It lasts just two minutes and twenty seconds, and it does not waste a single one of them. “Think” opens with Aretha Franklin at the piano, hammering out a groove that sounds like a warning and a celebration at the same time, and then she delivers one of the great ultimatums in popular music: think about what you are trying to do to me. It is a song addressed, on its face, to one careless man. But from the moment it hit radio in the spring of 1968, it belonged to everybody who had ever been taken for granted, and to a whole country that was being asked, that terrible year, to think about what it was doing to itself. Few songs have ever carried so much weight so lightly. Fewer still have survived, undiminished, for more than half a century.
To understand why “Think” landed so hard, you have to understand where Aretha Franklin stood in early 1968. She had spent six years at Columbia Records, from 1960 to 1966, recording elegant, jazz-leaning albums that never quite made her a star. Then, in late 1966, producer Jerry Wexler persuaded her to move to Atlantic Records, and everything changed. Wexler built her new sound around the gospel fire she had grown up with in her father’s Detroit church, and the hits came in a rush: “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” in early 1967, then “Respect,” her scorching reworking of Otis Redding’s song, which became her signature and her first number one. By 1968 she was, by one historian’s plain summary, the most successful singer in the nation. In February of that year she won her first two Grammy Awards, both for “Respect.” In January she had released Lady Soul, an album that reached number two on the pop chart. She was twenty-six years old, and she was unstoppable. “Think” was the sound of an artist who knew it.
It was also the sound of an artist recording through grief. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Franklin was a close friend of King’s and had worked beside him in the civil rights movement; she sang at his funeral. Less than a week later, she was in New York City recording “Think.” The timing matters, because the song’s most famous passage is its repeated cry of “freedom,” belted out like a chant, and in April 1968 that word carried the weight of King’s message and his murder. Nobody involved in the session needed to explain the connection. The song had been written as a personal statement, but it arrived in a moment when the personal and the political were inseparable, and audiences heard both at once. A demand addressed to one man became, without changing a word, a demand addressed to a nation.
The song itself was a rarity in Franklin’s catalogue: one of the only hits she wrote herself. She is credited as co-writer with her then-husband and manager, Ted White, though some in Franklin’s circle have claimed over the years that White actually had nothing to do with the writing. The truth of that dispute is lost now, but the song’s emotional logic points in one direction. Franklin’s marriage to White was rocky and, by 1968, only about a year from collapse; she left him that year, and they divorced in 1969. Heard in that light, “Think” sounds like a message delivered straight to the man standing closest to her: a warning that she saw exactly what he was doing, and that she would not keep accepting it. Yet what makes the lyric remarkable is how it refuses to stay small. It seesaws, verse by verse, between direct accusation aimed at a single person and a wider message aimed at everyone listening. The chorus warns one man to think; the freedom bridge invites a whole audience to claim its own freedom. That double vision is the whole trick of the song, and it is why it has outlived the marriage that may have inspired it.
The recording, made at Atlantic Studios in New York, matched the lyric’s urgency with a band built for impact. Wexler produced, with arrangements by Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin and Dowd engineering. Franklin herself played piano and sang lead, as she always did at her best, driving the band from the keyboard the way she had learned to do in church. Around her were some of the finest soul musicians in America: Spooner Oldham on Hammond organ, Jimmy Johnson and Tommy Cogbill on guitar, Jerry Jemmott on bass, Roger Hawkins on drums, and a horn section including Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love and Charles Chalmers on tenor saxophone, with Willie Bridges and Floyd Newman on baritone saxophone. Behind Franklin, the Sweet Inspirations sang the backing vocals, their voices answering her lines like a congregation answering a preacher. The whole record feels like a live performance barely contained by the studio walls: a relentless groove, stabbing horns, and a vocal that moves from conversational warning to full-throated demand without ever losing control.
That control is what separates “Think” from a mere shouting match. Listen closely and you hear a singer in complete command of her instrument, sliding from a near-spoken aside into a gospel cry, letting the band breathe and then snapping it back to attention. The song is built like a sermon and a dance record at the same time, which is to say it is built like Aretha Franklin herself: church-trained, streetwise, and utterly without fear. At two minutes and twenty seconds, it is also a masterclass in economy: no verse wasted, no chorus repeated once too often. The record says what it has to say and stops, which is exactly why radio loved it and why dancers did too.
Radio, in fact, had been told what to expect. Billboard, previewing the single, called it a “pulsating swinger with another wild performance” that had a similar feel to “Respect” and predicted it would quickly reach a million sales. Cash Box praised its “wailing lyrics of a hard-luck love affair” and its “tremendous rhythmic drive.” Both magazines were right. Released as a single on May 2, 1968, on Atlantic 2518, with Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” on the B-side, “Think” entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 18 and climbed fast, reaching number seven on the pop chart to become Franklin’s seventh top-ten hit in the United States. On the Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles chart it went all the way to number one, her sixth single to top that chart, reaching the summit on June 15. It also reached number six in Canada, number four in France, and number twenty-six in Britain, and it was eventually certified Gold in the United States for a million shipments. The prediction had come true, with room to spare.
