Trivia / Aretha Franklin

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• Creator Backlash: Franklin admitted that she didn't like her performance of "My Country Tis of Thee" at Barack Obama's first inauguration. She always hated singing in the cold because the air strained her voice (even though her hat took on a memetic life of its own), and she only agreed to it due to the historic significance of the event.
  • She also didn't like (though always performed) "Don't Play That Song For Me (You Lied)", remarking once, tongue in cheek, in concert, that she'd rather sing it as "Please re-record that song for me", because she felt it was rushed and smacked of "One-takeitis".
• Follow the Leader: After Franklin's Career Resurrection following her move to Atlantic Records, many female singers tried to replicate Franklin's strategy to achieve it: recording sophisticated Soul in recording studios in the South (especially Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama) with funky local musicians. It had mixed results, but the rush produced some albums that are undisputed classics (Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis) and a few cult classics (Cher's 3614 Jackson Highway).
• Saved from Development Hell: The film Amazing Grace took 47 years to be released, thanks to a combination of technical incompetence and legal trouble. It was filmed in 1972 as a documentary about the making of Franklin's LP of the same name, but none of the filmmakers remembered to bring a clapper board, which was essential for correctly synchronizing sound and pictures. Decades passed. In the 2000s digital technology made it possible to synchronise the recordings, and the hours of raw footage was edited down into a theatrical feature. The next problem was that Franklin did not want the completed film released, for reasons that remain unclear, and went to court to stop it. She died in 2018. The administrators of her estate had no objections to the film, and it was finally released in April 2019. It received excellent reviews, which must have been some comfort to the producers.

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