Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Tributes pour in for the ‘Queen of Soul’
ARETHA FRANKLIN 1942-2018 ‘Queen of Soul’ found singing style in church
Aretha. You really didn’t need to say her last name, so dominant was her image, and her influence, lasting across the decades. That unmistakable voice, layering true soul within popular music, movies and into the MTV generation and beyond. Aretha Franklin died of cancer at age 76.
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 died at her home in Detroit of pancreatic cancer, according to the late singer’s publicist.
Though her musical contributions were diverse, ranging in tone from spiritual to gaudy, her inimitable singing style came from a single source. Franklin 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.”
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 multi-octave mezzosoprano an instrument of stunning beauty, range and power, but her piano playing — often in counterpoint to her singing — was just as accomplished.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tenn., the second youngest of five children. 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.
Much like gospel-circuit contemporaries such as Sam Cooke, David Ruffin and Dionne Warwick, Franklin shifted to popular music and moved at age 18 to New York. 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. Yet her individuality still shined through.
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, 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.
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, fingerwagging energy to Redding’s song that turned it into a ’60s protest anthem.
In 1968, at the funeral for family friend the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin sang a heartbreaking “Precious Lord.” She was in many ways the perfect choice to sing that song at that moment. Her voice suggested the depth of a community’s despair.
Her career was derailed by the onset of the disco era and then by the shooting of her father in an attempted robbery in 1979. He spent five years in a coma before dying. A cameo in “The Blues Brothers” movie in 1980 got her back on track, and the ’80s were dotted with feisty, if relatively insubstantial, hits such as “Freeway of Love” and “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” and a typically commanding return to the gospel arena, the 1987 album “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.”
Back in the spotlight, she took her “Queen of Soul” brand to extremes. But she remained capable of summoning greatness. In 1998 she appeared on the nationally televised Grammy Awards as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti. She sang “Nessun Dorma,” an aria from Puccini’s “Turandot,” and won over a new audience stunned by her operatic derring-do.
She knew how to make a statement, and not just with her voice. She made waves with the bow hat she wore to Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January 2009. The hat is now in the Smithsonian Institution. But even more stunning was her performance of “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee),” with Franklin giving herself over to the moment, bearing witness to the arrival of the first African-American president in her country’s history. “Let it ring, let it ring, let it ring,” she urged, testifying to her community and her country as if she were still singing hosannas at her father’s church.