Aretha Franklin came to Washington to sing — and for history

As a 21-year-old Aretha Franklin worked on her singing voice in New York during the summer of 1963, her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, raced to finish the final touches on the planned March on Washington.

Nearly five decades later, Franklin found herself in Washington and performing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at the inauguration of the nation’s first black president.

It wasn’t the first time she sang to a Leader of the Free World.

Throughout her career, the “Queen of Soul” often returned to the nation’s capital for performances that at times put her in line with key moments of U.S. history. She sang for diplomats, welcomed emperors and brought one president — Barack Obama — to tears. Franklin accepted many honors and performed for charities and civil rights groups in Washington. She even got in one heated argument at the White House with another unnamed diva that resulted in the two performers reportedly exchanging obscene gestures toward each other.

For the Memphis, Tennessee-born, Detroit-raised Franklin, it’s not surprising she found herself in Washington late in her career. Franklin surrounded herself with the politics of the day and often referenced her experiences alongside episodes of U.S. history in speeches, interviews and her 1999 autobiography, “Aretha: From These Roots.”

She noted in her book, for example, that she was born three months after Pearl Harbor and her father backed Democrat Adlai Stevenson for president in 1956. “Daddy was a staunch, lifelong Democrat, as I am,” she wrote.

Franklin also mentioned that family passed down tales about the historic treatment of African-Americans, from slavery to sharecropping — something she’d never forget. “My grandmother, whom we all called Big Mama, had worked the fields herself and told us stories of those difficult days,” Franklin wrote in her autobiography. “No matter how much cotton