Aretha Franklin

• 1. Introduction

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  Aretha Franklin heard Otis Redding's reaction to her own version of his song "Respect": "That little girl done took my song away from me." She had added a supercharged interlude that spelled out the title letter by letter. Released in April 1967, it reached number one on both the R&B and pop charts. It became a civil rights and feminist anthem. Twice, Rolling Stone magazine named her the greatest singer of all time. The world knew her as the Queen of Soul. She was born on the 25th of March 1942 and died on the 16th of August 2018. Yet the title was not handed to her at birth. It was placed on her head, literally, by a radio personality at a Chicago theater. Before that crown, there were years of records that did not sell, a label that did not understand her, and a childhood marked by loss. How does a girl who learned piano by ear in Detroit become a voice that President Barack Obama said made American history well up? What did it cost her along the way?

• 2. A Preacher's House

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  At 406 Lucy Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, Aretha Louise Franklin was born to Barbara and Clarence LaVaughn "C. L." Franklin. Her father was a Baptist minister and circuit preacher from Shelby, Mississippi. Her mother was a skilled piano player and vocalist. When Aretha was two, the family moved to Buffalo, New York. By the time she turned five, C. L. had settled them in Detroit, where he led the New Bethel Baptist Church.

  C. L. Franklin's sermons earned him the nickname of the man with the "million-dollar voice." He was paid thousands of dollars to preach in churches across the country. That fame drew remarkable visitors to his home. Gospel singer Clara Ward came, as did James Cleveland and the early Caravans members Albertina Walker and Inez Andrews. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Wilson, and Sam Cooke all became his friends. Clara Ward, romantically involved with C. L. from around 1949 until her death in 1973, also served as a role model to the young Aretha.

  The marriage of C. L. and Barbara Franklin was troubled by his infidelities, and they separated in 1948. Barbara returned to Buffalo with Aretha's half-brother Vaughn, though she visited her children in Detroit often. On the 7th of March 1952, before Aretha's tenth birthday, Barbara died of a heart attack. Several women helped raise the children afterward, including Aretha's grandmother Rachel and the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. In that household, Aretha taught herself piano by ear, a skill that would later draw the admiration of Elton John and Keith Richards.

• 3. The Gospel Circuit

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  Just after her mother's death, Franklin sang her first solo at New Bethel Baptist Church, the hymn "Jesus, Be a Fence Around Me." When she was 12, her father began managing her and took her on his "gospel caravan" tours to sing in churches around the country. He helped her sign her first recording deal, with J.V.B. Records, where she appeared on both vocals and piano. In 1956, J.V.B. released her first single, "Never Grow Old." She was only 14 when the album Songs of Faith was recorded.

  During these years, Franklin sometimes traveled with the Soul Stirrers. She spent summers on the gospel circuit in Chicago, staying with the family of Mavis Staples. The music producer Quincy Jones recalled that Dinah Washington told him "Aretha was the 'next one." At 16, Franklin toured with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she would sing at his funeral in 1968.

  Among her greatest influences were Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. James Cleveland, known as the King of Gospel music, helped focus her early career as a gospel singer. He had been recruited by her father as a pianist for the Southern California Community Choir. Jerry Wexler later described her voice on Songs of Faith as belonging "not that of a child but rather of an ecstatic hierophant."

• 4. The Columbia Detour

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  After turning 18, Franklin told her father she wanted to follow Sam Cooke into pop music, and she moved to New York. C. L. Franklin, serving as manager, helped produce a two-song demo that reached Columbia Records, who signed her in 1960 as a "five-percent artist." Sam Cooke had tried to persuade her father to sign her with his label, RCA Victor, and Berry Gordy had asked Aretha and her elder sister Erma to join his Tamla label. C. L. turned Gordy down, feeling Tamla was not yet established.

  Franklin's first Columbia single, "Today I Sing the Blues," was issued in September 1960 and reached the top 10 of the Hot R&B Sides chart. Her recordings there ranged across standards, vocal jazz, blues, doo-wop, and rhythm and blues, mostly produced by Clyde Otis. By the end of 1961, DownBeat magazine named her a "new-star female vocalist." By the mid-1960s, she was earning $100,000 a year from performances in nightclubs and theaters.

  During a performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago, WVON radio personality Pervis Spann announced that Franklin should be crowned "the Queen of Soul." He ceremonially placed a crown on her head. Yet commercial success at Columbia stayed out of reach. Label executive John H. Hammond later admitted the company had failed to understand her gospel background and never brought that side of her out.

• 5. Muscle Shoals And After

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  In November 1966, when her Columbia contract expired, Franklin actually owed the company money because sales had fallen short of expectations. Producer Jerry Wexler convinced her to move to Atlantic Records. Wexler wanted to use her gospel background to build what he called "a tenacious form of rhythm & blues that became increasingly identified as soul."

