aretha franklin tour history

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Aretha Franklin  

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Aretha Louise Franklin (born March 25th, 1942) is an American singer from Memphis, Tennessee. In 2008, Rolling Stone magazine named her at number one on their rundown of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Franklin is indubitably one of the most iconic musical figures of the twentieth century; she’s synonymous, quite frankly, with R&B, soul, jazz and gospel, and certainly nothing short of an American national treasure. Franklin has an overwhelming number of hugely impressive accolades to her name; she’s won no fewer than 18 Grammy Awards and has sold in excess of 75 million records. In 1987, she became the first woman ever to be inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her halcyon days can probably be traced to the late sixties, when she was a staple on the U.S. charts with a flurry of now legendary singles. Her version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” probably remains her signature song all these years later - especially in terms of its wider political significance, as it became a civil rights anthem - but it faces stiff competition from the likes of “I Say a Little Prayer”, “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” and “Baby I Love You”. In the early seventies, she chose to move into gospel recordings, with great success; her version of “Amazing Grace” might be the seminal take on that classic song.

Despite battling with health issues, the now-septuagenarian Franklin continues to tour and record - her most recent release was a take on Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”. A late career highlight came in 2009, when she sang at the inauguration of President Barack Obama; it was another extraordinary chapter in a frankly incredible career.

Live reviews

If James Brown was the Godfather of Soul then Aretha Franklin must be the Godmother.

I was able to see Aretha Franklin perform in the most unusual and profound setting, about fifteen blocks away in downtown Washington, D.C. at President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. Though some people decided to make Aretha's magnificent over-sized hat the entire point of discussion of that performance, and true, Aretha Franklin has been known to make some show-stopping performance fashion choices throughout the years, but that was hardly the reason why that performance was so memorable.

It was Aretha's first time singing at an inauguration that was already historic in so many ways, and her rendition of My Country 'Tis of Thee was so beautifully natural, bold, and even heartwarming on that below freezing day in the nation's capital. Aretha is no stranger to a big stage, she had performed for Bill Clinton in the past, she sang at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral, and continues to tour, and sell out all over the world to this day.

Aretha Franklin is truly an American treasure, and seeing her sing live can brighten up any room, theater, arena, church, or even inauguration. R-E-S-P-E-C-T Aretha Franklin, and see this one of a kind woman live in concert soon.

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The concert was good..Although Aretha is older, she can still sing very well. there were some long breaks early on in the show, but she came back stronger than ever. I do wish she could have sang some more old favorites, but it was a good mix of songs.

The Queen was in top form last nite, the show was excellent. Loved hearing the standards as well as the new material, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow dance she and her fiancé did on stage, was a very touching moment for all her fans. WHAT A NITE!

What a great show! Her voice is as good as when she first started her career. To be still singing at the age of 75 and to be able to sing like that absolutely AMAZING!!

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Aretha Franklin Tour History

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Aretha Franklin

Multiple Grammy winner and "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin was known for such hits as "Respect," "Freeway of Love" and "I Say a Little Prayer."

(1942-2018)

Who Was Aretha Franklin?

A gifted singer and pianist, Aretha Franklin toured with her father's traveling revival show and later visited New York, where she signed with Columbia Records. Franklin went on to release several popular singles, many of which are now considered classics. In 1987 she became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2008 she won her 18th Grammy Award, making her one of the most honored artists in Grammy history.

Early Life and Career

The fourth of five children, Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Baptist preacher Reverend Clarence La Vaughan "C. L." Franklin and Barbara Siggers Franklin, a gospel singer.

Franklin's parents separated by the time she was six, and four years later her mother succumbed to a heart attack. Guided by C. L.'s preaching assignments, the family relocated to Detroit, Michigan. C. L. eventually landed at New Bethel Baptist Church, where he gained national renown as a preacher.

Franklin's musical gifts became apparent at an early age. Largely self-taught, she was regarded as a child prodigy. A gifted pianist with a powerful voice, Franklin got her start singing in front of her father's congregation.

At the age of 12, she became a mother for the first time with a son, Clarence. A second child, Edward, followed two years later — with both sons taking her family's name. Franklin would later have two more sons: Ted White, Jr. and Kecalf Cunningham.

Albums and Songs

After a brief hiatus, Franklin returned to performing and followed heroes such as Cooke and Dinah Washington into pop and blues territory. In 1960, with her father's blessing, Franklin traveled to New York, where after being courted by several labels, including Motown and RCA, she signed with Columbia Records, who released the album Aretha in 1961.

Though two tracks from Aretha would make the R&B Top 10, a bigger success came that same year with the single "Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," which crossed over to No. 37 on the pop charts.

But while Franklin enjoyed moderate results with her recordings over the next few years, they failed to fully showcase her immense talent. In 1966 she and her new husband and manager, Ted White, decided a move was in order, and Franklin signed to Atlantic. Producer Jerry Wexler immediately shuttled Franklin to the Florence Alabama Musical Emporium (FAME) recording studios.

"I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)"

Backed by the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Franklin recorded the single "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." In the midst of the recording sessions, White quarreled with a member of the band, and White and Franklin left abruptly.

But as the single became a massive Top 10 hit, Franklin re-emerged in New York and was able to complete the partially recorded track, "Do Right Woman—Do Right Man."

Hitting her stride in 1967 and 1968, Franklin churned out a string of hit singles that would become enduring classics, showcasing Franklin's powerful voice and gospel roots in a pop framework.

In 1967, the album I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) was released, and the first song on the album, "Respect" — an empowered cover of an Otis Redding track — reached No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts and won Franklin her first two Grammy Awards.

She also had Top 10 hits with "Baby I Love You,'' "Think," "Chain of Fools,'' "I Say a Little Prayer," "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman."

Dubbed the 'Queen of Soul'

Franklin's chart dominance soon earned her the title Queen of Soul, while at the same time she also became a symbol of Black empowerment during the civil rights movement.

In 1968 Franklin was enlisted to perform at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr . during which she paid tribute to her father's fallen friend with a heartfelt rendition of "Precious Lord." Later that year, she was also selected to sing the national anthem to begin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Amidst this newfound success, Franklin experienced upheaval in her personal life, and she and White divorced in 1969. But this did not slow Franklin's steady rise, and the new decade brought more hit singles, including "Don't Play That Song," "Spanish Harlem" and her cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters."

'Amazing Grace'

Spurred by Mahalia Jackson's passing and a subsequent resurgence of interest in gospel music, Franklin returned to her musical origins for the 1972 album Amazing Grace , which sold more than 2 million copies and went on to become the best-selling gospel album at the time.

Franklin's success continued throughout the 1970s, as she branched out to work with producers such as Curtis Mayfield and Quincy Jones and expanded her repertoire to include rock and pop covers. Along the way, she took home eight consecutive Grammy Awards for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance, the last coming for her 1974 single "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing."

Career Struggles

But by 1975, Franklin's sound was fading into the background with the onset of the disco craze, and an emerging set of young Black singers, such as Chaka Khan and Donna Summer , began to eclipse Franklin's career.

She did, however, find a brief respite from slumping sales with the 1976 soundtrack to the Warner Brothers film Sparkle — which topped the R&B charts and made the Top 20 in pop — as well as an invitation to perform at the 1977 presidential inauguration of Jimmy Carter . In 1978 she also married actor Glynn Turman.

A string of chart failures ended Franklin's relationship with Atlantic in 1979. The same year, her father was hospitalized after a burglary attempt in his home left him in a coma. As her popularity waned and her father's health declined, Franklin was also saddled with a massive bill from the IRS.

