A hometown sendoff
Aretha Franklin proved she belongs to all
DETROIT • Everybody wants a piece of Aretha Franklin’s artistic legacy. Church, state, activism, tradition, innovation and celebrity all vied for recognition in homages to the Queen of Soul, here in her longtime hometown.
Franklin belonged to the gospel church; she belonged to the pop public; she belonged to the civil rights and women’s rights movements; she belonged, emphatically, to Detroit. At her funeral Friday, the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, announced Detroit’s city-owned riverside amphitheatre, Chene Park, would be renamed Aretha Franklin Park. “The mayor just got re-elected,” quipped the officiant, Bishop Charles H. Ellis III.
Yet being a member of her communities — of faith, politics, geography — wasn’t enough to define Franklin. She also belonged to her family, her era and to the singular gifts, discipline, ambitions and regal impulses that make her irreplaceable.
On Friday, guests and the public packed the Greater Grace Temple for Franklin’s funeral, lasting eight hours with music, preaching, reminiscences and testimonials. Together, they honoured an artist whose roots were deep, widespread and thoroughly acknowledged, but whose vision and achievement were her own. “She was black without apology or excuse,” professor Michael Eric Dyson said. “And she was American without argument or exception.”
The church claims Franklin, rightly, as the preacher’s daughter who brought everything she had learned from gospel music — timing, dynamics, the ornaments, the vocal tones, the call-and-response with her backup singers, the way she played piano — into the hits that would make her a star for five decades. When Franklin hit an artistic impasse, she would reinvigorate herself by returning to church and recording albums of gospel standards. Franklin sang gospel at the funerals of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, and of Rosa Parks in 2005; Parks’ funeral was also held in the Greater Grace Temple. The continuity was symbolic and unmistakable.
But the church was only part of Franklin’s education and of the style she would forge. She also grew up hearing jazz, blues and R&B in a home that welcomed visits from touring musicians. And in the 1950s and 1960s her father, like other preachers nationwide, was a civil-rights leader, an ally of King. Growing up in a segregated era, Franklin absorbed a determination to make earthly life more equitable. At her funeral, there was as much praise for her civil rights advocacy — touring to fund King’s payroll, posting bail for Angela Davis in 1970 — as for her music.
Franklin had to move outside gospel music to become a superstar. Her 1967 breakthrough, after years of working in and out of gospel and jazz, was to bring pop concision and impact — Think runs just 2:20 — to songs that didn’t confine her voice or constrain her pride. Through the decades, she kept finding them, writing them or (as with Respect and I Say a Little Prayer) seizing them to make them her own.
Eulogies at her funeral made clear that Franklin did not isolate herself from the city where she had grown up. A Detroit radio personality, Mildred Gaddis, recalled that Franklin used to call up a local TV news anchor after seeing segments about families in trouble, then quietly send them a cheque. Ron Moten, a neighbour, said he had asked Franklin to visit his mother in an assisted-living home on her 90th birthday; Franklin showed up with her band to play an hour-long concert for all the residents.
Beyond charity, many of her friends affirmed that with Franklin, politics was always a topic of discussion. And while direct protest songs are a tiny part of her catalogue, there was no mistaking her bedrock message that, as she famously said, “Everyone wants respect. Everyone needs respect.”
Understanding what shaped Franklin only underscores how completely she synthesized and then transcended it all. But let the sacred and secular, the idealistic and hedonistic, the political and the esthetic, the local and the global all affirm their part in her music. There’s enough for everyone.