A life of pain. But no one turned suffering into such sublime music like Aretha
She had two sons by the age of 15, married a pimp who beat her, and battled alcoholism and crippling insecurity all her life. Yet no one turned suffering into sublime music like Aretha Franklin
Nobody wore a fur coat quite like Aretha Franklin. She loved to shrug it off dramatically mid-song — a Gospel music tradition to indicate emotional abandon. In her case, the fur also helped remind her audience they were in the presence of royalty.
She was the ‘Queen of Soul’ and nobody dare forget it. On the few occasions someone made that mistake, her regal behaviour could be quelling. When Beyonce introduced Tina Turner as ‘the Queen’ at the 2008 Grammy Awards, Aretha took it as an insult, angrily telling reporters it had been a ‘cheap shot for controversy’. (Given Turner was long ago crowned ‘Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll’, one might argue she had every right to the title).
Now, Aretha’s long reign is over. The woman who Rolling Stone magazine has judged to be the greatest singer of all time died aged 76 yesterday at her home in Detroit, Michigan.
She had been receiving hospice care for advanced pancreatic cancer, a disease she had been fighting since 2010. Although her health had long been crippled by years of alcoholism, heavy smoking and obesity, she announced only in February last year that she was finally retiring. An appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest in April was cancelled on doctor’s orders.
In a statement, her family said: ‘In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins knew no bounds.’
Her last performance, appearing as a frail shadow of herself, was at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New york during Elton John’s 25th anniversary gala for his Aids Foundation in November 2017.
yesterday, Elton paid tribute on social media: ‘The loss of Aretha Franklin is a blow for everybody who loves real music: Music from the heart, the soul and the Church. Her voice was unique, her piano playing underrated — she was one of my favourite pianists.’
Paul McCartney called her ‘the Queen of our souls, who inspired us all for many, many years’.
For decades, Aretha Franklin had been an icon of black America. Aged 26, she sang Precious Lord at Martin Luther King’s funeral in 1968 and, more than 40 years later, performed My Country, ’Tis of Thee at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.
WHEN she sang (you Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman in front of the President again six years later, he was seen wiping away tears before she had finished the first verse. ‘American history wells up when Aretha sings,’ he once said. ‘Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock ’n’ roll — the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope.’
Aretha sold more than 75million records, won 18 Grammy awards and had 20 No 1 singles in a career spanning more than 60 years, from her first album Songs Of Faith in 1956 to her last, A Brand New Me, released in November 2017.
She was best-known for hits such as Respect, (you Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, I Say A Little Prayer, and I Knew you Were Waiting For Me, but it was her range and versatility across musical forms that was truly astonishing. It went far beyond gospel, pop, jazz and R&B.
When Luciano Pavarotti couldn’t perform at the Grammys in 1998 because of a sore throat, she stepped in at 20 minutes’ notice and sang Nessun Dorma in his place. It was a triumph.
However, behind her seemingly effortless stage performances and the endless adulation showered on her, she was a troubled soul. The product of a chaotic, broken home and a philandering preacher father who turned his ministry into an excuse for sexual excess, she was pregnant with her first child at 12, and had two sons by different fathers by the time she was 15. Crippled by insecurity and battling a lifelong drink problem, she was an impossible diva at times — feuding jealously with other stars, and indulging in spectacular tantrums with her family and colleagues.
In denial about her personal problems and behaviour, Aretha did her utmost to hide it from her public. But it was all laid bare in an unauthorised biography in 2014, Respect: The Life Of Aretha Franklin, by David Ritz.
He had been determined to reveal the ‘real’ Aretha Franklin story after penning an official ‘sanitised’ version 15 years earlier. Aretha dismissed the new book as ‘trashy’ and: ‘Lies and more lies!’ But none of the sources, including her closest friends and relatives, denied it.
Aretha, one of four children, was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Clarence
Franklin and his wife Barbara, a vocalist and piano player.
Her father, the single most influential person in her life and her first manager, was an enormously successful Baptist preacher. Born in Mississippi, he claimed that at 15, a ‘voice coming from a burning plank’ had told him to go out and preach God’s Word.
Dubbed the Preacher With The Golden Voice, he became famous across the U.S. for his exuberant sermons, recordings of which sold by the hundreds of thousands.
When Aretha was four, the family moved to Detroit where her father took over the pastorship of the New Bethel Baptist Church. By seven, she was a member of the gospel choir at the church and able to replay a tune on the piano after hearing it just once.
At ten, she was singing solos. Her father — a close friend of Martin Luther King, who would stay with the family when in town — wallowed in his fame as a preacher and behaved like a film star, driving a Cadillac, wearing sharp suits and alligator skin shoes.
The attention he attracted only fuelled his promiscuous nature, culminating in his fathering a child with a 12-year-old girl.
His church became a front for orgies which insiders described as a ‘sex circus’. As biographer Ritz put it: ‘High on wine and weed, the party people celebrated the love of the flesh.’
Singer Etta James, who also attended the church and, like Aretha, lost her virginity before reaching her teens, said: ‘I can understand Aretha not wanting to talk about that...who wants to admit that you’re praising the Lord at the 8pm service and servicing some drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a singer an hour later?’
When Aretha was six, her mother had left because of her husband’s promiscuity and moved to Buffalo, New York, although she continued to see the children until her death three years later. The youngsters were largely brought up by a string of their father’s secretaries and girlfriends.
Traumatised by the loss of her mother and perhaps influenced by her father’s libidinous ministry, Aretha became highly sexualised at an early age. Soul singer Sam Cooke — who inspired her to move from gospel to secular music — later hinted they had an affair when she was 12 and he was 23.