However, a cameo in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers helped Franklin revive her flagging career. Performing "Think'' alongside comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd exposed her to a new generation of R&B lovers, and she soon signed to Arista Records.

Her new label released 1982's Jump To It , an album that enjoyed huge success on the R&B charts and earned Franklin a Grammy nomination. Two years later, she endured a divorce from Turman as well as the death of her father.

More Albums and Songs: 1980s and On

'who's zoomin' who'.

In 1985 Franklin returned to the top of the charts with a smash-hit album: the polished pop record Who's Zoomin' Who? Featuring the single "Freeway of Love," as well as a collaboration with the popular rock band The Eurythmics, the record became Franklin's biggest-selling album yet.

'I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)'

Her follow-up, 1986's Aretha , also charted well and eventually went gold, and her duet with British singer George Michael , "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),'' hit No. 1 on the pop charts.

In 1987 Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Detroit. That same year, she released the album One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism , which won the Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance.

Following another relatively quiet period in her career, in 1993, Franklin was invited to sing at the inauguration of Bill Clinton , and the following year she received both a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honors. She would also be the focus of multiple documentaries and tributes as the decade progressed.

'A Rose Is Still a Rose'

Nearing its conclusion, Franklin reprised her former role in Blues Brothers 2000 , released the gold-selling "A Rose Is Still a Rose" and stood in for Luciano Pavarotti , who was too ill to accept his Lifetime Achievement Award, with her rendition of "Nessun Dorma" commanding stellar reviews.

'So Damn Happy'

In 2003 Franklin released her final studio album on Arista, So Damn Happy , and left the label to found Aretha Records. Two years later, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became the second woman ever to be inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame.

In 2008 she received her 18th Grammy Award for "Never Gonna Break My Faith" — a collaboration with Mary J. Blige — and was tapped to sing at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama .

With 18 Grammys under her belt, Franklin is one of the most honored artists in Grammy history, ranked among the likes of Alison Krauss, Adele and Beyoncé Knowles . In 2011 Franklin released her first album on her own label, A Woman Falling Out of Love .

To support the project, she performed several concerts, including a two-night stint at the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York. With fans and critics alike impressed with her performances, she successfully proved that the Queen of Soul still reigned supreme.

'Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics'

In 2014 Franklin underscored that point with Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics , which reached No. 13 on the pop charts and No. 3 R&B.

In February 2017, the 74-year-old Queen of Soul told Detroit radio station WDIV Local 4 that she was collaborating with Stevie Wonder to release a new album.

“I must tell you, I am retiring this year," she said in the interview, adding: "I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from and where it is now. I’ll be pretty much satisfied, but I’m not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing. That wouldn’t be good either.”

On August 12, 2018, it was reported that a "gravely ill" Franklin was bedridden in her Detroit home, surrounded by family and friends. As news of her condition spread, more luminaries paid a visit to express their well wishes, including Wonder and Jesse Jackson .

Four days later, on the morning of August 16, Franklin succumbed to her illness, which her family revealed to be pancreatic cancer.

A public viewing was held later that month at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, with fans camping out overnight for the chance to pay their respects to the iconic singer. Her televised funeral was set to be held at the city's Greater Grace Temple on August 31, with Wonder, Khan and Hudson among the scheduled performers, and Jackson, Clinton and Smokey Robinson highlighting the list of speakers.

In January 2018, it was announced that Franklin hand-picked singer and actress Jennifer Hudson to play her in an upcoming biopic. After being pushed back several times, Respect will be released on August 13, 2021.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1942
• Birth date: March 25, 1942
• Birth State: Tennessee
• Birth City: Memphis
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Multiple Grammy winner and "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin was known for such hits as "Respect," "Freeway of Love" and "I Say a Little Prayer."
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Interesting Facts
• Aretha Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
• Aretha Franklin is one of the most honored artists in Grammy Award history, winning her 18th honor in 2008.
• Death Year: 2018
• Death date: August 16, 2018
• Death State: Michigan
• Death City: Detroit
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Aretha Franklin Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/aretha-franklin
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 15, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I'm using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I'm happy with that.

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Premium Content

How pain and passion shaped the genius of Aretha Franklin

She was a child prodigy whose brilliance was clear from the start. But the struggles she endured helped make her the Queen of Soul.

This story appears in the April 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine. Hear more about Aretha Franklin and the secret of musical genius in our podcast, Overheard at National Geographic .

GENIUS: ARETHA  Cynthia Erivo portrays the Queen of Soul in an eight-part television series that premieres at 9 p.m. ET Sunday, March 21, on Nat Geo. It’s available on Hulu the next day. 

Wearing a crisp white shirt and a black bouffant curled in a flip, Aretha Franklin seemed pensive but confident as she walked into the legendary FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in January 1967.

Franklin, just 24 years old, proceeded to take control with exceptional poise. She had not yet become a musical and cultural icon. She had not yet become Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul.

That day, she was largely unknown and a mystery. The studio musicians were not sure what to think. The creative tension was as thick as the cigarette smoke. It’s hard to imagine now, but Franklin was desperate for a hit.  

She had spent the previous six years recording a restrained kind of jazz at Columbia Records, without huge success. Now, at Atlantic Records, producer Jerry Wexler wanted to bring out the “church” in Franklin. Musicians from FAME Studios had created a southern rhythm and blues sound that had produced a string of hits, including Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances” and Percy Sledge’s classic “When a Man Loves a Woman.”  

Surrounded by a bunch of musicians who were unsure what kind of music they would make with her—Wexler had described them as a “rhythm section of Alabama white boys who took a left turn at the blues”—Franklin wasn’t interested in small talk. She called them Mister So-and-So, and they called her Miss Franklin.

Then the preacher’s daughter, raised in Detroit, Michigan, sat down at the piano. Musicologists later would explain that although Franklin did not read music and had no formal training, the piano was where she would summon her genius. The power of her voice was extraordinary on its own, a velvet force that seemed to reflect an ancient wisdom. Combined with her piano playing, it was glorious.  

For Hungry Minds

Without singing a word, she hit a chord on the piano. Then she straightened her back. Eyed the room. Touched up her frosted lipstick with her mouth. Every man in the room took notice.  

When she began to sing, she hit a “hell knows no fury like a woman scorned” note that threatened to peel the paneling.

Her voice exploded with raw emotion. Producers would describe what erupted from Franklin that day in Muscle Shoals as otherworldly.

She pounded the piano as if the keys marked a thin line between love and hate. Then she hit a low note and took it to church.

That recording of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” would catapult Franklin to fame.

The men in the band would say they’d never seen or heard any singer like her. The power of her voice, the strength of her storytelling, and the way she was able to channel that intangible thing called soul—brilliant.

“I can tell you what I saw,” Spooner Oldham, a legendary organist and songwriter, told me in an interview. Oldham, a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, has seen some outstanding acts. He’s played with Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and many more icons of music. But that first recording session with Franklin was something else, he said.  

“It was not talked about or planned. She just started playing. I knew I was working with someone special,” Oldham said. “Her voice was hard to describe. It covered so much territory. It was angelic. Soulful. Upbeat. Downbeat. If you start naming adjectives, you would name it all. She was one of a kind. I thought she was a musical genius right then.”  

During that session Franklin, backed by the renowned Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, recorded the first of many million-selling records. “They finished the track, and everybody in the room knew it was a hit record,” Rodney Hall, son of FAME Studios co-founder Rick Hall, told me.

