150: AMAZING GRACE | ARETHA FRANKLIN
I am not a Christian feller myself. Doesn’t matter with this record. If you don’t have goosebumps and are moved by this Earth shattering epic gospel performance, then I don’t know what. It was the Queen of Soul prime and it is the single greatest gospel performance ever caught on tape.
Look closely and you will see Jagger in the crowd.
Wiki: Amazing Grace is a live album by American soul singer Aretha Franklin. It was recorded in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, with Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir accompanying Franklin in performance. The recording was originally released as a double album on June 1, 1972, by Atlantic Records.
The album was a critical and commercial success, selling over two million copies in the United States alone and earning a double platinum certification. It also won Franklin the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance. As of 2017, it stands as the biggest selling disc of Franklin's entire fifty-plus year recording career as well as the highest-selling live gospel music album of all time.
Amazing Grace was remastered and re-released in 1999 as a two-compact disc set with many previously unreleased takes. A film documenting the making of the album premiered in 2018.
Reviewing for Rolling Stone in 1972, Jon Landau said, "Amazing Grace is more a great Aretha Franklin album than a great gospel album. She plays havoc with the traditional styles but she sings 'like never before' on record. The liberation and abandon she has always implied in her greatest moments are now fully and consistently achieved." Landau found himself "struck first by the comprehensiveness and depth of the arrangement and then by the brilliance of her lead voice," hailing her performance as "a virtuoso display of gospel pyrotechnics, done with control and imagination." He was especially fond of the uptempo songs expressing "unqualified joy," saying they "hit with tremendous power."
An article about the film by Wesley Morris at the New York Times: For all kinds of terrible reasons, the movies don’t have that many great shots of black women. They just don’t. But there’s a shot of Aretha Franklin in “Amazing Grace” that might be the greatest image of a black woman that I’ve ever seen in an American movie. It’s just a medium close-up, straight on, of her at the podium of the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, almost evenly framed between two microphones and a pair of Afros that complement hers. The camera doesn’t move. And neither does she, except to sing and even then: she’s moving you.
Half of what’s in the shot is some shade of white — her studded caftan, the wall behind her, the cluster of pearl-like berries dangling from her ears. Everything is white but Franklin, whose skin is brown (with some pastel eye shadow and glistening sweat) and whose voice is soothingly, staggeringly black. She’s up there to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And the way she’s framed, all that brightness seems to fortify her glow.
That shot was composed in January 1972, for a movie that scarcely anybody had seen until last month. That’s when I saw it, and I was too overwrought and entertained to really know what its movie context would have been. So I went a second time and thought two things as I watched it. First: Why didn’t the people who made the film use that shot more? This thing has got dozens of Grade-A, laugh-out-loud, dry-your-eyes, stand-up-and-scream images. But none as divinely worthy of stained glass or the National Portrait Gallery.
Which leads me to the second thought: What if this movie, which begins a weeklong run Friday at Film Forum (it’s also showing in Los Angeles), had managed to make it to a movie theater in 1972, when Franklin was among the planet’s greatest current pop stars? Just about the only other black women you could find photographed with as much care would have been Diahann Carroll during her three seasons on “Julia” and Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday, as an open psychological wound, in “Lady Sings the Blues.”