‘Her voice will soar forever’
‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin dies at 76, but musical legacy lives on
Aretha Franklin, who died Thursday at 76, was a once-in-a-generation singer. She was the Queen of Soul, but she also ventured into — and mastered — virtually every style of music, from jazz and classical to rhythm and blues. She passed away at her home in Detroit, according to the late singer’s publicist.
The singer was in and out of ill health for years, and last summer in Detroit asked an audience to “keep me in your prayers.” She had to take several breaks during the show and appeared frail. Earlier in the year she had announced that she would cut back her tour schedule. In 2010 she underwent surgery to remove a tumor and canceled six months of tour dates.
Yet last year before a performance at the Chicago Theatre she told the Tribune, “I’m not quitting,” and said she was working on new music with Stevie Wonder.
Though her musical contributions were diverse, ranging in tone from spiritual to gaudy, her inimitable singing style came from a single source. She practically grew up in church, and the emotional intensity and personal connection she nurtured there with the music never left her. It informed virtually every one of her 77 top-100 songs, including 21 No. 1 R&B hits.
“The thing many people don’t understand about this change in my career is that I never left the church,” Franklin once told author David Ritz
about her transition to secular music in her late teens. “The church stays with me wherever I go and wherever I sing.”
Critic Anthony Heilbut, who has written extensively about Franklin’s life and career over the decades, has called the singer a pivotal figure in the way women and AfricanAmericans were perceived in popular culture.
Franklin’s “role was such that a history of black America could well be divided into pre- and post-Aretha,” he once wrote.
She won 18 Grammy Awards and was the first female artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1987. Not only was her multioctave mezzo-soprano an instrument of stunning beauty, range and power, but her piano playing — often in counterpoint to her singing — was just as accomplished. She influenced countless singers — Whitney Houston, Adele, Patti LaBelle, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Mariah Carey, Luther Vandross, Jennifer Hudson, Fantasia. But her legend was forged not just on her ability to hit all the notes and embellish them with astonishing technical flourishes, but to convey emotional nuance and deep feeling.
Her fame seemed destined, as she grew up in the household of the famed preacher C.L. Franklin and was mentored by his friends, who included gospel greats Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward and Albertina Walker. As a girl, Franklin mesmerized congregations at her father’s house of worship in Detroit, New Bethel Baptist Church. But her career was not without hardship.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tenn., the second youngest of five children. Her family moved to Buffalo, N.Y., and then Detroit, where her parents divorced. Her mother died when she was 10, and because of her father’s travels, she was primarily reared by her grandmother. As a teen, Franklin was a soloist in her father’s church and began recording gospel songs. She dropped out of high school and toured the gospel circuit, singing in churches around the country. It was a hard life during which she learned firsthand about racism while traveling the back roads of the South.
The young singer also learned how to interact with an audience. Even at 14, she was imbuing a towering gospel song such as “There’s a Fountain Filled with Blood” with drama and dread beyond her years. In her late teens she toured alongside the Staple Singers and Sammie Bryant and was second-billed to her father, the star preacher.
Then, much like gospel-circuit contemporaries such as Sam Cooke, David Ruffin and Dionne Warwick, Franklin shifted to popular music with her father’s blessing and moved to New York at age 18, leaving her two young children in the care of her grandmother in Detroit. She was wooed by Motown, a small hometown label, but turned it down because it wasn’t properly established yet and instead signed with Columbia Records. There she was overseen by the legendary producer and talent scout John Hammond, a purist who saw her as an immense talent who shouldn’t be wasted on pop trifles.
Hammond made a number of fine recordings with Franklin that bridged the worlds of gospel and jazz, but Columbia grew impatient for hits, and the orchestral arrangements and choice of material didn’t always underline her strengths. Hammond acknowledged later that the label mishandled her talents with its straight-laced standards. Yet Franklin’s individuality still shined through. As Heilbut wrote, she “was the first gospel star to switch fields without switching styles.”
When her contract expired, she moved to Atlantic Records and came under the supervision of producer Jerry Wexler, who admired her gospel recordings and wanted to update their feel for the pop market. Atlantic was an R&B juggernaut with a roster that included Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding (via the affiliated Memphis-based Stax label), and Wexler immediately paired Franklin with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section in Alabama. A one-night recording session in January 1967 yielded a landmark song, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” a smoldering performance that seemed to address Franklin’s deteriorating relationship with her thenhusband, Ted White. Recording in the South during the height of the civil rights era proved overwhelming for Franklin, however, and she left the next day. Wexler, knocked out by the performance, came up with the solution: He would bring the Muscle Shoals rhythm section to New York, where his prized singer would be more comfortable.
Another classic soon followed, “Respect,” a cover of a Redding song that Franklin transformed in tandem with her sisters Carolyn and Erma. The siblings’ call-and-response chemistry dated to their days at New Bethel, and they brought a fresh, sassy, finger-wagging energy to Redding’s song that turned it into a ‘60s protest anthem.