The source of some of the pain Franklin sang so passionately about would become clear by what happened next. The recording session ground to a halt as all hell broke loose in the studio.  

Franklin’s husband-manager, Ted White, accused a trumpet player of flirting with his wife and demanded that the musician be fired. Rodney Hall later recalled his father telling him that the night ended with Rick Hall and White trying to throw each other off a balcony of the hotel where Franklin was staying.

The messy scene was a window into Franklin’s private world. She would channel her pain and infuse soul into songs that would become universal, crossing musical genres and spanning time, generations, and cultures. That night in Alabama would set her on a course to drive popular music for decades and take the sound of soul to new heights. Her voice would become the revolutionary sound of women, African Americans, and others demanding to be recognized.  

Just days after leaving Muscle Shoals, Franklin would record another hit, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” in a studio in New York City. A week later, she recorded “Respect,” which would become an anthem not only for Franklin’s power in the music industry but also for women’s rights at a volatile time.

More than 50 years after Franklin’s epic recording session in Muscle Shoals, and nearly three years after her death at age 76, her brilliance remains something of an enigma. Her long and successful reign as the Queen of Soul is undisputed. That she could sing the deepest of blues, the funkiest of funk, finger-popping pop, silky jazz, powerful rhythm and blues, soul-stirring gospel, and even dramatic opera with phenomenal ease is undisputed. That she was a musical genius unmatched in her range, power, and soul is undisputed.  

Much as Albert Einstein pushed the boundaries of science and Pablo Picasso created a new art form, Franklin extended the sound of music to new depths, arranged it, expanded it, captured it, composed it, made it her own, and ruled over it for more than six decades.

( Explore the Queen of Soul's remarkable run on the Billboard charts. )

But what, exactly, was the root of Franklin’s artistry? Like other geniuses, she was a child prodigy, her gift recognized early and nurtured by her father. As with Picasso and Einstein, she had a dominant personality and a keen sense for detail. Franklin had an acute ear that allowed her to break down the melodic threads of a song and arrange them to her liking. She also had an intense ambition and drive to make hit records. Even as her health was failing in her later years, she wanted to get back into the studio and make music.

“Aretha’s genius was very, very natural to her,” music mogul Clive Davis told me. “She felt, embodied, and was able to perform music like no one else before her.”

Davis, who worked with Franklin for 38 years, said her genius lay in her ability to take songs deeper—sometimes deeper than the songwriters had intended. “She understood the essence of both language and melody and was able to take it to a place very few—if any—could,” he said.  

“Aretha never had a music lesson,” said Brenda Corbett, a cousin who sang backup for Franklin for more than 50 years. “She knew exactly what she wanted. If it wasn’t right, she would let you know.”

It was the way she used her voice, such as when she jumped octaves, that revealed her gift. That’s when anyone listening got goose bumps.

Franklin’s phenomenal vocal range seemingly climbed as high as a mountaintop before plunging to painful depths. Some musicologists say her voice pushed four octaves. But it was the way she used her voice, such as when she jumped octaves on musical bridges, that revealed her immeasurable gift. That’s when anyone listening got goose bumps.

“Often genius is conceived in terms of a high score on an IQ test, a conception I tend to disfavor,” said Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “Other times genius will be defined as exceptional early talent in a particular domain,” he said. “And yet other times genius will be attributed to those who have left a pervasive and enduring impact.”

Child prodigies, experts say, often seem to be old souls, performing at levels far beyond their years. As children, they can seem chillingly advanced, awing others as they master complex sonatas or science and math equations.  

In Franklin’s case, her musical talent was evident from the start.

She was born Aretha Louise Franklin on March 25, 1942, in South Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, the Reverend Clarence LaVaughn “C.L.” Franklin, was a prominent Baptist preacher. Her mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was a highly regarded gospel singer.

The family moved to Buffalo, New York, from Memphis and then to Detroit, where her father became pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church. When Aretha was six years old, her mother left the family. Aretha, her brother, and her two sisters were raised by their paternal grandmother—who lived in their home for a time—but Aretha longed for her mother, who died suddenly a few years later.

“It happened when I was 10,” Franklin said in Aretha: From These Roots, an autobiography she wrote with David Ritz. “Daddy called all of us—me, Erma, Carolyn and Cecil—into the kitchen. As he sat at the end of the sink, which resembled a sideboard, he said it plainly and solemnly. Our mother had suffered a fatal heart attack. I just stood there, stunned. I cannot describe the pain, nor will I try. Pain is sometimes a private matter, and the pain of small children losing their mother defies description.”

It was a childhood trauma, relatives say, from which she never really recovered—a sadness she carried for the rest of her life.  

It’s also clear that Franklin was influenced by the talent of her father, a celebrated performer in his own right. C.L. Franklin was known well beyond Detroit, because recordings of his sermons were best sellers. His most famous sermon, “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” from 1953, is “arguably the most demanding sermon in the African-American Baptist tradition,” wrote Nick Salvatore, author of Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America.

Aretha was in her early teens when she joined her father on the gospel circuit. C.L. Franklin recognized his daughter’s brilliance, and showed her off as they traveled from church to church. He’d preach, and then she would sing.  

Aretha made her first record at 14—according to some sources, about two years after she had given birth to her first child, Clarence, and the age at which she would have her second child, Eddie.

One 1960 concert poster from Chattanooga, Tennessee, advertises a sermon by C.L. Franklin with his 18-year-old daughter, Aretha, “a rising star in the gospel-music field.” According to Jason Hanley, a musicologist and vice president of education and visitor engagement at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, “The Reverend Franklin is actually the headliner there. Then his incredible daughter, this prodigy, Aretha Franklin, is performing the gospel message her father is talking about.”  

Jeff Ramsey, a professor in the voice department at Berklee College of Music in Boston, said that the time Aretha Franklin spent in church choirs and on the gospel circuit helped polish her genius—that the circuit gave her a wisdom formed by the history, pain, and resilience of Black people in the United States. Her roots were gospel, and “what never changed was the sacredness of her voice,” Ramsey said.

In Ritz’s biography, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, Franklin’s brother, Cecil, said that he and his sisters had musical talent but that Aretha “was born with it. Later on, musicologists can try to analyze how she came to it. They can say that she practiced harder than the rest of us or paid more attention to the music around her or was more motivated to learn. But I’m here to tell you that none of that is true. She didn’t practice. She didn’t pay any more attention to the music around her than Erma, Carolyn, or myself.”

He added that “we always knew that she possessed a different kind of talent. That’s the talent they call genius. You can’t learn it. You just have it.”

Genius can be nurtured in an environment that gives it room to grow. Geniuses often have huge personalities, enormous ambition, competitiveness, and an ability not to shrink around other talented people.  

In Detroit, Aretha Franklin grew up in a city that would produce a litany of Motown stars: Diana Ross, “Little” Stevie Wonder, Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations. Even among all that talent, Aretha Franklin stood out. Robinson said he first saw a young Aretha when he was eight years old.  

Robinson, who became friends with Cecil Franklin, described his first encounter with Aretha at the Franklin family home. “We’re walking around the house, and I hear music,” Robinson told the crowd at Franklin’s funeral. “The piano being played, and this voice, it sounds like a little girl singing. And I go and look in that room, and I see you, and you’re there and you’re singing.”

