The Sound Made Flesh

It begins with a sonic relay, the buzz of conversation interwoven with the hum of a Hammond organ. Like the first seconds of Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up," the sound of the voices chatting and the organ playing announce life in a lower frequency and register. In those initial moments, one cannot know which came first, the talking or the playing, because they are deeply entangled. This entanglement sets the stage for anticipation, the desire for Spirit to happen and flow and release. The refusal of a border — between the noise of the flesh and the noise of the electrical, mechanical object — might tell us something about how Aretha Franklin thought about black creativity.

The recording that includes this (1999), an extension of the original 1972 hit album. But this extended version is simply the sonic context of the project: What one receives in "The Complete Recordings" was already there, already animates the release that sold over 2 million copies. Like her other gospel recordings, in both iterations was a set of live recordings attempting to capture the sacred sounds of blackness as not being about individual genius, but always about the social world that makes such sound-making possible.