Aretha Franklin, music’s ‘Queen of Soul,’ dies at 76
Aretha Franklin, whose exceptionally expressive singing about joy and pain and faith and liberation earned the Detroit diva a permanent and undisputed title – the “Queen of Soul” – died Aug. 16 at her home in Detroit. She was 76.
Her representative Gwendolyn Quinn confirmed the death to the Associated Press and said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
One of the most celebrated and influential singers in the history of American vernacular song, Franklin reserved her place on music’s Mount Rushmore in the late 1960s and early 1970s by exploring the secular sweet spot between sultry rhythm-and-blues and the explosive gospel music she’d grown up singing in her father’s Baptist church.
Her calling card: “Respect,” the Otis Redding hit that became a crossover smash in 1967 after Franklin tweaked it
just so (a “sock it to me” here, some sisterly vocal support there).
Twenty of her singles topped Billboard’s R&B chart and more than 50 reached the R&B Top 10 over a six-decade recording career during which she earned volumes of praise for her innovative and emotive vocal performances, even when the material didn’t quite measure up to her talents.
A graceful mezzo-soprano stylist, Franklin had remarkable range, power and command, along with the innate ability to burrow into a lyric until she’d found the exact coordinates of its emotional core.
“She just bared her soul, she exposed herself, she did everything but get on the floor and scream and cry,” singer Natalie Cole told VH1. “She just had that special something that people respond to.”
“I don’t know anybody that can sing a song like Aretha Franklin,” Ray Charles once declared. “Nobody. Period.”
She was at once a brilliant technician and a master emoter, a devastating combination that was unleashed on hits ranging from the swaggering “Chain of Fools” and the cooing “Baby, I Love You” to the pleading “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and the fiery, finger-wagging, “Freedom!”-chanting “Think,” another of Franklin’s popular anthems.
She sang gospel truths that resonated across age groups, but it was grown-up music, reflecting an adult sense of self-awareness and maturity and full of hard realities to which she seemed to relate.
“If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me, it’s good,” she told biographer Mark Bego. “But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. . . . I look for something meaningful. When I go into the studio, I put everything into it. Even the kitchen sink.”
In 1968, at the apogee of her career when she was in her mid-20s and recording soul classic after soul classic on Atlantic Records, Franklin explained: “Soul to me is a feeling, a lot of depth and being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside, to make the picture clear. Many people can have soul. It’s just the emotion and the way it affects people.”
Long before she abruptly and mysteriously canceled a half-year’s worth of performances and appearances in November 2010 (doctor’s orders were cited, but no details about her ailments were offered), Franklin’s health had been a source of concern, mostly because of the considerable weight she was carrying.
When she resurfaced in 2011 for a brief concert tour, just months after announcing that she was undergoing an unspecified surgical procedure, Franklin told AARP magazine that she’d shed 85 pounds. She attributed the change to diet and exercise but steadfastly denied that she’d had gastric-bypass surgery - and also that she’d had pancreatic cancer. Franklin did not divulge additional details.
Franklin’s career could be divided neatly into two parts: the Atlantic Records years in the late 1960s and 1970s, and everything else, with some periods more fallow than others.
Before she became a soul-singing superstar, Aretha Louise Franklin was a young pop-jazz singer struggling to find her voice on Columbia Records.
Even before that, she was a precocious gospel singer who took solos at her father’s Detroit church, New Bethel Baptist, and occasionally toured with the charismatic minister.
She was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis but moved to Buffalo, then Detroit, at a young age when her father changed pulpits. A rock star among preachers, C.L. Franklin was known as “the man with the million-dollar voice.” His sermons, often delivered beneath a neon-blue crucifix, were broadcast on the radio and released on vinyl by Chess Records.
Aretha’s mother, Barbara Siggers, was called one of the top gospel singers in the country by Mahalia Jackson, a family friend and gospel great.
Siggers never pursued a career in music beyond performing in church, but Jackson encouraged Aretha to sing. So, too, did Clara Ward, another gospel legend who visited the Franklin home regularly.
The Franklins often had celebrity company (jazz pianist Art Tatum and singer Sam Cooke were frequent guests), and Aretha was becoming a minor sensation herself. But her childhood was rocky.
Her parents separated when she was 6, and her mother moved back to Buffalo - although Franklin, in her autobiography, “Aretha: From These Roots,” disputed the widely repeated story that she and her siblings had been abandoned.
“In no way, shape, form or fashion did our mother desert us,” she said, calling the story “an absolute lie.” They communicated by phone, and there were regular visits, too. “She was extremely responsible, loving and caring.”
Still, according to biographers, family friends always swore that the upheaval deeply affected Franklin, who had been a confident and outgoing child but became introverted and insecure after her mother moved away.
Then, when Franklin was 10, her mother died after a heart attack. “The pain of small children losing their mother defies description,” Franklin said in “From These Roots.” Jackson, the gospel singer and family friend, would say that “after her mama died, the whole family wanted for love.”
Franklin continued to sing in church and signed a deal with Checker Records. In 1956, at the age of 14, she released her first album - a collection of hymns and spiri- tuals recorded during services at New Bethel Baptist. Her burgeoning career - she was also a gifted pianist - was placed on hold when Franklin twice became pregnant as a teenager and dropped out of school. She had two sons, Clarence and Edward, by the time she was 15. (The father - or fathers - has never been identified, leading to wild speculation.) When Franklin returned to music, she shifted her attention to secular songs, with her father’s blessings - and guidance. Her father advised his daughter against signing a contract with the local startup that would eventually come to produce the sound of young America. And so Motown, which was scooping up talent all around the neighborhood, with everybody from Diana Ross to Smokey Robinson, missed out on Aretha Franklin. “The studio was only a few blocks from where my dad’s home was, where we lived,” Franklin told The Washington Post in 2008. But “it was still a fledgling label. And my father wanted me to go to Columbia Records because of the national and international distribution he knew they had.”