordy fully emerged, C.L. Franklin was black Detroit's biggest star. In the shape-shifting landscape of Detroit's civic affairs, Franklin's mass appeal and grassroots credibility, along with the sheer heft of his sizable flock made him somebody local builders of political coalitions had to check in with during the early 1960s. But, though they did business with him, black Detroit's talented tenth never brought Franklin along when they met with Henry Ford or Walter Reuther to discuss the Negro's role in the city's future.
A friend and backer of Dr. King, Franklin showed up for the work of his times, doing more than some and less than others. But he too visibly bore the taint of low life to ever serve as the public face of high-minded causes.
Salvatore chalks this up to the complexities of Franklin's nature: the child he fathered with a teenage parishioner in Buffalo; an exiled wife; his shoulder-rubbing with the demi-monde; uncloseted womanizing; tax evasions; mishandling of church funds; and arrests for marijuana possession and drunk driving. He thereby fails to explain that which requires no explanation. One problem with outsized humanity is the grand scale of its messiness.
King's death marked the passing of C.L. Franklin's historical moment. Shortly after riots gutted the city in 1967, the auto industry tanked, and Detroit began to hemorrhage money and people. Franklin's core enterprise bled right along with all the others lodged near the city's heart.
His last 10 years were soured by failing heath, dwindling capacity and a shrinking congregation. He drank harder and loosened his grip. As Aretha waxed into the Queen of Soul, his relevance was waning. He was beginning to be known only as his daughter's father.
In 1979, Franklin was shot in his home by a burglar, and lay for five years in a coma from which he never recovered. Aretha, fiercely devoted to the man who took her out of school and put her to her life's work when she was still a child, shelved her performing career to supervise his care.
When Franklin died, Jesse Jackson preached his funeral "in a searing heat" to a crowd of thousands. In the early 1970s, Jackson had slung King's mantle over C.L. Franklin's style, and worked his show well enough since to have made a splash in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries.
Sitting mutely, near the place where 30 years ago she'd recorded her first songs, Aretha heard Jackson invoke one of them as an expression of her father's faith. "There is a land," he intoned, "where we shall never grow old."
And, though C.L. Franklin's day is past and gone, a body of work vividly preserved -- and now this book -- have made its memory fadeless.
(Arthur Kempton, who lives in Chapel Hill, wrote the book "Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music.")

GRAPHIC: Remembered today as the father of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, C.L. Franklin, pictured with his daughter in 1961, was one of America's most popular entertainers.
Photo Courtesy of the Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Mississippi. ###End Credit