Doris Duke
I'm a Loser

Let's make it short and clear, putting all the cards on the table. Do you like Aretha Franklin? Well, this is the best Aretha Franklin album that Aretha Franklin never made. Or rather: this is the album Aretha Franklin would have made if she had been Etta James. Boom! I can feel it, from the other side of the monitor, the jeers have started. But that's how it is. I understand that my word may not suffice for you. So I'll call to the witness stand someone who understood this field very well, the late Dave Godin (R.I.P., master), a herald of the black music of the Golden Age. He, from the columns of that Sacred Text vulgarly called a magazine named "Blues & Soul" (how much would I pay to own the collection? Six months of salary? Okay, if only I didn't earn too little, I'd throw in all the math-rock I own as a tip...) in August 1970, expressed himself like this:

"The art of praise is difficult (unfortunately it's much easier to write a negative review than a positive one) but I will set aside all caution to proclaim with utter joy that 'I'm a loser' by Miss Duke is the best LP I have ever heard, a magnificent example of soul music that will remain vivid and fresh in the future just as we hear it today." - Dave Godin, "Blues & Soul" n.41

Exaggerated? I would say not at all. If anything, the exaggerated part is that whoever produced such a wonder only gave us a couple of follow-up LPs (even the second one is indeed worthy), then faded away and to this day has not left any trace of themselves since as far back as 1975. But that’s it. Doris born Curry, then married Willingham (it's with the surname of her first husband that she signed her early 45s), and finally artistically renamed Duke, after a famous tobacco heiress from the early 1900s, did not become what the title of her second LP announced: "A legend in her own time", only because the paths of merit and success once again traveled conspicuously in parallel and who knows why. Then, after listening to "I'm a loser", it's legitimate to wonder who's really insane, you or the whole world that didn't applaud admiringly such a bounty of goodness.

The signatures at the bottom of the songs are a guarantee in themselves: Jerry Williams alias Swamp Dogg (another name to whom, reverently, votive candles should be lit), Gary US Bonds, and George Williams. The warm and lyrically intense southern voice of Duke does the rest. "Lyrically intense" is not said casually. These are twelve tracks that describe, in fact - almost like a concept - the spleen of a soul in direct contact with the drama of romantic unhappiness and despair, which, in other realms, perhaps only Billie Holliday before her had explored so deeply. We listen to the elemental piano riff, accompanied by the tick-tock of a snare drum introducing the initial "He's gone", a title that already sets an agenda, a cross between secular gospel intensity and soul ballad that unfolds verses like: "You only live once...and it's not guaranteed" and thus it's immediately clear between which coordinates we will move. Even where the Stax-rooted R&B shows its brighter sides, when not funky - "I can't do without you", "The feeling is right" and "Congratulations baby", all seemingly stolen from the best Etta James repertoire - the lyrics and melismas guide us toward breathtaking tensions (for instance, the bride leaving her man right at the altar, "a voice in my head says 'run, girl, run'..."). Or maybe the Hi-sound is anticipated - we already find the entire Ann Peebles of the mid-Seventies here -, both in "Divorce decree" (another lovely tale of relational failures) and in the sublime "How was I to know you cared." Then, when returning to territories where the organ provides a churchlike backdrop to dry electric ballads that only Aretha among the goddesses and Betty LaVette among the demigoddesses have rendered with similar pathos ("Ghost of myself", another self-explanatory title, "Your best friends" and who knows here what it's about..., "We're more than stranger", again Etta at her best) our journey to the heart of the bleeding soul seems to have hit rock bottom. Wrong.

There is still room for a taste of falsely cheerful Philly-sound and never was the contrast between lyrics and music so glaring ("Feet start walking" and "I don't care anymore", here describing a descent into the depths of prostitution). And that's not all. Not content with having tried to update Billie Holliday in a soul key, Doris Duke at the end of the album also modernizes James Carr, gifting us that "The dark end of the street" revised and corrected as "To the other woman (I'm the other woman), the definitive ballad in which a woman's clandestine love for a married man reveals all its impotent pain, voice torn by shards of electric and the customary mournful Hammond.

But there's nothing to be done, Doris had already told us everything in the titles. Between "I'm a loser" and "A legend in her own time", unfortunately, the former prevailed...