Aretha Franklin's Day Dreaming

on the right to daydream and get lost in yourself

Aretha Franklin found me at the dull edges of a morning in Miami, FL last year. I was on the fringes of my molting when I played Franklin’s 1972 hit Day Dreaming on a loop for hours.

I was in Miami for a work retreat and had spent every day stuck in a beige conference room pretending to be focused. The only promise I had made to myself was that before I got on my flight home I would touch the ocean at least once. So I did. I woke up early the next day on a night when I had never really gone to bed and accepted that I would be late to the last day of my retreat to just hear the ocean lap itself against my feet. I sat on the beach for 20 minutes just looking at the beyond, ignoring the white tourists behind me yet fully aware of the blistering the sun at 9 am. All I had was a towel, Aretha, and a want to shake off the weight of my unknowing for just a moment.

It is a lesser-known fact that Aretha Franklin had her first child when she was 12 years old. She was a child of Memphis, TN, raised in Buffalo, NY, and Detroit, MI, but she was a product of black meccas in every chapter of her life. Her girlhood was short and later ruled by her father, C. L. Franklin’s management of her career but it was hers none the less. That Miami morning, I had just begun my relationship with Franklin’s music when I found Day Dreaming, I got lost in the thin piano chord of the song's opening track. The song and the reserved and love drenched sound of Franklin took me past myself and into Franklin’s lust and love for another kind of being right beyond a shore line. Franklin allowed me to stew in the space between action and decision and let the winds of integrity touch me like an old lover I should l have left a long time ago. I let my mind float away in the wake of what felt like years of stagnancy all while under the same Florida sun Franklin had written the song.

Day Dreaming is a dazzling journey into Franklin’s expertise as a composer, vocalist with restraint, and a woman in love grinning her bare teeth to her lover's whims for escape. Day Dreaming was Franklin’s 12th #1 song on Urban Radio and hit #5 on the Hot 100 in 1972. The song was written at Criteria Studios in North Miami,FL as an LP along with a cover of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long by Otis Redding. The duo single release was written and recorded in honor of Franklin’s long standing love affair with Dennis Edwards of The Temptations. Day Dreaming was the fifth single from Franklin’s 1972 album Young Gifted &Black, Franklin’s 18th studio album and the song was widely praised. She later revealed that she was secretly engaged to Edwards but ended it after years of abuse and lack of commitment. The song was written by Franklin with guest piano by Donny Hathaway, dainty flute tracking by Rhodes Law and Bernard Purdie’s drums that brought to life a call in my ears to move into my deepest pleasures.

I’m here today because I am again shedding a new skin and returning, noticing and reflecting on Franklin’s belief in the beyond, the song in its psychedelic piano and airy sentiments of escaping with a lover call to me as I find myself wanting to run away with my imagination. I find myself looking outside windows more often as the summer closes. I am studying the relationship to play that artists such as Franklin and Hathaway use to look at their carnal passion for connection, desire, and another world without ever looking down. I want to be a witness to my own faith in the impossible just like them.

I think what I’m saying is I hope you and I find a way back to (y)our deepest longings and I hope we one day get to daydream into a freedom with Aretha Franklin guiding us along the way.

Listen to Danyel Smith’s Black Girl Songbook Podcast about Aretha Franklin!

See ya soon,

Clarissa