  In January 1967, Franklin traveled to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, backed by the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. She recorded "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" there but spent only one day, after an altercation broke out involving her manager and husband Ted White, studio owner Rick Hall, and a horn player. The song reached number one on the R&B chart and gave her a first top-ten pop single. Its parent album later went gold.

  By 1968 Franklin had become, in Wexler's circle, the most successful singer in the nation. That year she issued the top-selling albums Lady Soul and Aretha Now, carrying singles like "Chain of Fools," "Think," and "I Say a Little Prayer." In February she earned her first two Grammys, including the debut Best Female R&B Vocal Performance award. On the 16th of February, she was honored with a day named for her and greeted by Martin Luther King Jr., who gave her the SCLC Drum Beat Award less than two months before his death.

  In late April and May 1968, Franklin toured outside the US for the first time. At the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, a near-hysterical audience covered the stage with flower petals. She also appeared that June on the cover of Time magazine, in a portrait by Boris Chaliapin. In January 1972 she returned to gospel with a two-night live church recording, Amazing Grace, which sold more than two million copies and ranks among the bestselling gospel albums ever. Sydney Pollack filmed those performances, but synching problems and Franklin's own resistance meant the film was not released until November 2018, by producer Alan Elliott.

• 6. The Arista Revival

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  In 1980, Franklin signed with Clive Davis's Arista Records. "Davis was beguiling and had the golden touch," according to Rolling Stone. That same year she appeared in The Blues Brothers as a soul food restaurant proprietor and wife of Matt "Guitar" Murphy. In November she performed at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium before Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

  Clive Davis hired the rising soul singer Luther Vandross to produce Jump to It in 1982, which earned her first gold certification since the Sparkle soundtrack seven years earlier. When a young Narada Michael Walden produced Who's Zoomin' Who?, the album took on a crossover pop sound with synthesized dance-rock. It peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard 200, her highest in nearly 20 years, and became her first platinum album in the United States. Exposure on the then-fledgling channel MTV brought her to a younger audience.

  On the 27th of October 1986, Walden's production yielded Aretha, carrying her duet with George Michael, "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)." It became her first single in nearly twenty years to top the Billboard Hot 100, and also topped charts in the United Kingdom and Australia. In 1987 she performed "America the Beautiful" at WWE's Wrestlemania III, and she released the gospel album One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, recorded at her late father's New Bethel church. Three years after working with Babyface, she released A Rose Is Still a Rose in 1998, whose title track was her final top 40 single.

• 7. Stepping Into The Aria

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  At the 1998 Grammy Awards, opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti became too ill to perform the aria "Nessun dorma" after the show had already begun. The producers, desperate to fill the slot, turned to Franklin. She was a friend of Pavarotti and had sung the aria two nights earlier at the annual MusiCares event. She asked to hear his rehearsal recording, then agreed she could sing it in the tenor range the orchestra was prepared to play. More than one billion people worldwide saw the performance, and she received an immediate standing ovation.

  Franklin would perform the aria live several more times. The last was for Pope Francis at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September 2015. A small boy was so moved that he came onto the stage and embraced her while she was still singing.

  At the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors, during the section for honoree Carole King, Franklin sang "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman." On the swelling bridge she dramatically dropped her fur coat from her shoulders to the stage, earning a mid-performance standing ovation. Rolling Stone read the gesture as an echo of times when gospel queens would toss their furs onto the coffins of other gospel queens. On Thanksgiving Day 2016, at Detroit's Ford Field, she gave a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that lasted more than four minutes before the game between the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions.

• 8. What She Carried

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  From her childhood in a prominent African-American preacher's home to the end of her life, Franklin was involved in the struggle for civil rights and women's rights. She gave money to civil rights groups, at times covering payroll, and performed at benefits and protests. When Angela Davis was jailed in 1970, Franklin told Jet: "Angela Davis must go free... Black people will be free." She added that she acted not because she believed in communism, "but because she's a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people."

  Franklin's family life held private grief. She first became pregnant at 12 and gave birth to her first child, Clarence, on the 28th of January 1955. She was the mother of four sons and did not like to discuss her early pregnancies with interviewers. Her father and idol, described as "unorthodox on every level," knowingly preyed on his pre-teen congregants; her half-sister Carol Ellan Kelley was C. L.'s daughter by Mildred Jennings, a 12-year-old member of his Memphis church.

  On the 10th of June 1979, while Franklin performed at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, her father was shot twice at point-blank range in his Detroit home. C. L. lay in a coma, cared for at home with 24-hour nursing, and died at Detroit's New Light Nursing Home on the 27th of July 1984. Franklin had moved back to Detroit in late 1982 to help with his care.

  Franklin died at her home in Detroit on the 16th of August 2018, aged 76, from a malignant pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. Barack Obama said she "helped define the American experience." In 2019, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded her a posthumous special citation "for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades," making her the first individual woman to receive such a citation. Fans turned to the New York City Subway, where the operator placed permanent stickers reading "Respect" beside the "Franklin" name in two stations.