Dueling Hits - Aretha Franklin - 1967-1968 | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: I have initiated this new segment on BCN, where I determine the Best Music Ever ... and, 'with a little help from my friends'. I do this from my opinion, for what that is worth, where I will measure the best music that I am familiar with.

    I do this for two reasons: 1) I want to expose the best music that I know to the rest of us. 2) Popular Music today may be the very worst it has ever been, and that is saying much, since I lived through Disco.

    For a list of all of the contributions to this series, please click here.

    As previously mentioned, there will be others who share their favorites with our BCN readers, in particular here, Bobby Tony.

    She has so many memorable songs through the years but the ones that probably had the most soul were the ones about loving so bad it almost hurts.

    I say a Little Prayer

   

    Natural Woman

   

    I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You).

    "What made this record all the more remarkable was that the backing musicians who provided the brooding, soulful and unmistakably black sound were in fact white - country boys who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s in what at that time was the most racially troubled state in America". See the story of Muscle Shoals, Alabama here.