Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin is, for many people, the greatest voice popular music has ever produced.

They called her the Queen of Soul, and it was not a courtesy title. She had a voice that had everything: the power to fill a cathedral, the sweetness to break your heart, and above all a truth that made you believe every word she sang.

She came from the church, from gospel, and she never stopped sounding like it: like fervour, like prayer, like something sacred, even when she was singing about earthly love.

The preacher's daughter

To understand Aretha you have to understand where that voice came from.

She was born in Memphis in 1942, but she grew up in Detroit, the daughter of the Reverend C.L. Franklin, the most famous and influential Black preacher in the United States in his day. They called him "the man with the million-dollar voice" because of his sermons.

The Franklin house was a centre of Black American life. The great gospel singers passed through it — Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward, who were mentors to the young Aretha — and so did the leaders of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King visited the house.

Her mother, also a singer, died before Aretha turned ten, and the girl found refuge and a voice in the choir of her father's church.

At fourteen she was already recording gospel records. At sixteen she was touring the country alongside Martin Luther King.

Music and the struggle, for her, were always the same thing.

She took a man's song away from him

And here is the story that defines her.

In 1965 a soul singer named Otis Redding had recorded a song of his own, "Respect", in which a man asked his wife to show him respect when he came home from work. It was a good song, told from the man's point of view.

Aretha recorded it on Valentine's Day 1967, and transformed it completely.

She turned its meaning upside down: in her voice it was no longer a man demanding, but a woman standing her ground and claiming the respect she deserved and the world denied her.

And it was not only a question of who sings it. The spelling out — that word nailed down letter by letter — and the "sock it to me" in the chorus were not in Redding's version. Aretha and her sister Carolyn brought them in at rehearsals.

It came out in April and reached number one on the Billboard chart in June.

The reinvention was so complete that Redding himself acknowledged it in public, with humour and with resignation. Introducing the song at the Monterey Pop festival in June 1967, with her version already at the top, he said that this was a song a girl had taken away from him; a good friend of his, who simply took the song away, but that he was going to play it anyway.

"Respect" was never his again. It belonged to Aretha, and to everyone who needed that word in order to stand up straight.

The voice of a struggle

That was her role, and it is what makes her bigger than any list of hits.

In the nineteen-sixties, while the United States burned with the fight for civil rights, the voice of Aretha Franklin was the soundtrack of that dignity. "Respect", "Think", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman": songs that gave Black people and women a voice, a strength, a pride.

She was not an activist who also sang. She was a singer whose voice alone was a political act, because it asserted, with a power impossible to ignore, the humanity and the greatness of those the country treated as inferior.

In April 1968, when Martin Luther King — a friend of her family — was murdered, Aretha sang "Precious Lord" at the funeral events. She was closing a circle that had begun when she was a girl, touring alongside him.

The queen, crowned

Aretha won eighteen Grammy awards.

In January 1972 she went back to the church to record live, over two nights, in a Baptist temple in Los Angeles, with the Reverend James Cleveland and with her father sitting in the congregation. Out of that came "Amazing Grace", the best-selling live gospel album in history and the best-selling record of her whole career.

The Queen of Soul returning to the place she had come from, with the preacher listening to her.

In 1987 she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Keith Richards presented her. She sang for presidents — her performance at Barack Obama's inauguration stayed in the memory — and for Pope Francis, in Philadelphia, in 2015.

She died on 16 August 2018, at seventy-six, of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour. The whole world stopped to say goodbye to the queen.

What to remember

Aretha Franklin is the proof that one voice, on its own, can be a force that changes the world.

If you put on "Respect", "Think", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" or "I Say a Little Prayer", you are going to hear the greatest voice in soul, yes, but you are going to hear much more than that: a Black woman in the nineteen-sixties asserting her dignity and the dignity of all her people with a power no speech ever reached.

The girl from the church choir in Detroit who took a man's song and turned it into the cry of freedom of women and of an entire people.

They called her the Queen of Soul, and it was an acknowledgement that, in her kingdom, there really was nobody above her.

Long live the queen.

Sources

Aretha Louise Franklin (Memphis, Tennessee, 25 March 1942 – Detroit, 16 August 2018), American singer, songwriter and pianist, known as "the Queen of Soul". Daughter of the Reverend C.L. Franklin, an influential Baptist preacher in Detroit nicknamed "the man with the million-dollar voice", and of the gospel singer Barbara Siggers Franklin, who died on 7 March 1952, eighteen days before Aretha turned ten. She was formed in her father's church, with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward as models; she recorded her first album, "Songs of Faith", at 14, and at 16 she toured alongside Martin Luther King Jr., a friend of the family. After years at Columbia, her career took off with Atlantic Records from 1967. "Respect" is a song by Otis Redding released in 1965; Franklin recorded it on 14 February 1967, it was issued on 10 April and reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on 3 June, where it stayed for two weeks. The spelling out of the word and the "sock it to me" refrain were contributed by Aretha and her sister Carolyn Franklin, and do not appear in Redding's version. Introducing the song at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Redding said it was a song a girl had taken away from him. Other major hits: "Think", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "Chain of Fools" and "I Say a Little Prayer". "Amazing Grace" (1972) was recorded live on 13 and 14 January at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, with the Reverend James Cleveland and with C.L. Franklin present; it is the best-selling live gospel album in history and the best-selling record of Franklin's career. She won 18 Grammy awards from 44 nominations, along with the Grammy Legend Award (1991) and the Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), which are counted separately. On 3 January 1987 she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, presented by Keith Richards. She sang at Barack Obama's inauguration (2009) and before Pope Francis at the Festival of Families in Philadelphia (26 September 2015). Sources differ on her part in Martin Luther King's funeral rites: several biographies state that she sang at the funeral of 9 April 1968, while the account of the service attributes "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" to Mahalia Jackson at the Morehouse College ceremony; this text states only that she sang "Precious Lord" at the funeral events of April 1968. She died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, an uncommon variant with a slower course than pancreatic adenocarcinoma. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005) and a posthumous special citation from the Pulitzer board (2019). Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Britannica, NPR, History, the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and other press coverage.