Remembering Aretha in Pittsburgh
Three Rivers Stadium, soul food and R-E-S-P-E-C-T
IPittsburgh Post-Gazette f Aretha Franklin didn’t always stick to her word, sometimes that was a good thing.
In October 1970, the Queen of Soul told a Pittsburgh crowd that she was never coming back to the city, according to the Pittsburgh Courier. It was spoken from the stage at Three Rivers Stadium, where she drew a mere 400. Granted, it rained earlier that day and there were rumors that the Queen might not show, but still, that must have been a cavernously empty experience.
Fortunately, the soul legend, who died Thursday of advanced pancreatic cancer at 76 in Detroit, would reconsider and pay us more visits and have some wonderful experiences over the years with fans and promoters in Pittsburgh.
As you’ll read in all the tributes, the exquisitely gifted singer was among the most decorated performers in history: Born in Memphis, Tenn., she was the first female artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she ranked No. 1 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time and she won 18 Grammys and held honorary doctorates from Yale, Princeton and the Berklee College of Music, among others.
But no one called her Dr. Franklin, because the bigger title was Queen of Soul, applied to her in 1967, when she was 25.
“That happened when I was at the Regal Theater in Chicago, which was very much like The Apollo in New York,” she told the Pittsburgh PostGazette in a 2015 interview. “One of the local DJs there, a guy named Pervis Spann, he walked on stage one evening with a crown, and I went, ‘Whoooa! What is this?’
“Her second reaction, “Who wouldn’t want to be called ‘Queen’!”
The first real buzz about her in Pittsburgh is an extraordinary mention in a Post-Gazette column by Harold V. Cohen on Oct. 3, 1960. He reported that Columbia Records executive John Hammond, the legend who discovered her along with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and many others, came through Pittsburgh on his way to dropping his son