FAREWELL TO THE QUEEN OF SOUL

Barack Obama said: “When she sings, it captures the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence”

She was known as the Queen of Soul, but Aretha Franklin, who has died aged 76, was more than that, said The Times: in a career spanning seven decades, she left behind “the limitations of musical genre to become a legend in her own lifetime”. Although her music was rooted in gospel, she could sing anything, from R&B, jazz, blues and rock to opera: at the Grammy Awards in 1998, after Pavarotti phoned in sick, Franklin stepped in with only 20 minutes’ notice to deliver a “deathless” rendition of Nessun dorma in his stead. Her “spine-tingling” voice, imbued with an emotion that “seemed to emanate from deep within her being”, captivated millions of fans, her fellow performers and four US presidents: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton asked her to sing at their inauguration galas, and though she was a lifelong Democrat, George W. Bush awarded her America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2005. “Aretha is still the best singer in the world,” he said. “She finds meanings in lyrics that even the composers didn’t know they had.”

But it was “America’s first black president who most eloquently encapsulated Franklin’s significance”, not just as an entertainer, but as an “indomitable icon of black womanhood”. She sang at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009. Six years later, he wept openly when the great diva came on stage for a Carole King tribute in Washington and brought the house down with her performance of (You Make Me Feel Like)

A Natural Woman. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the AfricanAmerican 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. “When she sits down at a piano and sings A Natural Woman, she can move me to tears because it captures the fullness of the American experience and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. From early childhood, she was steeped in the gospel tradition: her mother, Barbara (née Siggers), was a pianist and gospel singer, while her father, Clarence Lavaughn “C.L.” Franklin, was one of America’s most famous Baptist preachers. Known as “the man with the milliondollar voice”, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr and ordained the young Jesse Jackson; he also filled the family home with music (they had two pianos) and musicians. As a girl, Aretha met Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and Dinah Washington (who declared her “the one to watch”), while one of her sisters dated Marvin Gaye. She began singing solo in her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church aged ten, and touring with his “gospel caravan” at 12. Yet it was not an easy childhood: C.L. Franklin was charismatic, but domineering and philandering (in 1940, he’d fathered a child with a 13-year-old member of his congregation). When Aretha was six, her mother had moved out, leaving her and her siblings in the care of their father and paternal grandmother; the children visited her regularly, but four years later she died of a heart attack. Aretha had her first child when she was 12 and her second at 14. She never identified the father of either child; there were even false rumours that C.L. Franklin had fathered the first. With C.L. Franklin acting as her manager, she released her first gospel album in 1956, aged 14. She then decided to follow Cooke into secular music, and moved to New York where, in 1960, she was signed to Columbia by John Hammond – the man who “discovered” Billie Holiday, said The Guardian. Around that time, Franklin was also introduced to Ted White, a handsome hustler who became her manager. Although she knew he was a womaniser and a drunk, she married him in 1961. She rarely discussed her private life, but he was said to have “roughed her up” in public, and she began to drink heavily. “I don’t think she’s happy,” her friend the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson told Time in 1968. “Somebody else is making her sing the blues.” The following year, the couple divorced. (Her second marriage, to the actor Glynn Turman, also ended in divorce.)

Some blamed White for her career’s failure to take off in the early 1960s. However, Hammond later admitted that Columbia had “misunderstood her genius”. She’d recorded several decent jazz and blues albums with the label, but it was only when she moved to the R&B label Atlantic in 1966, at the behest of the producer Jerry Wexler, that she found her real voice. “I took her to church, sat her down at the piano and let her be herself,” he explained. In 1967, she had five top ten hits, including I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) and Respect (both recorded with the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section). Previously a hit for Otis Redding, the latter became, in Franklin’s hands, a “blazing” feminist anthem. (“That girl took my song from me,” Redding commented.) Although her songs were usually about the pain of romance, “their subtext was often about political liberation”, said Rolling Stone, and many became anthems of the civil rights movement. In 1968, the newly anointed Queen of Soul performed at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral and at the Democratic National Convention. “Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit,” she said. “A lot of it is based on suffering and sorrow, and I don’t know anyone in this country who has had more of those two devils than the negro.”

Franklin did not fare well professionally in the disco era, and had personal problems too: she managed to stop drinking, but remained addicted to junk food; she developed a fear of flying, which limited her public performances; and became seriously depressed. In 1979, her father was shot during a robbery, and remained in a coma until his death five years later. Rumours of her unreliability, diva-ish tendencies and jealous rages swirled. But she rebounded in the 1980s, with her exuberant cameo in The Blues Brothers, and Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, her platinumselling 1985 album. After that, she performed with a host of younger artists, including Eurythmics and George Michael, and in 1998 Lauryn Hill wrote and produced a song for her, A Rose is Still A Rose, which became the title track on her 37th studio album. In 1987, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; in 2010, Rolling Stone ranked her as the greatest singer of all time. “She is the reason why women want to sing,” noted Mary J. Blige. Although beset by ill health, Franklin carried on working: in 2014, her cover of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep – a song it is hard to imagine could have been written without her – became her 100th Billboard R&B chart hit.