'We Can Rock The World's Foundation': 1971 And Black Music In Revolt

In March of 1971, Aretha Franklin performed a three-night stand at the Fillmore West, promoter Bill Graham's legendary venue and home base of bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Franklin's band included saxophonist King Curtis as her musical director and Billy Preston on keyboards, fresh off his stint as the "fifth Beatle" and hard at work on his own breakthrough, I Wrote a Simple Song. Besides performing her own classics and some future pop standards, including Ashford & Simpson's "You're All I Need to Get By," Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Diana Ross' signature "Reach Out and Touch," Franklin sought common ground with the so-called hippie crowd long associated with the Fillmore. Her covers of Bread's "Make It With You" and especially Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With" resonated in the house, but it was her introduction of the "sanctified church" to that audience that revealed the cultural force of Black music in this moment.

With help from Ray Charles, who joined Franklin onstage the final night, she turned her four-minute song "Spirit in the Dark" into a nearly 30-minute dissertation on soul. You can hear the crowd, already in a frenzy, lose it completely when Charles takes hold of the keyboard, still learning the song — repeating "" Preston's later that "the hippies