As a little girl, Aretha occasionally was pulled from sleeping to perform for stars who were visiting her famous father. In that parlor she met gospel singers Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson, singer-songwriter Sam Cooke, composer and band leader Duke Ellington, jazz pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, singers Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Lou Rawls, and Billy Eckstine, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Franklin's genius was on full display on her debut R & B album when she remade “Respect,” written by legendary soul singer Otis Redding. His song was meant to be about a man demanding respect when he comes home. Franklin’s version was about a woman making that demand, and she spelled out each letter of the word “respect” in the lyrics.

Redding reluctantly would admit that Franklin made the song hers. During the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Redding told the crowd: “Now, there’s something we’d like to do for everybody. It’s a song a girl took away from me. A good friend of mine, this girl, she just took the song. But I’m still going to do it anyway.” Then he launched into an up-tempo version.

That year Franklin won her first Grammy Awards honor for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording and Best Rhythm & Blues Solo Vocal Performance by a woman for “Respect.” She would go on to win 17 more Grammys and receive 44 nominations for the award, presented by the Recording Academy to honor excellence in the recording arts and sciences.

Music fans got an unexpected glimpse of the stunning range of Franklin’s talent at the 1998 Grammy Awards ceremony in New York. Luciano Pavarotti, the world-renowned Italian tenor, was scheduled to perform “Nessun Dorma,” the great aria written by Giacomo Puccini. But Pavarotti called the set of the live broadcast and said he was sick.

Franklin had been scheduled to perform with the Blues Brothers—Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman, and Jim Belushi—on the Grammy show that night. But Ken Ehrlich, the show’s executive producer, remembered that Franklin had sung “Nessun Dorma” two nights earlier at a benefit for the Recording Academy. “I just ran up to her dressing room and asked her if she would do it,” Ehrlich later told Billboard.

What followed was one of the signature moments of Aretha Franklin’s career. Neither a tenor nor an opera singer, she performed the aria beautifully.

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“She had to change keys because she had to use Pavarotti’s arrangement,” Ritz said. She listened to the orchestration for 20 minutes and figured how to change her voice to a key that wasn’t her first choice. She turned it into a soul song but honored the beauty of Puccini’s melodic gift.

Franklin told me in a 2012 interview that “Nessun Dorma” was among her favorite songs. “There are too many” songs to name, she said, when asked about those she liked best. “Certainly among them would be ‘Respect,’ ‘Jump to It,’ ‘Natural Woman,’ ‘Rock Steady,’ and ‘Nessun Dorma,’ Pavarotti’s signature song.”

There was no hint of bravado in her voice.

In 1987 Franklin became the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, blazing a trail for female Hall of Famers. Rolling Stone placed her at number one on its Greatest Singers of All Time list. In 2019 she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

Franklin gave countless iconic performances—including stepping on stage in a luxurious fur coat that fell off her shoulders and a canary yellow gown to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” at an inaugural event for President Bill Clinton in 1993. The song was a classic from the musical Les Misérables. She commanded the song and the stage. When she dropped her fur and then hit a high note, the crowd and the Clintons rose to their feet.

“Everyone in the audience was transfixed as the performance kept building,” Davis recalled at Franklin’s funeral. “Then the one and only Aretha, on her own, spontaneously changed the lyrics from ‘I dreamed a dream’ to ‘I have a dream,’ and that instinctive switch to the Martin Luther King mantra made the climax chillingly unforgettable to this day.”  

She sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, where she wore a gray hat that has its own social media following and is listed among the assets in a civil dispute over her estate in Detroit.  

“Aretha helped define the American experience,” Obama tweeted after her death. “In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade—our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect.”

Franklin’s courage and legend extended beyond her music. She helped finance the civil rights movement, marched with King, and sang at a memorial service for the civil rights leader in 1968. She created music that became the soundtrack for revolutions: the civil rights and women’s movements, and protests against the Vietnam War.  

In 1970 she offered to pay up to $250,000 to bail political activist Angela Davis out of jail. “Black people will be free,” Franklin told Jet magazine then. “I’ve been locked up” for disturbing the peace in Detroit, “and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a black woman and she wants freedom for black people. I have the money; I got it from black people—they’ve made me financially able to have it—and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”

Franklin sang the songs that became, for many of us, the background music of our childhoods. We danced to “Chain of Fools” in bell-bottoms in the 1970s. We learned to spell singing “Respect,” and demanded it. We grew our natural hair into Afros like Aretha’s. When we woke up, it was her song about young love that came to mind: “I Say a Little Prayer for You.”  

You might be too young to have seen Franklin in her prime, but you probably have heard her music. Your mother and father most likely know it. You’ve heard it at the movies. And you’ve heard Aretha’s style of singing in artists such as Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Fantasia, Jennifer Hudson, Lady Gaga, Whitney Houston, and Adele.

At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s 16th American Music Masters Tribute, which honored Franklin in 2011, a suite of artists serenaded Franklin with her songs. Franklin wasn’t supposed to perform that night in Cleveland. But during a break in the show, she demanded a piano.  

Aretha ascended to the stage with Ronald Isley, Cissy Houston, Jerry Butler, and Dennis Edwards to perform an encore.

“They launch into this incredible song,” the Hall of Fame’s Hanley recalled. “She is in charge. In that moment, the whole world shrunk down to her spotlight. We were all witnesses. That is when I personally realized why she is who she is.”

The only times she released the pain seemed to be when she sang. And when the pain erupted, it was astronomical.

Biographer Ritz, who cowrote Franklin’s autobiography in 1999 and wrote his own book about the singer 15 years later, called her an engineer. He told me that part of Franklin’s genius lay in how she deconstructed others’ songs she had decided to cover: In the studio she’d take a song apart, infuse it with soul, then add her original groove. When she put the song back together again, she mastered it. “She does a big band version of a hit by Glen Campbell called ‘Gentle on My Mind,’ ” said Ritz. “It was a country song with jazz, groove, and big band, and she kills it.” Her intelligence, he said, was manifest “in the intensity of her emotional expression.” It was born of her personal pain, depression, and desire never to talk about her story or what hurt her.

In an early interview, a young Franklin smiles nervously as she sits at a piano. White, her husband, sits next to her. Her hair is pulled back, and her face is soft and innocent. She tells the camera in the voice of a girl: “I’m still trying to find out who and what I really am.”  

In a 2012 interview with me, she answered every question but one. She bristled when I asked her to recall her earliest childhood memory.  

“Her whole life, she kept it very secret what was happening with her life, from the romantic to the personal,” Ritz said. “You couldn’t get any information out of her. She suppressed anger. She suppressed her confusion. The one vehicle she used to express it all was her music. Because it was suppressed, it was extravagantly expressed.”

Ritz spent years with Aretha trying to tell her story. “Some of us go and pay the psychologist or psychiatrist and shut the door,” he said. “She does it by opening her mouth on stage. This is her psychotherapy. Her catharsis.”

In Atlanta, Georgia, National Geographic filmed the third season of Genius, a scripted series that in previous seasons focused on Einstein and Picasso . The eight-episode season stars Cynthia Erivo as Franklin.

Suzan-Lori Parks is showrunner and executive producer for Genius: Aretha. Parks, a Tony winner and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, sits on the sofa in a living room set that transports you back in time. It’s designed to replicate Franklin’s childhood home in Detroit and help reimagine the life of young Aretha. The sofa and two love seats are covered with protective plastic. Cigarette butts are scattered in ashtrays. A grand piano sits in the corner of the room. A staircase frames the living room.

