‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin, a voice for the ages, dies at 76
Like the best actors and poets, nothing came between how Aretha Franklin felt and what she could express, between what she expressed and how we responded. Blissful on “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman.” Despairing on “Ain’t No Way.” Up front forever on her feminist and civil rights anthem “Respect.”
Franklin, the glorious “Queen of Soul” and genius of American song, died of pancreatic cancer on Thursday morning at her home in Detroit. She was 76. Few performers were so universally idolized by peers and critics and so exalted and yet so familiar to their fans.
In recent years, Franklin’s voice soared in several Connecticut performances, including a March
2015 show at Webster Bank Arena in Bridgeport and New Year’s Day
2016 and March ’17 concerts at Mohegan Sun Arena.
She made a surprise appearance in June 2011 at a $3,000-per-ticket fundraiser at the Belle Haven Club in Greenwich, where she performed with Dave Matthews and the Tedeschi Trucks Band.
Franklin wore a pink wrap and green dress to that appearance, concealing a blue, plastic hospital boot — the result of breaking her foot two days prior at a private concert in Dallas.
“She performed beautifully,” Greenwich First Selectman Peter Tesei said at the time. “It was quite an impressive performance. She certainly has earned the title, the Queen of Soul.”
On Thursday, longtime Greenwich resident and a fellow music icon Diana Ross paid Twitter tribute to Franklin.
“I’m sitting in prayer for the wonderful golden spirit Aretha Franklin,” Ross tweeted.
Chart-topping
Born March 25, 1942, a professional singer and pianist by her early teens and a superstar by her
mid-20s, Franklin recorded hundreds of songs that covered virtually every genre and she had dozens of hits. But her legacy was defined by an extraordinary run of top 10 soul smashes in the late
1960s that brought to the radio an overwhelming intensity and unprecedented maturity, from the wised-up “Chain of Fools” to the urgent warning to “Think.”
Rolling Stone ranked her first on its list of the top 100 singers. Franklin was named one of the 20 most important entertainers of the 20th century by Time magazine, which celebrated her “mezzo-soprano, the gospel growls, the throaty howls, the girlish vocal tickles, the swoops, the dives, the blue-sky high notes, the blue-sea low notes. Female vocalists don’t get the credit as innovators that male instrumentalists do. They should. Franklin has mastered her instrument as surely as John Coltrane mastered his sax.”
Franklin won 18 Grammy awards and, in 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But her status went beyond “artist” or “entertainer” to America’s first singer, as if her very presence at state occasions was a kind of benediction. She performed at the inaugural balls of presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, at the funeral for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and the dedication of Martin Luther King Jr’s memorial. Clinton gave Franklin the National Medal of Arts and President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Franklin’s best-known appearance with a president was in January 2009, when she sang “My Country `tis of Thee” at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
Crossing generations
Her voice transcended age, category and her own life. Franklin endured the exhausting grind of celebrity and personal troubles dating back to childhood. The mother of two boys by age 16 (she later had two more), she struggled with her weight, family problems and financial setbacks. Her strained marriage in the 1960s to then-manager Ted White was widely believed to have inspired her performances on several songs, including “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Think” and “Ain’t No Way.” Producer Jerry Wexler nicknamed her “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows.”
Despite growing up in Detroit, and having Smokey Robinson as a childhood friend, Franklin never recorded for Motown Records; stints with Columbia and Arista were sandwiched around her prime years with Atlantic Records. But it was at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father was pastor, that Franklin learned the gospel fundamentals that would make her a soul institution.
“In black neighborhoods and white universities, in the clubs and on the charts, her hits came like cannonballs, blowing holes in the stylized bouffant and chiffon Motown sound,” Gerri Hirshey wrote in “Nowhere to Run,” a history of soul music that was published in 1984. “Here was a voice with a sexual payload that made the doowop era, the girl groups, and the Motown years seem like a pimply adolescence.”
In a 2004 interview with the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, Franklin was asked whether she sensed in the ’60s that she was helping change popular music.
“Somewhat, certainly with ‘Respect,’ that was a battle cry for freedom and many people of many ethnicities took pride in that word,” she answered. “It was meaningful to all of us.”
If she never quite recaptured the urgency and commercial success of the late ’60s, she never relinquished her status as the singer among singers.
“If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me, it’s good,” she told Time magazine in 1968. “But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is about — just living and having to get along.”