She gave birth to the first of her four sons just two months after her 13th birthday, calling him Clarence after her father. His tawdry reputation was such that rumours spread that he was the baby’s father. In fact, it had been a friend of Aretha’s from school. Two years later, a second son was born.
Throughout that difficult childhood, she was driven by a determination to make it as a singer, dropping out of school — leaving her children to be raised by
her paternal grandmother, ‘Big Mama’ — to join her father’s travelling ‘Gospel Caravan’, singing and playing piano. She recalled how they often encountered racial segregation, only able to eat at certain restaurants and stopping only at petrol stations where they knew they could use the lavatories.
At 18, she went to New York and signed with Columbia, making nine albums with just one single making the Top 40. Her fortunes changed when she moved to Atlantic records in 1967. Her first five releases were all in the Top 10.
Musical success contrasted with private life disaster. She married her first husband, Ted White, in 1961 when she was 19. A brutal Detroit street criminal and pimp, he financed Aretha’s early career with the profits of prostitution. He also ‘didn’t hesitate slapping [Aretha] around and didn’t care who saw him do it,’ according to the singer’s producer, Otis Taylor.
As if to compensate, she ate and drank compulsively — the alcohol helping to numb the pain of her terrible marriage, according to friends. Performing her 1967 hit respect in a concert that year, a tipsy Aretha fell off the stage and broke her arm, later claiming she had been blinded by the stage lights. However, she was arrested for disorderly behaviour and cancelled concerts unexpectedly.
‘She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown,’ her sister Carolyn said of Aretha during her time with White. She had her third child with him in 1964 but they were divorced by 1969.
Over the next decade, Aretha managed to get her drinking (if not her eating) under control, but her private life continued to be messy. Like her father, fame went to her head.
‘She was the Queen of Soul and I think at times she saw her boyfriends like her servants,’ said her former lover Dennis edwards, lead singer of The Temptations.
She had another child by Ken Cunningham, her road manager, and married second husband Glynn Turman, an actor, in 1978. By then, her first run of hit records had dried up, but she never stopped fighting to remain relevant to audiences, duetting with George Benson, George Michael, and the eurythmics over the next decade.
Her mental health, though, was always fragile and she was oppressed by the pressures of her industry, according to Carolyn. ‘She was afraid she wasn’t good enough as a singer, pretty enough as a woman, or devoted enough as a mother,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to call it but deep, deep insecurity.
‘Her style was to either drink away the anxiety or, when that stopped working, disappear for a while, find her bearings, and go right back onstage and wear the crown of the impervious diva.’
Her brother, Cecil, repeatedly had her hospitalised in a remote Connecticut clinic for ‘nervous exhaustion’. She would seemingly recover and dive back into her career, only to end up in hospital again.
Irked by these rumours of her mental instability, Aretha fed the Press with fabricated tales about her wonderful life, concocting stories about mystery lovers and once announcing she was getting married to a man who, it turned out, knew nothing about it.
She was always deeply jealous of other stars. recording a song with gospel star Mavis Staples, Aretha insisted Staples’s voice was turned down so much it was barely audible.
Barbra Streisand and Diana ross were viewed as rivals for her crown and she had little time for them, while friendships with other singers lasted only as long as it took Aretha to take offence at some perceived slight and put them on what she called her ‘s**t list’.
In 1989, she sang a duet with Whitney Houston (It Isn’t, It Wasn’t, It Ain’t Never Gonna Be) when Whitney was at the peak of her fame, and probably the biggest pop star in the world.
But the older star was aloof and unfriendly, entering ‘the studio as Queen Aretha, the original diva’, Houston observed. When the song failed to become a hit, Aretha blamed Houston, saying: ‘Whitney lacked [her] wisdom and maturity as a recording artist.’
Male stars were no different. Luther Vandross never got over her insistence on calling him ‘Vandross’ and he having to call her ‘Miss Franklin’ when he produced a 1981 album for her.
‘Falling-outs are her specialty,’ said ruth Bowen, her booking agent and a longtime friend.
She clashed with her family, too. Her two sisters were both talented singers but the fiercely competitive Aretha sometimes tried to hold back their careers. She further clashed with her family members about the care of her father after he was shot during a robbery attempt in 1979 and spent five years in a coma.
It was her absolute refusal to show any hint of weakness that meant she never got the professional help which her family believe she needed.
‘She takes her suffering and turns it into anger,’ said her brother Cecil. ‘It’s all about diva drama. It’s hard for her to deal with extreme sadness and loss. rather than deal, she acts out. She goes to rage. rage without reason. It’s crazy.’
Aretha developed a fear of travel and particularly of flying, boarding her last plane in 1982. She would only go on tour by bus and, even then, refused to go through the rockies or drive in bad weather. In later years, her inability to play either abroad or on the West Coast severely hampered her singing success.
It was Bill Clinton who saved her — and who kick started her later career. Keen to capture the black vote, he asked her to sing at the Democrat national convention in 1992.
On becoming President, he repaid the favour by inviting her to the White House and to perform at various official functions.
The Diva was back and to celebrate she bought a mink coat so big it needed its own seat when she took it off — as famously happened when she went to see the musical Sunset Boulevard on Broadway.
Her habit of failing to turn up at recording studios and even performances continued to ensure her finances never kept up with her extravagance. The department store Saks Fifth Avenue once sued her for long overdue bills that amounted to more than $262,000 (£206,000) for furs and shoes. It was one of more than 30 lawsuits brought against her by plumbers, caterers, florists and the like for not paying their bills.
Does any of this ultimately matter, fans may ask, given she was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century? As she once told her sister erma: ‘If Queen elizabeth gets to be queen for the duration of her life, why not Queen Aretha.’
It took a brave pretender to her throne to argue otherwise.