It was in a living room like this that Franklin heard the great Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, and Clara Ward. At a piano like this, she would sit on the bench next to the inimitable James Cleveland, who taught her chords. In a kitchen like this, Big Mama, as she called her grandmother, and the cooks her father hired prepared southern soul food—fried corn, black-eyed peas, chicken and dumplings, greens, and sweet potato pies.

Parks was determined to capture Franklin’s genius for the “definitive series of the universally acclaimed Queen of Soul,” she said. She continued, “And while everyone who listens to Western popular music knows the sound of her voice, very few people know her story, know the pain she struggled through, know the difficulties of her childhood, know that her mother died at a young age, know she didn’t just burst onto the scene and find her sound.”

Franklin didn’t have it all figured out when she started singing, Parks said. She “dug down deep and made something beautiful out of her life that endures and lights the way for all of us.”  

Geniuses create light for generations, Parks said. “Harriet Tubman was a genius. Einstein was a genius. Edison was a genius. Da Vinci was a genius. Bach was a genius. [John] Coltrane was a genius. Toni Morrison was a genius,” she said. “These are people who create not just things that are fashionable, but things that deeply endure.”

Across the studio Erivo is in hair and makeup, transforming into Aretha, summoning the genius and the diva. In 2016 Erivo felt as though she and Franklin sang together—if just for a moment. Erivo, dressed in a white lace gown, stood on stage at the Kennedy Center Honors, performing “The Impossible Dream.” Just as Erivo was about to hit a spiraling note, the camera cut to the audience. And there was Franklin, eyes closed, singing the words with her.

The moment was fleeting but powerful. Erivo told me she watches the video clip often. “I’m really glad I got to do something that she enjoyed,” Erivo said, “and that I was one of the voices that brought her some happiness.”

Erivo, who has won a Grammy, Emmy, and Tony for her Broadway performance in The Color Purple, met Franklin backstage after a show. Erivo was nominated for two Academy Awards in 2020—for Best Actress and Best Original Song—for playing the role of abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet.

Now she’s transforming into the Queen of Soul. “To be able to play an icon like Aretha, who is one of my idols, is kind of incredible,” said Erivo, who grew up in the United Kingdom, where she began listening to Franklin’s music as a child.  

Erivo said she prepared for the role by reading, listening to music, and watching the soul-stirring documentary Amazing Grace, which was released after Franklin died and features her as she records a live album in 1972.  

The film, shot over two nights at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts section of Los Angeles, reveals a 29-year-old Franklin returning to her gospel roots. Directed by Sydney Pollack, it captures rare footage of Franklin in a transcendent performance. On the second night, Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones squeezed into the audience.  

The film also captures Franklin’s father sitting next to Ward, who became a mentor to Franklin.

“I’ve watched it religiously. It gives you a great insight into who she was,” Erivo told me. “When she gets to the bridge of the song, something happens and she opens up completely. That is when you feel her heart.”

DeNeen L. Brown interviewed Aretha Franklin in 2012. Elias Williams photographed National Geographic magazine’s February 2020 feature about the slave ship Clotilda .

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Aretha Franklin: A Legacy in Music

By David Remnick

Aretha Franklin’s voice was a pure, painful, and unforgettable expression of American history and American feeling, the collective experience of black Americans and her own life. The Queen of Soul , who died Thursday morning, was the daughter of the most influential black pastor in Detroit, a charismatic, often cruel man who filled the house with musical friends—Duke Ellington, Della Reese, Nat Cole, Mahalia Jackson—and a constant cloud of threat and fury. Aretha Franklin rarely spoke of her inner life , her crises—she was wary of almost everyone—and yet the sound she made, the emotions she expressed and embodied, was as distinctive as that of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane. What artist built a sturdier and more sublime arc, from the songs of the first praise houses and black churches to the blues to R. & B. to pop and hip-hop? Like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, Franklin combined matters of the spirit and matters of the body; the whole of her, it seemed, was in every bar. And though no one could imitate that voice and phrasing —the ecstatic shrieks and eerie note-bending, that sense of behind-the-beat time—her influence was immense. Beyoncé once said that her own “soulfulness” comes “from the gospel. . . . It comes from Aretha.”

Prayer, love, desire, joy, despair, rapture, feminism, Black Power—it is hard to think of a performer who provided a deeper, more profound reflection of her times. What’s more, her gift was incomparable. Smokey Robinson, her friend and neighbor in Detroit, once said, “Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another, far-off magical world none of us really understood. . . . She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” Etta James once recalled listening to Franklin’s version of Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s standard “Skylark.” In the second verse, Franklin jumps an octave. “I had to scratch my head and ask myself, How the fuck did that bitch do that? I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?’ I said, ‘You heard her do ‘Skylark,’ didn’t you?’ Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I’m never singing that song again.’ ”

“Skylark,” from “Laughing on the Outside,” in 1963.

“Respect,” live in 1967.

“Chain of Fools,” live in 1968, in Amsterdam.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” live at the Fillmore West, in 1971.

“Rock Steady,” in 1972.

“Mary Don’t You Weep,” from the gospel album (and still unreleased film) “Amazing Grace,” in 1972.

“Amazing Grace,” with the Reverend James Cleveland on piano, in 1972.

If you want a good cry, you shouldn’t miss Franklin singing at the Kennedy Center Honors—an Obama-era moment, though Obama could hardly claim center stage when the Woman in Mink sat down to the piano. She’s nearing the end, and yet she hits the notes of her youth.

“(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

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By Amanda Petrusich

By Emily Lordi

Aretha Franklin

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INDUCTED BY

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The first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Aretha Franklin was an artist of passion, sophistication and command, whose recordings remain anthems that defined soul music. Long live the Queen.

HALL OF FAME ESSAY

By Michael Hill

Aretha Franklin was only twenty-five when she clinched the title of Lady Soul with her unforgettably proud, sexy, candid and confident 1967 version of Otis Redding’s “Respect.”

Franklin had already given notice of the sound of things to come with her first Jerry Wexler-produced single for Atlantic Records, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way l Love You),” cut at Rick Hall’s Fame Recording Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

That legendary one-day session marked not only the emergence of a prodigious talent but the start of a new era of fresh, forthright soul music.

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In her five decades as a recording artist, Aretha Franklin, the undisputed “Queen of Soul,” became a music legend. Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942. Her family soon relocated to Detroit, Michigan, where her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, became a minister at New Bethel Baptist Church. Rev. Franklin was a prominent gospel performer in his own right and his career exposed his daughter to gospel and soul music and to civil rights leaders such as  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  and contemporary or future musical icons such as  Smokey Robinson ,  Sam Cooke , Clara Ward, and  Bobby “Blue” Bland . Unfortunately, Aretha’s life was marred by tragedies that included the death of her mother when she was 10, physical abuse by her first husband, and the tragic shooting of her father in 1979.  He remained in a coma until his 1984 death.

Aretha Franklin recorded her first album at the age of fourteen,  The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin , while singing solos in New Bethel and going on tours with her father.  In 1960, she signed with Columbia Records. Despite producing ten albums and her concert performances netting $100,000 in nightclubs and theaters, the Columbia style, featuring Top 40 pop ballads, proved an uneasy fit. Columbia tried to turn Aretha into a jazzy pop singer while she was determined to draw on her background in blues and gospel music. In 1966, Franklin signed with Atlantic Records which gave her more creative control, and she began revolutionizing soul music by creating a sound all her own.

