“Rock Steady” (Aretha Franklin)

Over the past few days we’ve looked at songs from some of my favorite girl singers, so it’s inevitable that we’d come to the Queen of Soul. Today’s classic girl singer song of the day is Aretha Franklin’s 1971 classic “Rock Steady,” one of the funkiest tracks ever committed to vinyl. This happens to be a song that Aretha wrote herself; it was produced by the usual Atlantic Records crew of Tom Dowd, Arif Maudin, and Jerry Wexler.

“Rock Steady” was originally intended as the B side to Aretha’s cover of “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby),” a hit the previous year for Brit girl singer Lulu. The DJs wisely flipped over the single, however, and made “Rock Steady” a #9 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the Best Selling Soul Singles chart. (The original A-side stalled at #73 on the Hot 100 but rose to #9 on the Soul Singles chart.)

The backing musicians on this track included Atlantic’s regular New York studio crew of Cornell Dupree on guitar, Richard Tee on organ, Chuck Rainey on bass, and the inimitable Bernard Purdie on drums. What makes this track special, in my opinion, is Purdie’s drumming, which defines the term “funky.” His four-bar break in the bridge, essentially paradiddles between the bass drum and snare with some tasty syncopated hi-hat chirps at the end, is the stuff of legend, one of the most famous drum breaks in the history of recorded music. I confess to copiously copping this and other grooves from Mr. Purdie over the years; when it comes to funky drumming, he is the man.

Aretha Franklin is one of the top singers of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or any decade. She had hits that she covered from other artists (“Respect,” originally by Otis Redding; “I Say a Little Prayer,” originally by Dionne Warwick; “The Weight,” originally by the Band; “Spanish Harlem,” originally by Ben E. King; “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” originally by Simon & Garfunkel), hits written specifically for her by the top songwriters of the day (“(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” by Carole King and Gerry Goffin; “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” by Stevie Wonder), and hits that she wrote herself (“Think,” “Call Me,” “Day Dreaming”). All in all, she had 16 Top 40 hits in the 1960s, 15 in the 1970s, 9 in the 1980s, and 2 in the 1990s. That’s an incredible run and they were all masterful performances.

Ms. Franklin was born in 1942 and started performing when she was just 12 years old. While she originally signed with Columbia Records (in 1960), that collaboration wasn’t particularly fruitful She hit it big when she signed with Atlantic Records in 1966; her first Atlantic hit was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” which hit #9 in 1967 and she really blew up with her next single, “Respect,” that hit #1 later that year. Aretha moved from Atlantic to Arista in 1980 and had a career resurgence with the hits “Freeway of Love” and “Who’s Zoomin’ Who,” numbers 3 and 7, respectively, in 1985.

Aretha kept performing all the way into her mid-seventies. She passed away on August 16, 2018, of pancreatic cancer, aged 76. She was a force that will not be duplicated.