From Booklist
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. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Angela D. Dillard, New York Times Book Review
"Salvatore . . . tapped into the soul that moved Franklin in song and sermon and that thrived beneath the beat of Motown.
Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press
The story of Franklin's charismatic and sometimes controversial life also is a story of Detroit."
Rick Kleffel, THE AGONY COLUMN BOOK REVIEW
"Salvatore's biography reads on any random page like a gripping novel of mid-twentieth century America, raw, exciting and profoundly involving."
Aretha Franklin in the DETROIT FREE PRESS
"I'm delighted [Nick Salvatore] thought enough of my dad to write the book and document some historical facts."
Sunday's Boston Globe (2/20)
" Richly textured. ...[Salvatore] deftly interweaves Franklin's life with the swirling undercurrents of the fast-breaking events of the era." "
Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Born in rural Mississippi in 1915, C. L. Franklin would go on to become the most famous African American preacher in America. His style of preaching revolutionized the art, and his call for his fellow African Americans to proclaim both their faith and their rights helped usher in the civil rights movement. Booming, soaring, flashy, and intense, C.L. was one of a kind. And yet Franklin was, like many great public figures, immensely complicated. A beacon of faith and light, he also knew the shadows. He knew the power of the Lord, yet he was no saint. And in Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore tells Franklin's story for the first time." "Salvatore's book is the product of eight years of extensive research and interviews. It begins in rural Mississippi, in famous Sunflower County, home to Delta soil and the birthplace of the blues. Franklin's mother was religious, his father, nowhere to be found, and his stepdad, a man of the plow, not the pulpit. But though needed in the fields, Franklin felt a calling he could not resist. We follow him through his early years as a preacher, to Tennessee and then farther north. And in Detroit, we see the young man become the legend." This is, in many ways, the story of the rise of activism in the black church, but it is also the tale of the rise of gospel, blues, and soul music in the twentieth century - as well as that of C.L. Franklin's own daughter, a girl with a staggering voice and the name Aretha. With a cast of characters that includes Martin Luther King Jr., B. B. King and Art Tatum, Coleman Young, Jesse Jackson, Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson, among many others, Singing in a Strange Land is the story not just of one man, but of a people and a nation.
FROM THE CRITICS
Angela D. Dillard - The New York Times
In hese days of growing affinity between evangelical Christians and the right, Nick Salvatore's life and times of the Rev. C. L. Franklin -- ''the preacher with the golden voice'' -- Singing in a Strange Land is a reminder of an earlier, happier age. Although Franklin's theological underpinnings were, like those of many other black ministers of his day and ours, deeply conservative, his politics were staunchly progressive. Pastor of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church from 1946 until 1979 (when he was shot by burglars and entered a coma that lasted until his death more than five years later), and one of the leading figures in the Northern branch of the civil rights movement, Franklin helped set the tone of protest in the Motor City and beyond … Salvatore spent hundreds of hours in Detroit talking with relatives and friends of Franklin and older members of the New Bethel congregation. He seems to have absorbed much of the city's distinctive political history, and to have tapped into the soul that moved Franklin in song and sermon and that thrived beneath the beat of Motown.
Art & Photography
Book Info