The album around the single confirmed that this was no one-off. Aretha Now, released on June 14, 1968, with “Think” as its opening track, reached number three on the pop album chart and topped the R&B album chart, and it is still regarded as one of the great soul albums of the decade. Its other hits included “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The House That Jack Built,” and Atlantic issued nine Franklin singles in 1968, every one of them successful in the United States or Britain. She was not merely having a good year. She was having the kind of year that defines a career, and “Think” was its sharpest, most defiant statement, the one in which she said, in her own words, exactly what she meant.
Twelve years later, the song gave her career a second life, in the unlikeliest of places: a musical comedy about two white bluesmen in black suits. By 1979, Franklin’s commercial fortunes had faded. Rhythm and blues, as director John Landis later put it, was basically over as a chart force. When Landis was casting The Blues Brothers, the 1980 film built from John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Saturday Night Live act, he wrote a part specifically for Franklin: Mrs. Murphy, the owner of a soul food restaurant, whose husband, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, is about to run off with the band. Landis insisted that she sing “Think” rather than her biggest hit. Franklin, by his account, was surprised, asking him, “Don’t you want me to sing ‘Respect’?” But Landis understood the scene. The song grew directly out of the dialogue, as Mrs. Murphy tells her husband to think about what he is doing. “Respect” would have been the obvious choice. “Think” was the right one.
Making the scene was not easy. Franklin was not used to lip-syncing, and the number required many takes and considerable editing before it worked. But the recording itself was pure Aretha. She re-recorded the song in the Atlantic Records studio in New York for the film’s soundtrack, listened to the backing track once, and asked to replace the piano part herself. “I’ll play,” she said, and she did. The film version runs three minutes and fifteen seconds and features the Blues Brothers band with backing vocals from Franklin’s sister Carolyn and her cousin Brenda Corbett. On screen, the number explodes: Franklin behind the counter, the whole diner joining in, Jake and Elwood Blues dancing in the aisles. It reminded a new generation, and a new decade, of exactly who Aretha Franklin was.
The timing could not have mattered more. Franklin’s contract with Atlantic had expired, and after the film’s release she signed with Clive Davis’s Arista Records, beginning the second act of her career. The Blues Brothers appearance is often credited with reviving her fortunes: millions of moviegoers who had never bought a soul record in the 1960s watched the Queen of Soul stop a film dead with a twelve-year-old song, and wanted more. She finally got to sing “Respect” in a Blues Brothers film almost twenty years later, when she reprised the role of Mrs. Murphy in Blues Brothers 2000. But it was “Think” that did the work in 1980, because “Think” was the song that let her play a character and still be herself: a woman telling a man, in public and in song, to think again.
She returned to the song in 1989, recording an updated “Think (1989)” for her album Through the Storm, produced and arranged by Arif Mardin with his son Joe Mardin, and re-recorded it as a public service announcement for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a neat twist on a song about consequences: think about what you are doing, this time behind the wheel. Other singers have taken it up too, from Katharine McPhee in 2006 to Adam Lambert in 2017, but none has displaced the original. The song belongs to the voice that co-wrote it, and to the moment that produced it.
That moment has never really passed. Pitchfork placed “Think” at number fifteen on its list of the two hundred greatest songs of the 1960s, calling it a volcanic soul stomp that cries for freedom. But its real ranking is measured differently: in how often it is still played, still quoted, still danced to, still sung by women who recognize themselves in its demand. It became a feminist anthem because it states a woman’s terms without apology or explanation. It became a civil rights anthem because it was recorded in the week after King’s assassination and because its freedom cry meant what it said. It became a personal anthem because, underneath the politics and the history, it is about the oldest situation in the world: someone treating you badly and expecting you not to notice. Franklin noticed. She wrote it down. She sang it, with a band behind her and a movement behind her, and she made noticing sound like joy.
So much of what made 1968 unbearable is still with us, and so, fortunately, is the answer this song offered. Think. Think about what you are trying to do to me. Think about what you are doing to each other. Think, and then claim the freedom that follows from thinking clearly. Aretha Franklin packed all of that into two minutes and twenty seconds, in a New York studio, in the darkest spring of her country’s decade, and she made it swing. That is why “Think” is not a museum piece. It is a tool, still sharp, still waiting for the next person who needs to say, out loud and in full voice, that they deserve better.
Watch the video below and listen to the Queen of Soul lay down the law, one chorus at a time.
Sources:
Wikipedia — “Think (Aretha Franklin song)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(Aretha_Franklin_song))
American Songwriter — “The Story and Meaning Behind ‘Think,’ the Aretha Franklin Smash that Shone a Light on Her Songwriting Skills” (https://americansongwriter.com/the-story-and-meaning-behind-think-the-aretha-franklin-smash-that-shone-a-light-on-her-songwriting-skills/)
Men’s Journal — “‘Think’ by Aretha Franklin Hit No. 1 on This Day 58 Years Ago” (https://www.mensjournal.com/news/58-years-ago-today-iconic-1968-soul-classic-hit-no-1-and-it-still-holds-up)
Open Culture — “Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Perfect Performance in The Blues Brothers, the Film That Reinvigorated Her Career (1980)” (https://www.openculture.com/?p=1054982 via @openculture)
ScreenGawk — “How the Blues Brothers Saved Aretha Franklin’s Career” (https://www.screengawk.com/the-blues-brothers-saved-aretha-franklin-career/)