By 1968, Aretha Franklin was considered a symbol of black pride and soul music. Her songs “Respect,” “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” “Young, Gifted, and Black,” and “Think” became anthems reflecting the growing militancy of African Americans in challenging racial oppression. Her  Amazing Grace  album released in 1970, which returned her to her church roots, sold over two million copies and made her one of the most successful gospel singers of the era. Franklin received an award for excellence from Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 and appeared on the cover of  Time  magazine on June 28, 1968.

In the early 1970s, despite the success of her landmark 1971 album  Aretha Live at the Fillmore West , her career began to decline. She worked on the soundtrack to the 1976 film  Sparkle  with  Curtis Mayfield , which produced her last Top 40 hits of the decade.

In the 1980s Franklin moved to Arista Records where she has recorded everything from gospel to dance music. While her last big hit was  A Rose Is Still a Rose , produced by Lauryn Hill in 1998, Franklin continued to be a significant presence in the music industry and the African American community.  In 2001, she wowed audiences across the globe with her performance in VH1’s  Divas Live: The One and Only Aretha Franklin , and in 2009, she sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at  President   Barack Obama ’s inauguration.

Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (1987). She had the largest number of Top 40 singles of any female performer (forty-five) and was also the youngest recipient of the John F. Kennedy Center Honors (1994). Over her career, Franklin won seventeen Grammys and had twenty Number 1 R&B hits. Her 1967 album ,   I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You , is considered the greatest soul album of all time, while her 1971  Aretha Live at the Fillmore West  is called one of the top five greatest live albums of the rock era.

Aretha Louise Franklin died in Detroit, Michigan of pancreatic cancer on August 16, 2018.  She was 76.

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B. Lee Cooper, “Popular Music: An Untapped Resource for Teaching Contemporary Black History,” Journal of Negro Education , (1979); Paul Friedlander & Peter Miller, Rock and Roll: A Social History (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006); Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,  https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/aretha-franklin ; Rolling Stone Magazine,  https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/aretha-franklin-queen-of-soul-dead-at-76-119453/ .

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The Queen: Aretha Franklin

By Mikal Gilmore

Mikal Gilmore

& #8220;I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Jerry Wexler once said of Aretha Franklin . Wexler was the Atlantic Records producer who, in 1967, helped raise the singer to her sudden and incomparable soul heights. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”

Those doleful eyes were sometimes mistaken for shyness. That was how a group of white musicians viewed her in a first meeting at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on January 24th, 1967. Wexler thought the exploding Southern style of soul would bring out the best in the 24-year-old Aretha’s still-under-recognized artistry, even though she’d been making records since 1956. These were experienced session men: Most had played with Wilson Pickett at Wexler’s behest. Aretha didn’t enter FAME with a reputation as a soul singer, and she certainly wasn’t overbearing, as some thought Pickett could be. “And just suddenly,” said FAME songwriter Dan Penn, “she walks over to the piano, she sits down at the piano stool, and I’m watchin’ her. She kinda looks around, like, ‘Nobody’s watchin’ me.’ I thought she thought for just a second, ‘Is this not my session?’ And with all the talent she had, she just hit this unknown chord. Kind of kawunka-kawunka-kawung! Like a bell ringing. And every musician in the room stopped what they were doing, went to their guitars and started tunin’ up.”

That day and night would end up as the most eventful in  Aretha Franklin’s career — an unprecedented musical triumph and a near-terminal disaster. Franklin would later have little to say about the events. But then, she often proved reticent over the years. Yet others recalled Franklin as anything but timid. Mavis Staples — who had toured with her during their teen gospel years — thought Franklin was in fact inclined to “devilment” out of the public eye: “One time she hid behind the tree with a baseball bat to knock her own sister on the head. . . . Aretha was tough.”

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Which is to say that Aretha Franklin was paradoxical — and learned to be at a young age. From childhood on, she saw as much pain as she did glory. Her mother left her family when the girl was six; she had babies while still a child herself; she married a man who dominated her career and publicly battered her; she became a superstar, only to watch her matchless and lustrous career slide for too many years, to the indifference of almost everybody who had once applauded or empowered her. And then she witnessed deaths — too many: first her mother; then her father, after lingering for years in a coma from gunshot wounds; then three siblings, all lost to cancer.

Aretha Franklin’s voice — bred from gospel, blues and jazz, American traditions that reached indelible glory because they had to overcome America itself — made all the difference. It was how, in the words of a gospel song she loved, she got over. “You had a number of gospel singers who were filled with the spirit,” said writer Peter Guralnick. “She translated that spirit into the secular field. . . . She translated that feel and fire.” More than that, Franklin’s voice raised and defined her. Nobody came close to touching it, though she emboldened many others to follow her — Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys and Beyoncé among them. More than any of them, Franklin possessed a roar that wasn’t merely technically breathtaking; it was also a natural and self-derived instrument that testified to her truths in ways she otherwise refused to address. Some say Franklin was insecure at times in her gift, but with something so fearsome moving through their body, mind and history, who wouldn’t be both daunted and proud?

Upon learning of her death in August, at age 76, from pancreatic cancer, Barack and Michelle Obama said in a statement, “Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect.”

The late keyboardist Billy Preston — who started in gospel and went on to play with Franklin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — put it in more rough-hewn terms: “She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know — you’ll swear — that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

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That singer gave nerve to people when they were being beaten down and killed — she saved a lot of lives. She probably even saved her own, for as long as possible.

T o get to Aretha Franklin , you have to go through her father. The Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin possessed an almost blueslike incantatory style that became known as “the squall”; the bluesman Bobby “Blue” Bland credited it as a considerable influence on his own vocal style, and C.L.’s mastery of the form bore deep influence on Aretha. But C.L. and Aretha shared more than a vocal flair. Both were confident, ambitious, proud — even imperious — and both were dedicated to marking their place in history. Her father had bred her to be significant.

1956: Releases first album, "Songs of Faith: The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin," at 14

RB/Redferns/Getty Images

Aretha Franklin signs her contract with Atlantic Records on November 21, 1966 in New York City, New York. She is accompanied by Atlantic Executive Jerry Wexler and husband and manager Ted White.

PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Aretha Franklin performing at a Martin Luther King Jr. tribute called Soul Together on June 28, 1968 at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles perform onstage at the Fillmore West in February, 1971 in San Francisco, California.

Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

John Belushi, Aretha Franklin and Dan Aykroyd on the set of "The Blues Brothers" in 1980.

Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Aretha Franklin performs on stage at the Hyatt Hotel during the 1985 NBA All-Star Game celebration, Chicago, Illinois, April 18, 1985.

Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Aretha Franklin plays with a camcorder before a concert rehearsal in New York, 1995.

Joe Tabacca/AP/REX Shutterstock

Aretha Franklin and Clive Davis at BMG Records party after Grammy Awards, New York on March 9th, 1997.

David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images

Aretha Franklin dances on stage during the first annual March On Cancer in Washington, DC, September 1998.

Khue Bui/AP/REX Shutterstock

Aretha Franklin performs during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival Opening Gala premiere of "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of our Lives" at Radio City Music Hall on April 19, 2017 in New York City.

Taylor Hill/Getty Images

C.L. was born in Mississippi in 1915 to sharecroppers who picked cotton for white landowners. His father abandoned his wife and child when Clarence was about four, and his mother married Henry Franklin, also a farm laborer. C.L. didn’t want to be a farmer. By 18, he was a Baptist circuit preacher, and in 1936 he married Barbara Siggers in Memphis. Barbara was a skillful pianist, and according to Mark Bego’s Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul, “[as] a gospel singer, Barbara Siggers was in the same league with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward.”

