This Girl’s in Love With You by Aretha Franklin

This Girl's in Love With You, Aretha Franklin's sixteenth studio album, hit the racks on Atlantic on January 15, 1970, with the house team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin behind the board. The girl who'd learned to sing in her father's Detroit church had been tearing up Atlantic since 1966, and here she takes other people's songs and makes them testify: "Son of a Preacher Man" gets a slow, knowing strut, and "Call Me" is pure pleading gospel-soul.

The real scoop is "Let It Be". Paul McCartney mailed Franklin and Atlantic a demo as a guide, and her version reached the public before the Beatles had even put out their own single that March. For all the hits packed onto it, the album made Billboard's Top 20 but sold only modestly, and it spent years out of print until Rhino brought it back on CD in 1993.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.