Queen of it all

There will never be another Aretha

She was the first woman in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Some 112 of her singles reached the charts. She won 18 Grammy Awards.

The state of Michigan had her voice declared a precious natural resource.

Aretha Franklin was not only the “Queen of Soul,” she was the queen of it all.

She could sing anything, and did, from pop to opera. She could sing with anyone, and did, from Annie Lennox to Elton John. And she lived a life in full — of sorrow and triumph, pain and glory.

She was the queen, not just of soul music, but of itself. You could hear it, palpable, in her voice — heartache and hope.

What we heard when she sang we never heard before and will never hear again. It was the voice of her father’s church; of women let down by life, by luck, by men; and it was the voice of civil rights — the march toward freedom and dignity.

She traveled and campaigned with Martin Luther King Jr., and sang at his funeral.

Hers was the voice of America, both as we are and as we wish to be.

Aretha Franklin’s death, at 76, in Detroit, from pancreatic cancer, ends an era. But her voice is not silenced. It will live on, thanks to the miracle of modern recording and DVDs.

Books have been written, and more will be written, about her life and her triumphs over various personal and medical adversities. And musicologists will ponder her gifts, and the remarkable ways she combined disparate, even opposite things — like rhythmic innovation and innate melodic taste, or the spiritual and the seductive. Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson did too.

Without the black church, America’s nightclubs and music halls would have been much duller places in this century and the last.

But the scholars will never be able to capture the wonder of Aretha Franklin’s music making. Pick any song. Ten seconds in and the listener is moving, maybe just a toe, but moving. There is joy in her music. Joy incarnate.

Her signature song was “Respect.” It was not only a fantastic tune, brilliantly sung, but an anthem, for women, for black women, for young black men — for everyone and anyone who has ever been disrespected and needed to be lifted up. Aretha Franklin lifted us all. She leaves a void that can never be filled. No one should ever try. But her mighty sound shall ring forever though this grateful land.