Some duets are arranged by record companies. This one was arranged by a diary clash. When Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart wrote a swaggering soul number about women standing on their own two feet for their 1985 album Be Yourself Tonight, they imagined it as a duet with Tina Turner — then at the peak of her comeback, and the embodiment of everything the lyric described. Turner was unavailable. So the British duo got on a plane to Detroit and recorded it with Aretha Franklin instead. The substitution produced one of the great pop collisions of the decade: the Queen of Soul and the ice queen of synth-pop trading verses over a band borrowed from Tom Petty, on a record that became a modern feminist anthem, a top-ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and a Grammy nominee. It is difficult, in hindsight, to imagine the song belonging to anyone else.
Detroit Muscle
The session took place at United Sound Systems in Detroit, the studio where Franklin had cut some of her own history, and Stewart — producing — built the track like a man who knew exactly whose house he was in. Behind the two singers he assembled a band with serious American credentials: Stan Lynch, drummer of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, behind the kit; his bandmate Benmont Tench on organ; Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell on lead guitar; and session great Nathan East on bass. The Charles Williams Singers, a gospel choir, were brought in to raise the choruses. The Heartbreakers connection ran deeper than one track: Campbell also played lead guitar on the album’s “Adrian,” the duet with Elvis Costello, making Be Yourself Tonight a quiet summit of three musical worlds — Detroit soul, British pop and the Californian rock aristocracy — with Stewart conducting traffic in the middle of it all. The resulting record is a fascinating hybrid — Eurythmics’ electronic pulse running underneath a groove that is pure Detroit soul, with Franklin’s gospel roots showing through every time the choir answers her.
Even the album’s credits bow to the guest: where other contributors get plain job titles, the liner notes of Be Yourself Tonight bill Franklin, gloriously, as providing “‘super’ vocals.” It is the only honest description. The session’s rhythm tracks were handled with similar respect for pedigree — Shelly Yakus, the engineer behind records by Tom Petty and John Lennon, was brought in to record Stan Lynch’s drums, and the whole production has the unhurried confidence of people who know the singer will do the heavy lifting.
The lyric treats its politics as a party. Lennox and Stewart wrote it as a roll call of the modern woman — the one who was told to stay behind now standing, as the song puts it, on her own two feet — and the two vocalists attack it less like a lecture than like a celebration already in progress. Franklin, then in the middle of her own mid-eighties resurgence with the album Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, sings with the authority of a woman who had been doing it for herself since before Lennox was in school. Lennox, rather than shrinking, rises to the contest. Spin put it best: “That this hard-driving feminist anthem works so wonderfully for both women is a testament to the talent of Lennox. Any lesser singer would have wilted and died in such company.”
The song sat near the heart of an album recorded between November 1984 and January 1985 in Paris, Detroit and Los Angeles — the Detroit stop on that itinerary existed precisely because of this track. Be Yourself Tonight itself became the duo’s most commercially successful album, reaching number three in Britain and number nine in America, topping the chart in Australia and selling double platinum at home; both “Sisters” and the album’s lead single, “Would I Lie to You?,” would be Grammy-nominated. For Franklin, the timing was equally sweet. Who’s Zoomin’ Who? had re-established her as a pop force in 1985 after years in the commercial wilderness, and the duet let her test her authority against the most talked-about new voice in British music — on a song whose subject was, in effect, her own biography.
Two Varieties of Charisma
RCA released the single on 21 October 1985, and it appeared on both Be Yourself Tonight and Franklin’s Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, giving each album a claim on it. It reached number nine in the UK and number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100, went top ten in Ireland and New Zealand, and earned a top-ten placing on the US dance chart — though, in one of the era’s quiet ironies, American R&B radio largely kept its distance, parking the record at number 66 on the R&B chart even as pop stations embraced it. The twelve-inch single carried the extended “ET mix” and, on the flip, “I Love You Like a Ball and Chain.” At the 28th Grammy Awards the song was nominated for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. Decades later, the single was certified Silver in Britain for post-2004 sales alone — the anthem was still selling in the streaming age. The trade press understood immediately what it was hearing. Billboard praised “two varieties of charisma plus a furious funk production,” while Cash Box called it “a rousing, soulful tune with a driving R&B feel.”
It was the third of the album’s four singles, following “Would I Lie to You?” and “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart),” and in commercial terms it was the album’s boldest gamble: a five-minute soul record, sung by two women, with no male voice anywhere on it, released into a market that rarely let such a thing near the top ten. The gamble paid off on three continents, and it did so without softening its message by a syllable — a fact worth pausing on. Plenty of eighties hits smuggled radical ideas inside love songs. “Sisters” hid nothing. Its politics were the chorus, the title and the entire point, and the public bought it anyway.
The video, taped at Detroit’s Music Hall, intercut the performers with clips from old black-and-white films — including the kitchen-sink classic A Kind of Loving (1962) — stitching the song’s argument into a longer history of working women on screen. It was a thoughtful touch for a record that was, at heart, about inheritance: what one generation of women hands to the next. Franklin had recorded “Respect” in 1967 and turned a man’s plea into a woman’s demand; eighteen years later, Lennox arrived in Detroit with a song that assumed the demand had been granted, and simply got on with the dancing.
The Anthem That Keeps Enlisting Singers
Few eighties singles have been re-enlisted as often. Lisa Simpson sang it — with her aunts Patty and Selma, and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart — on The Yellow Album in 1998. The Spice Girls performed it as a duet between Mel B and Mel C on their Spiceworld Tour the same year, passing the song to a generation who had been in nappies when it was released. The Pointer Sisters took it to number two in Belgium in 2005, recording it with singer Natalia. And in 2011, when the Grammy Awards staged a tribute to Franklin, the song was the inevitable finale: Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride, Florence Welch and Yolanda Adams — five of the most powerful voices in pop, soul, country and gospel — closed the show with it, a living diagram of the song’s own argument.
It helps that the song was engineered to be inherited. Its lyric is written as a roll call — mother, daughter, sister, the woman behind the great man stepping out from behind him — and its chorus is a slogan simple enough for a child to chant and sturdy enough for a march. Lennox’s writing in this period was at its most direct — pop that says plainly what pop usually only implies — and “Sisters” is the plainest speaking she ever did: a celebration, as the song itself announces, of “the conscious liberation of the female state.” Where “Respect” had demanded, “Sisters” presumes; the argument, it insists, is already won, and what remains is the party. That presumption is exactly why movements keep adopting it. A protest song asks for something. This one behaves as if it already has it, and dares the listener to catch up.
That the record began as a second choice has become part of its legend. Tina Turner’s absence forced Eurythmics onto a plane, into Aretha Franklin’s home city, and up against the most formidable singing voice of the twentieth century — and the song is unthinkable without the friction that followed. “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” endures because it never sounds like a slogan being recited. It sounds like two women, from two continents and two musical centuries, discovering in a Detroit studio that they were singing about the same life.