CL Franklin's Influence on Soul Music

CL Franklin grew up poor on a Mississippi farm and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule plowing the farm for his stepfather. At the age of 16 he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an ignorant preacher. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but he wasn't the main pastor at any of them. Unlike many people in the conservative black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's, I pity the fool.