Song 45:
"Ain't No Way" by Aretha Franklin
Peak: 16
Year: 1968
Year end position: NA
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/27
Chronological Songs by Artist: 7/27
Video?: No
Wikipedia?: Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_No_Way
Spotify?: Yes
When I first started this blog, I
thought I was pretty well informed on the various songs I would run into.
I’ve had a few reactions that surprised me. The first is that I’ve run
into some songs that really don’t hold up very well, and it’s a bit of a
challenge to not go too negative on them. Then, there’s the songs that I
wasn’t all that familiar with that turn out to be really, really good. I
think today’s song falls into the latter category.
First off, let’s get the grammar out of
the way. “Ain’t No Way” is really terrible grammatically. It should
really be “Isn’t Any Way”. As we’ve seen with the run of “Ain’t” songs,
if you are getting your English lessons from musicians, you are probably going
to have a hard time graduating high school. Other than that, the song
title is pretty generic.
I should probably say up front that in
my opinion, Aretha Franklin has the best voice that we will hear on this
blog. She’s not my favorite singer, per se, but I think that her voice is
the strongest. I am of the opinion that she could probably sing the names
out of the phone book and it would sound pretty good. Apparently I am not
alone in this opinion. Rolling Stone placed her as #9 in its list of
Greatest Artists of all time, and #1 on its list of Greatest Singers of all
time. She exemplifies my opinion that singers with a gospel background
are among the strongest singers, mostly because they practice so much early in
life. If you subscribe to Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule for
expertise, gospel singers get closer to that sooner than most.
I was unfamiliar with this song when I
saw it come up on the list. Because we are going alphabetically through
the top 20 songs, you sometimes get some strange songs. If I were going
to introduce the world to Aretha Franklin’s music, I don’t know that this is
the song that I would have chosen. Listening to it for a while though,
I’m warming up to the idea that it actually is a good representation of why I
like Aretha Franklin so much.
The song was not originally designed to
be a hit at all. It was the B-side of another song we will hear: “(Sweet
Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone”. This makes this song an interesting
phenomenon of a bygone era. Nowadays, B-side singles don’t make sense,
mainly because the method of getting songs out to the public has changed so
much. Back in the 1960s, the main way that people could consume music was
through buying vinyl 45s. It was also the way DJs would play music over
the radio. Most of the time, there was an A-side, which was supposed to
be the hit song, and a B-side, which was just another track, but not supposed
to be anything special. There were times (especially in the 50s and 60s),
when DJs would start to play both sides of the 45, and both the A-side and the
B-side would hit the charts (usually at the same time). This practice
tailed off in the 70s and disappeared entirely by about the 1980s.
Today’s song was such a B-side.
The song was originally written by
Aretha Franklin’s younger sister, Carolyn. I was unaware that she had any
siblings at all, but she had 2 sisters, both of which were in the music
industry in one way or another. The lyrics of the song are about a woman
that wants to love her man, but the man is doing something that is preventing
her from doing that. You never really know what that thing is, but lyrics
read like frustration on the part of the singer. There is a line in the
bridge where Aretha sings, “And if you need me like you say, say you do / Oh
then please, please /Please don't you know that I need you?” This is
maybe my favorite part of the song. It’s the part of the song where
Aretha’s really belting out the notes, and you can almost feel the frustration
that she is feeling. I think the repeating of the words “say” and
“please” give the song real feeling here. Then she repeats the line “Oh,
it ain't no way”, but then something interesting happens. You’ve just
been taken down this frustrated road, and in comes the background singer with
this soaring set of notes to lift you up out of the blues that Aretha just took
you through. It turns out that this is no ordinary background
singer. It is none other than Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney Houston),
and she has incredible range which she puts on display in this song. I
think that combination of the two powerful voices on the song elevate it above
just another run-of-the-mill blues song.
Listening to this song over the last
week, I think I will be adding it to my favorites. I could listen to this
song 1,000 times in a row and never get tired of it. It’s like a master
class in blues singing.
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