In 1939, C.L. secured a pulpit of his own at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, where he began to develop his legendary sermonic style. Following a subsequent ministry in Buffalo, New York, the Franklins moved to Detroit in mid-1946. The New Bethel Baptist Church had issued a calling: It wanted C.L. to become its new pastor. By this time, he and Barbara had four children of their own: Erma (born in Shelby, Mississippi, 1938), Cecil (Memphis, 1940), Aretha (Memphis, March 25th, 1942) and Carolyn (Memphis, 1944). Barbara also had a son from a prior marriage, Vaughn, and C.L. had fathered a daughter outside the marriage, Carl Ellan Kelley, with a 12-year-old parish-ioner in Memphis. The family settled into a mansion on East Boston Boulevard. Miracles would happen in Detroit, and also devastation — all essential to the making of Aretha Franklin.

In Detroit, C.L. helped develop what became known as black liberation theology, and became a friend and colleague to Martin Luther King Jr. C.L. proclaimed to his parish, “We are black, not because we are cursed, for blackness is not a curse. . . . [White people] conditioned you that way because they used this as a means to an end, to give you a feeling of inferiority.” Aretha absorbed all this, and those implicit meanings would underlie much of what she would sing and how she would sing it.

Starting in the early 1950s, C.L. recorded a series of sermonic albums — more than 70 in all — and eventually leased the masters to Chicago blues label Chess Records; he was called “the man with the million-dollar voice.” C.L. was adamant in his faith, but he was also worldly. He dressed in flashy suits and drove Cadillacs. Rumors attached to him; one involved gospel singer Clara Ward, with whom C.L. had an on-and-off years-long affair. Two years into the grand new life in Detroit, Barbara abruptly packed up and, accompanied by her son Vaughn, moved back to Buffalo. Erma told biographer David Ritz in Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, “I do know that my parents’ relationship was stormy, and that my father had a violent temper. I never saw him strike her, but we were all very conscious of not inciting Daddy’s wrath.”

Aretha was six when Barbara left. During summer vacations, Aretha, Erma, Carolyn and Cecil visited their mother and Vaughn in Buffalo, where the two lived in what Aretha described as a pleasant, middle-class black neighborhood. Cecil later said, “As much as Aretha adored our father, she would have been thrilled to live with Mother. . . . Dad made it clear that wasn’t an option.”

All three sisters — Erma, Aretha and Carolyn — had significant musical talents, but Aretha in particular developed as a prodigy. C.L. hired a piano teacher to polish his daughter’s skills, but Aretha hid when the teacher visited. “Playing by ear,” she wrote, “has allowed me to develop a rather personal and signature style, which I treasure and would not give up for anything or anyone.” Smokey Robinson, a friend of Cecil, told Ritz, “There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room. . . . When Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords — big chords. . . . Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood.”

C.L. pegged Aretha as the family’s likeliest star. She was flattered to be performing for late-night house guests who sometimes included famed entertainers: Dinah Washington, Oscar Peterson, Nat Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Arthur Prysock and Dorothy Dandridge were reportedly among visitors to the house. So were Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and gospel great Clara Ward. It was Ward, more than anybody else, who influenced Aretha to become a singer. Aretha claimed she was around 10 when she sang her first solo at New Bethel, trembling beforehand, standing on a little chair, singing “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.” Afterward, parishioners told C.L., “Oh, that child sure can sing!”

In Buffalo, Barbara had been sick on and off. Though she was a nurse, nobody could figure out what the problem was. On March 7th, 1952, on his way home from school, Vaughn saw an ambulance speeding by. His grandmother told him his mother had died only minutes before — a heart attack. Back in Detroit, C.L. gathered the children into the kitchen on East Boston and gave them the news. “I just stood there, stunned,” Aretha wrote in her memoir, From These Roots . “I cannot describe the pain. . . . Pain is sometimes a private matter, and the pain of small children losing their mother defies description.” The children visited Buffalo to attend the funeral; C.L. did not.

“Let me tell you about the kind of child Aretha was,” Ruth Bowen, who later became the singer’s publicist, told Ritz. “She was a traumatized child.” Seeing Aretha in her father’s church, Bowen said, “she looked like a lost child. Her eyes were filled with sadness. . . . Then when she got up to sing, this sound came out. It was gospel filled with blues. I mean, frighteningly strong blues, beautifully mature blues. After she sang, she sat back down and withdrew into her own little world.” Her brother Cecil put it this way: “Insecurity invaded her spirit at an early age. . . . I think that basic insecurity has never left her. In fact, I believe it defines her — that and her soaring talent.”

C.L. Franklin gave Aretha pride, stubbornness, faith and a kind of hubris. Barbara Siggers gave her a lacuna in which the greatness had to pass through to find voice. C.L. was the gospel. Barbara was the source of the blues, in all its haunting and transcendent ways. The blues is a way of feeling hurt and defying it, taking life as it is, living in the full hollow of it, yet going on. Aretha Franklin took her pain and transmuted it into something that moved the land with her voice.

At age 12, Aretha became pregnant. This did not, by all accounts, blow up into a major family drama. “[C.L.] was not judgmental, narrow or scolding,” she wrote. “In my fifth or sixth month, I dropped out of school. My family supported me in every way.” On January 28th, 1955, she gave birth to her first child, Clarence. Aretha always refused to divulge the father’s full identity, and he didn’t stay active long in her life anyway. Then at age 14, in January 1957, she gave birth to a second child, Edward. She also declined to name this baby’s father.

At the same time, Franklin was maturing as a gospel singer. In the mid-1950s her father launched a successful gospel caravan, which toured the country — including in the Jim Crow South, where the troupe often had to take back roads and could not patronize segregated hotels and diners. The traveling members also gathered for after-show rites in which a different zeal burned. In Ritz’s Respect, Ray Charles and Billy Preston referred to the gospel circuit as “a sex circus.” Charles said, “I loved the church singers. . . . When it came to pure heart singing, they were motherfuckers. When it came to pure sex, they were wilder than me — and that’s saying something. . . .”

Was Aretha exposed to these occasions? As   Nick Salvatore wrote in Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America, “What arrangements C.L. made to shield her from the tour’s nocturnal activities are not known, but her very presence unavoidably exposed her to experiences well beyond her years.” But, as Salvatore wondered, “Can imperfect people perform good deeds? Can a flawed minister lead others to salvation? C.L. certainly thought so.”

In 1956, when Aretha was 14, she released her first album, Songs of Faith, with C.L. managing her. Because the music was mostly recorded at New Bethel with Franklin accompanying herself on piano before an open microphone, her vocals took on an incorporeal quality — world-weary and mystical at the same time. As Aretha wailed “Precious Lord,” a listener in the audience called out, “Listen at her!” A great career in the gospel world was there for the wonder child’s taking.

Aretha was also smitten with secular black pop music. “The new rhythm & blues,” she said, “couldn’t be turned off.” In particular, two artists had a formative impact on her, and she knew both as visitors to her father’s home: Dinah Washington   and Sam Cooke. Neither fit any single genre — both started in gospel but proved endlessly transformative. Amalgamate the two and you pretty much have the alchemy for Aretha Franklin.

