I had most wanted to see the miracle performed, had longed to see the shape of Aretha’s mouth when she called him forward, to confirm with my eyes that somebody was raised and had come walking in the church loosed of death. In those years after the assassinations and the riots, when the world outside our homes shouted anew that we were not welcome, that we should be in bondage in prisons or schools, or else we should be cast out of our neighborhoods or this life altogether, the Amazing Grace album was a cherished reminder that victory would one day be ours.Īs ravenous as anyone else, the thing I had most wanted to see in Amazing Grace was Franklin calling Lazarus. From the pulpit and the piano, Franklin preached the good news. In addition to its ancestral resonance and spiritual beauty, it is the best-selling live gospel album of all time because it is the only gospel album delivered by a prophet. It is a reminder of and testament to ’Retha’s gospel roots lest any of us got silly and forgot in a pinch, it’s a damned good substitute for church. The Amazing Grace album had been and still is a quintessential staple of Black American families, as synonymous with the Black domestic realm as the blues is with Saturday morning house scourings. I know why we all wanted to pull the film into our hearts with our eyes and ears and whatever other senses we could reasonably lay on it. When it was released, and we flocked to see it wherever it was screened, possessing and consuming it, willing it to fill us up full, we were collectively viewing it over Franklin’s dead body. And Franklin famously did not want it to be released and blocked it in all the ways she could until she flew home. It was infamously lacking the clappers that facilitate the synching of video and audio, and it had to await the arrival of modern technology to reveal it like some DNA sitting in an evidence locker. To be sure, the footage and the film it finally became had a troubled technical and spiritual history. Footage of her calling Lazarus back from the tomb during “Mary Don’t You Weep” is missing from the album’s documentary film, released in 2018. That night, Franklin, clothed in heart-chakra green and angel white, came to relay the good news in an old-time way: through a good Jerusalem rocking and the performance of a miracle. It was the second and final night of Franklin’s January 1972 performance recording of Amazing Grace in Los Angeles at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. Hen Aretha Franklin, born in Memphis and raised in Detroit, channeled Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, and called for Lazarus of Bethany to come back from the dead, somebody or bodies in Watts heard and heeded her voice and got up walking like natural men. One of these mornings bright and fair / I’m gonna take my wings and fly the air

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