Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. She is called “Queen of Soul”. In 2010, Rolling Stone magazine ranked her number one on its list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” and number nine on its list of “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. Franklin began her career as a child, singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit where her father was a minister.

At the age of 18, she embarked on a secular music career as a recording artist for Columbia Records. While her career did not immediately flourish, she found acclaim and commercial success once she signed with Atlantic Records in 1966. Her commercial hits such as “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”, “Respect”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “Chain of Fools”, “Think” and “I Say a Little Prayer” propelled her past her musical peers. Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries, and 20 number-one R&B singles. She won 18 Grammy Awards,[3] including the first eight awards given for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (1968–1975) and a Grammy Awards Living Legend honor and Lifetime Achievement Award. Franklin is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 75 million records worldwide. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1987, she became the first female performer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She also was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2019 awarded Franklin a posthumous special citation “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades”. In 2020, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
—Adapted from Wikipedia

When Aretha died, so many excellent writers paid tribute. I am going to lazily quote them here with some links where you can see her perform.

“Franklin’s 76 years on Earth bookended a grand arc of tumult, letdowns, progress, setbacks, terror, and hope in American history. That in itself might not be a remarkable feat so much as a reminder that all black people older than 53 have seen and lived through hell. But Aretha—and that first name is sufficient, as it was in black churches and parlors for half a century—was an architect of a movement as much as a witness to it. She toured with the actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to raise money for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, when the organization was in dire financial straits and was attempting to embark on a Poor People’s Campaign. She was an activist who strained to keep a movement going even after King’s assassination, and who worked to support the Black Panthers and attempted to post bail to free the activist Angela Davis from jail. She loved black people. In this country, that simple fact was radical enough.”

“At her zenith, her main power was in transformation, in taking less potent songs and breathing fire into them. Through sheer force of will, she transformed Otis Redding’s “Respect” from a pleading ballad to a civil-rights staple, a slogan for struggles at the intersection of blackness and womanhood”

“Soul was and is a revolutionary art, and Aretha [the “Queen of soul”] belongs in the broader conversation about this country’s revolutionary heroes with any provocateur or patriot who ever lived.”
—Vann R. Newkirk II
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/aretha-franklins-revolution/567715/

“More controversially, in 1971 she publicly offered to pay bail for the black power figurehead and Communist party member Angela Davis, who had been charged with conspiracy, kidnapping and murder for her alleged role in a courtroom escape that had turned into a shootout with the police. “Angela Davis must go free,” Aretha said. “I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.””
—Sean O’Hagan
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/19/aretha-franklin-life-of-heartbreak-heroism-hope

“This was the promise of soul: that pain granted depth, and that one was never alone but accompanied by a vibrant community that had crossed too many bridges in order to survive. Franklin was the queen not only of soul music but of soul as a concept, because her great subject was the exceeding of limits. Her willingness to extend her own vocal technique, to venture beyond herself, to strain to implausible heights, and revive songs that seemed to be over—all these strategies could look and sound like grace. She knew that we would need it.”
—Emily Lordi
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/aretha-franklins-astonishing-dr-feelgood

“Franklin sang with a power and conviction that healed. She transformed pain—both others’ and her own—into jubilation.”

““Respect,” originally an Otis Redding song, is best-known as an Aretha anthem. The song became an unofficial rallying cry for both the civil-rights movement and women’s liberation, a powerful addition to the artistic arsenals of both efforts. Franklin’s singing made shared demands impossible to ignore.”
—Hannah Giorgis
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/aretha-franklin-natural-woman/567697/

“Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. “

“What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.”

“When I e-mailed President Obama about Aretha Franklin and that night, he wasn’t reticent in his reply. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

‘ “Aretha gets offended when she thinks you think you’re getting over on her,” Tavis Smiley told me. “It’s hard to know why that line gets blurred from time to time, between making people respect you and self-sabotage. But don’t ever underestimate the power of the personal. ‘Respect’ is not just a song to Aretha. It’s the mantra for her life.” ‘
—David Remnick
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul

Video

Performing “Respect” in 1967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGjZHvD5q4

Aretha sings “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center honors and President Obama sheds a tear while Carole King flips out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT4aRd-hCqQ

Amazing Grace, a documentary released in 2019 presenting the live recording of Aretha Franklin’s album Amazing Grace at The New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles in January 1972. Available on Amazon, Hulu, etc. This is an article about the film in Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/aretha-franklin-documentary-amazing-grace-making-of-true-story

This print was published in August 2021.