by JOSH MYERS
Those who are in charge of memories are rarely themselves properly remembered. Amazing Grace is kind of a testament to a realization of Aretha Franklin that lingers. We can now linger in a moment that fully captures what it is to be with someone so responsible for our feeling, so responsible for our communion with a spirit that moves us. A debt she inherited, a debt we inherited. A spirit that, we must always remember, never left her. But, oh, how good it feels to see and know it in its fullest articulation, in its “native” context? That is Amazing Grace. And how sweet is the sound.
Ancestors must be remembered. And the context through which we remember them matters. Memories may constitute feelings of joy and pain, yearning and contentment. What makes them precious is that they re-present to us former selves, former ways of being. We must remember their spirits—who they were, really, for they still have much work to do in and for us. In remembering them, we re-member our selves. Amazing Grace is a demand never to forget how spirit fills us, how it moves us. Aretha Franklin left us her will and it is in part, the memory of the spirit she gives us and gives in to.
In the credits to the film, the filmmaker Alan Elliott, is said to have “realized” its release. The film, having never been released because of technical glitches that seemed insurmountable, was finally realized. Not restored or rescued, but realized. With Amazing Grace, we now can fully realize what made the highest-selling gospel record of all-time what it is to us. With the audio recording, we witnessed and felt the spirit. In the visual companion, we sense what it all meant, really meant. In remembering Amazing Grace, in seeing it, we can recognize all our selves, shot through with the imperative of ancestral recall. We can be fortified to address that which is in us, while addressing how we might confront that which is outside of us. With memories, we become fully realized.
Those who are responsible for ensuring that we remain connected to that which makes us human often carry a burden that compromises the quality of their own lives. So what we also see in Amazing Grace is the desire, the need for a return. Aretha’s R&B band, which took part in the recording, talks about that desire, how they had serendipitously learned some of the music on the road as they spent Sunday mornings in various churches. There was a searching for something that could not be found as readily or as familiarly in the clubs, the concert halls, the arenas. So let us all go back.
They are in New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts section of Los Angeles. It is 1972, seven years after a rebellion, three years after a shootout, a community in midst of the terror of structural and state violence. It is night time. There is no air-conditioning, a familiar feeling to all who have experienced revival or church meeting. For those so familiar, you can almost smell the scene, it is what the Bakongo might call lufuki, a possible origin of the Ebonics term, funky. The Southern California Community Choir marches in. This is Black space—space made by Black people. And then she walks down the aisle. She is almost completely stoic. She’s called into that space by James Cleveland who directs us to “give in” to the spirit. Are these instructions for the audience? Or are they instructions for Aretha? Are they instructions for us, almost fifty years later? When we gaze into her eyes, they are still. She does not smile. This is not entertainment.
Immediately, we sense that what Aretha is undertaking is serious work, precious work. It is something she had carried, that had to be released, to be given to us. And it was important that it be handled in a particular way. Her eyes moved only when the spirit was released. She opened her mouth only to sing. Her expression only changed when that work was consummated. We were invited not by Aretha the entertainer, we were entranced by Aretha, the seer. That costuming—in the most ritualistic sense of the word—is the first thing we notice. It was a mask, in the deeply African sense of the concept. She was possessed.
Those who can feel us and those who we can feel are often entrusted with making interventions into our lives that seem almost too large for anyone to bear. It is important that she was not alone. Alexander Hamilton is there directing. The choir that is there swinging in the background, reminiscent of the feeling of weeknight choir practice, as they sat and swayed, rather than stood and rocked.
And then there were the moments, where you really saw, where the meaning was clear: James Cleveland talking about what it means to do something live. The double-clap that inaugurates the unique arrangement of “What a Friend.” The invocation of “Yes,” the praise-chant, that Ashon Crawley describes as “a moment of consent in a world that ongoingly exploits.”[1] Cleveland reminding us that the words matter less than who the song is being sung to, whose spirit we are given into. The ending of the first night with “Amazing Grace,” a moment that forces Cleveland to retreat to a chair, face down, rocking back and forth. Exiting that song, in a way that required Cleveland and Franklin to hold each other. In their holding, they carried the weight together, a carrying that was clearly for us and not for themselves.
The second night opens and, we are still caught up: Seeing rather than just hearing the antiphony and the Blues of “Climbing Higher Mountains.” C.L. Franklin and Clara Ward’s entrance. C.L. explaining what it means to be held by the “the spirit and enthusiasm” that Aretha had “engendered”— an “intangible thing.” The shout. And finally, the second night’s closing with “Never Grow Old.” A moment that is so rich, explanations ultimately fail, but we might encapsulate the energy in the way that C.L. wipes Aretha’s brow, and the circle that formed around the woman in the front row, who realized the promise inherent in that song.
Those who understand what it is that truly makes us whole, remind us that we will indeed never grow old. There is so much that endures, that must endure. So much that makes us and that has made us. So much that enlivens us. When the speakers of words of comfort include, “She is not dead,” we alter our relationships to creation. But when those words are sung…
Soon after her death, Crawley wrote, that Franklin’s gospel was much larger than any narrow conception of church doctrine, but about “the anticipatory drive of the Spirit,” they were “about the feel of being in space-time with others, of the social practices that make the enunciation of her voice felt among us. What we hear in her live gospel recordings is the mysticism of black life she sang with and through, a life that takes seriously the suffering of the masses and attempts to re-deploy sound in order to produce new worlds of possibility.”[2] Her will—our wills must be done. We must will a new world of possibility into being. It will take Amazing Grace.
We no longer have Aretha Franklin in materialized time and space, but that is not all there is to being. Being is also memory. And such memories, can do work. For her brother, Vaughn Franklin, the film, “helped us to heal… you feel like she’s still there.”[3] With Amazing Grace, having also graced us, her precious memories now linger, bequeathed to us.