Drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie

Jerry Wexler said that we’re going to do a gospel album. This was the first time that Jerry and I were back together. I had been blackballed by Jerry for something that happened in the studio a few years earlier. He made a statement, and his statement was wrong and my answer was wrong. He was trying to say he wanted me to do something like Steve Gadd did on a particular record. And it didn’t come out that way. He said, “I want you to play like Steve Gadd,“ And I told him, no, I’ll do one better, I’ll call Steve Gadd and let him come and do it. He said, “OK, it’s done, it’s finished.” He paid us all and refused to call me for the next couple of years. I was still doing this for Atlantic for King Curits and didn’t know this man had fired me. After we did Amazing Grace, it was an 180 degrees----the respect for each other was there. We talked about it, and I said, “I didn’t know you had fired me.” He said, “You know what, I thought that.” I had never been fired by anybody in my entire life except for Jerry Wexler. 
	The rehearsals were the joint. We actually rehearsed in the church and in a rehearsal studio, we had both. While we were in the church, Aretha preached. The actual recording of the date was nowhere near like the rehearsal was two days before, the day before. Aretha preached. She was actually being a minister. The choir and everyone was in totally in shock because the lady was preaching. She went someplace else. Some of those rehearsals were recorded and he owned them. Jerry did. Man, it was something else. She preached better than any preacher I had been around in years and you felt everything she did. Every song. Every word you were on pins and needles. The church was full with choir, friends. What James Cleveland would have to say would knock your socks off and he said, “I had never in my entire life had anybody preach better than me. The church, they stood up and looked at him because nobody could believe that comeing out of his mouth.” It was all spontaneous. It had nothing to do with what the recordings were. This never, in the history of anything that went down, never heard James Cleveland give anybody that sort of praise. Better than him? To him, there was not a preacher in the world better than him.