Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin (born March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan) was an American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s. Considered one of the greatest vocalists of the 20th century, Franklin possessed a formidable gospel-trained voice that she used to command a range of music styles, including jazz, blues, pop, rhythm and blues (R&B), rock, and even opera. Her hits include anthems of the ’60s such as “Respect” and “Think” and the searing ballads “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and “(You Make Me Feel like) A Natural Woman.” Nicknamed the “Queen of Soul,” she was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987).

Early life and gospel influences

Franklin’s mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit and was a minister of national influence. A singer himself, he was noted for his brilliant sermons, many of which were recorded by Chess Records. Her parents separated when she was six, and Aretha Franklin remained with her father in Detroit. Her mother died when Franklin was 10.

As a young teen, Franklin performed with her father on his gospel programs in major cities throughout the country and was recognized as a vocal prodigy. Her central influence, Clara Ward of the renowned Ward Singers, was a family friend. Other gospel greats of the day—Albertina Walker and Jackie Verdell—helped shape young Franklin’s singing style. Her debut album, Songs of Faith (1956), captures the electricity of her performances as a 14-year-old.

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The Columbia years

At age 18, with her father’s blessing, Franklin switched from sacred to secular music. She moved to New York City, where Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who had signed Count Basie and Billie Holiday, arranged her recording contract and supervised sessions highlighting her in a blues-jazz vein. From that first session, “Today I Sing the Blues” (1960) remains a classic. But, as her Detroit friends on the Motown label enjoyed hit after hit, Franklin struggled to achieve crossover success. Columbia placed her with a variety of producers who marketed her to both adults (“If Ever You Should Leave Me,” 1963) and teens (“Soulville,” 1964). Without targeting any particular genre, she sang everything from Broadway ballads to youth-oriented R&B.

Move to Atlantic Records and becoming “Lady Soul”

Critics recognized Franklin’s talent, but the public remained lukewarm until 1966, when she switched to Atlantic Records, where producer Jerry Wexler allowed her to sculpt her own musical identity.

At Atlantic, Franklin returned to her gospel-blues roots, and the results were sensational. “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” (1967), recorded at Fame Studios in Florence, Alabama, was her first million-seller. Surrounded by sympathetic musicians playing spontaneous arrangements and devising the background vocals herself, Franklin refined a style associated with Ray Charles—a rousing mixture of gospel and R&B—and raised it to new heights.

As a civil-rights-minded nation lent greater support to Black urban music, Franklin was crowned the “Queen of Soul.” “Respect,” her 1967 cover of Otis Redding’s spirited composition, became an anthem operating on personal, sexual, and racial levels. It was her first single to reach number one on the Billboard pop chart and earned two Grammy Awards—the first of many in her career. “Think” (1968), which Franklin wrote with her first husband, also contained more than one meaning in its lyrics. For the next half-dozen years, she became a hit maker of unprecedented proportions; she was “Lady Soul.”

Amazing Grace and later music

In the early 1970s Franklin triumphed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco before an audience of flower children and on whirlwind tours of Europe and Latin America. Amazing Grace (1972), a live recording of her performance with a choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is considered one of the great gospel albums of any era. By the late 1970s, however, disco cramped Franklin’s style and eroded her popularity; La Diva (1979), which attempted to capitalize on that genre’s popularity, was a commercial flop.

But in 1982, with help from singer-songwriter-producer Luther Vandross, she was back on top with a new label, Arista, and a new dance hit, “Jump to It,” followed by “Freeway of Love” (1985). She reached the top of the pop charts for the second time in her career in 1987 with “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me),” a duet with British singer George Michael that won a Grammy.

She continued to record in the 1990s and early 21st century. A highlight of her later career was her surprise performance of the opera aria “Nessun dorma” at the 1998 Grammy Awards, where she filled in at the last minute for Luciano Pavarotti (who had to cancel because of a sore throat). Franklin reprised the aria for Pope Francis during his visit to the United States in 2015.

Personal life and political activism

In the 1960s some listeners noted a recurring theme of intense and troubled relationships in many of Franklin’s songs and assumed that they sprang from her personal experience. A reluctant interviewee, she kept her private life private, claiming that the popular perception associating her with the unhappiness of singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday was misinformed. In 1961 she married Ted White, who also became her manager. They had a tempestuous marriage that was marked by reports of domestic violence, and he is credited by some for influencing Franklin’s “scattershot” musical choices before her signing with Atlantic. Eventually, she fired him as her manager. They had one son, Ted White, Jr., before divorcing in 1969.

Franklin also had two children, Clarence and Edward Franklin, to whom she gave birth as a teenager (she never publicly disclosed their fathers’ names). In the 1970s she had a fourth child, KeCalf Franklin, with boyfriend Ken Cunningham. She was married a second time in 1978 to actor Glynn Turman; they divorced in 1984.

In her own words, Franklin was “on the front lines” of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She sang at a memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr., after he was assassinated in 1968, and two years later she offered to pay the bond money for Angela Davis when the activist was arrested on charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy after an abortive attempt to free several Black prisoners during a revolt at a courthouse in California. Franklin was also a high-profile supporter of the Democratic Party. She sang the national anthem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and she later performed at campaign and inauguration events for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. In 2009 she electrified a crowd of more than one million with her performance of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at Obama’s presidential inauguration.

Honors, death, and legacy

Although Franklin’s album sales in the 1990s and 2000s failed to approach the numbers of previous decades, she remained the “Queen of Soul.” Along with her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, she received a Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, a National Medal of Arts in 1999, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.

In 2002 the U.S. Library of Congress added “Respect” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Franklin’s rendition of her 1967 hit “(You Make Me Feel like) A Natural Woman” during the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for Carole King (who cowrote the song) in 2015 was breathtaking and showed Franklin’s voice to be in fine form.

Franklin died from pancreatic cancer in August 2018 at age 76. Her funeral, which was televised, was attended by many celebrities, religious leaders, and politicians and featured performances by musicians of many generations. The documentary Amazing Grace, which chronicles her recording of the 1972 album, premiered in late 2018.