Singing in A Strange Land

C. L. Franklin, father of the “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin, was the original country preacher, embodying the hopes, dreams, and insecurities of southern blacks who sought to survive with dignity in the North. Salvatore recounts Franklin’s struggles from sharecropper roots in Mississippi, his early career as a minister in Memphis, and his more than 30 years at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Franklin’s life spanned the Depression through the post-civil rights era and reflects the struggle of a generation that moved from rural to urban culture and the parallel struggle within the black Baptist Church from conservatism to social and political activism. Franklin’s limited formal education did not stifle his desire to learn and imagine possibilities beyond those promised in eternal salvation. His personal virtues and vices are interwoven in this recollection of the complex religious, political, and commercial life of a city dominated by the automobile industry and a union history with a racist undercurrent. This well-researched and scholarly, but accessible, biography reflects changes wrought by the black church on the broader American society.