Between 1948 and 1955, Washington had 27 R&B Top 10 hits, and she became a pop star with 1959’s epochal “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes.” She could be commanding, and she liked mink coats, parties and pills, and in December 1963 she died in her sleep from an overdose of barbiturates. Cooke was an even bigger star, and Aretha saw a lot of him, because his group, the Soul Stirrers, sometimes joined C.L.’s gospel tours. On one occasion, after a show in Atlanta, Aretha visited Cooke in his hotel room. The two were sitting on his bed talking, “when a thunderous knock came at the door. It was Daddy. Sam and I froze in our tracks. ‘Aretha, I know you’re in there,’ ” Aretha wrote. At first chance, she shot out of the room, “just when the conversation between me and Sam had taken another turn. Daddy never knew that with his intimidating knock he changed the course of history.” 

If Cooke and Washington could cross over from gospel to pop, Franklin reasoned, so could she. When she told her father what she wanted to do, he didn’t balk. “The plan was to make her a star,” said Carolyn, “and make it happen quickly.” Motown founder Berry Gordy and his songwriting partner Billy Davis wanted to sign Aretha. “Everything that she sang was with such emotion that you felt every word,” said Davis. “She had just terrific control over her expressions.” C.L., though, thought that Gordy and Davis’ ambitions were too local.

To hit the big time, they decided that Aretha should move to New York, where she initially lived in cheap hotels. She left her children in Detroit under the care of her grandmother Rachel — effectively leaving them behind just as her mother had surrendered her at a distance. She was 18.

She and C.L. hired a new manager, Jo King. In early 1960, King introduced C.L. to Phil Moore, an arranger and jazz pianist. Moore sat down with Aretha at the piano, and they played a few songs. Then he turned to C.L. and made the most prescient statement anybody ever made about Aretha Franklin: “Your daughter . . . does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration.”

C.L. told Moore that he’d been thinking of trying to place Aretha with Columbia Records, and Moore knew the ideal producer: John Hammond, who had supervised Bessie Smith’s last recording sessions and had discovered 17-year-old Billie Holiday. Hammond visited King’s studio to meet Aretha and hear a demo she had recorded. He didn’t need much convincing. He later said he thought Aretha was “an untutored genius — the best voice I’ve heard since Billie Holiday.” He signed her on the spot. Hammond produced her first Columbia album and had a clear idea of what he wanted Aretha to sound like. “My vision for Aretha had nothing to do with rhythm & blues,” he said. “I saw her as a jazz/blues artist.”

The singer’s Columbia debut, Aretha: With the Ray Bryant Combo, was released in late February 1961. She was 18. If the intent had been to cast  Franklin for an audience that appreciated Lena Horne, Carmen McRae and Nancy Wilson, Franklin instead arrived with a distinctive edge. The single “Won’t Be Long,” which peaked at Number Seven on the R&B chart, worked as a précis for her later resplendence. Franklin performed it in her first national TV appearance, on The Steve Allen Show, and there she was: all the greatness already in place, as apparent as it would ever be. She hit the song off with big gospel chords on piano and sang with a witty, rousing, vocal majesty, in the last minute roaring startlingly.

It was around this time that Aretha met the man who, other than C.L. Franklin and Jerry Wexler, would prove the most significant figure in her career — for good and bad. Ted White would recall meeting Franklin at a club in Detroit, the 20 Grand. Her sister Erma had been talking to him around that time. “She also told me,” Aretha wrote, “he considered me among the most beautiful women in the world.”

White dominated Franklin’s career, and schooled her in how to present herself in public. Franklin refused to discuss White much in later years, though in From These Roots, she wrote, “I didn’t realize I was in way over my head. . . . [Ted White] was a take-charge kind of guy.”

Aretha’s brother Cecil said that their father “knew Ted was something of a shady character — and he thought the association would hurt Aretha.” Motown producer Harvey Fuqua told Ritz, “Anyone who didn’t see Ted White as a straight-up pimp had to be deaf, dumb, and blind. . . . It took someone that slick to get a great talent like Aretha in his stable.” Within six months of their first date, Aretha and White married. C.L. was bitterly opposed to the whole deal; he counted White as an enemy.

In pop criticism, it became accepted wisdom that, with the exception of Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, from February 1964, Franklin’s Columbia years were miscast by both the singer and the label. In truth, the Columbia recordings were rife with songs of heartbreak and rapture, sung in a voice that even then was untouchable. But none of Franklin’s Columbia albums were hits, and their mix of styles — show tunes, torch songs, blues, standards, novelties, pop and quasi-R&B — didn’t fit any easily identifiable demographic of listeners. “It wasn’t really me,” Franklin said later. When it was apparent she would not renew her contract, the label assembled unissued recordings into stopgap albums. The label called one 1966 release Soul Sister, but it wasn’t soul at all. The real soul sister, though, was just months away.

Wexler was a co-owner of New York’s Atlantic Records, along with Ahmet Ertegun, and was feeling restless about the label he had helped build. Both Atlantic and Wexler were well-regarded. Through the 1960s the label helped advance a more tenacious form of rhythm & blues that became increasingly identified as soul. Wexler produced some of the most important artists himself. In 1966, he was in a recording session in Muscle Shoals, trying to stop a fight between Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge, when he got a phone call from a friend, a gospel DJ, who told him, “Aretha’s ready for you. Here’s her phone number.”

Wexler had had his eye on Franklin for a long time. “The voice,” Wexler wrote, “was not that of a child but rather of an ecstatic hierophant. . . . On Aretha’s first recording, her singing was informed with her genius. From the congregation, a man cried out, ‘Listen at her . . . listen at her!’ And I did.” He called and spoke with Ted White, and in November 1966, she and White sat down in Wexler’s office and made a handshake deal. “I felt a natural affinity with the Atlantic sound,” Franklin said. “To me, Atlantic meant soul.”

Wexler had become enamored of FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals. It was owned and run by producer Rick Hall, who used sidemen whom Wexler admired: keyboardist Barry Beckett, bassist David Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins and guitarist Jimmy Johnson; they were occasionally augmented by prominent session musicians like organist and pianist Spooner Oldham and guitarist Dan Penn — all of them white. FAME, Wexler decided, was where he would record Franklin’s first music for Atlantic. 

White wasn’t convinced. The Ku Klux Klan was active near Muscle Shoals (and still is). But Wexler insisted, and he met White and Franklin at FAME on January 24th, 1967. The day that Franklin recorded in Muscle Shoals proved the most momentous in her history — it blasted open her future, then fell into a nightmare.

Wexler played the musicians a demo of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” a song by White’s friend Ronnie Shannon. At first the band didn’t know what to do with it. “The song didn’t have a specific meter, really,” said Oldham. It was Oldham who turned it around. He sat down at a Wurlitzer electric piano and devised a new voicing — an odd slant of chords and cadence — to open the song. “Spooner’s got it! Spooner’s got it!” said Chips Moman, a songwriting partner of Penn. Aretha sang the opening line — it was the first time some of the musicians had heard her voice. “From there it was like sparkles and shine,” Penn said. “After everybody heard her sing, ‘You’re no good, heartbreaker,’ she had five instant fans. I can tell you, she was getting all the respect one person can get from those cats.” Shortly, Penn and Moman went into a closet to complete a song they had been working on: “Do Right Woman – Do Right Man.” Wexler and the songwriters thought it might suit Franklin’s remarkable voice.

C ompleting “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” took only a few hours. “I couldn’t believe it was that good,” Wexler remembered. “I had to get used to that kind of greatness!” Then things went wrong: More than 50 years later there are still mysteries surrounding that day and night — and nobody has ever been able to gather the full truth. Tension had been building between Wexler and Hall: Whose session, after all, was this? “Hall could be belligerent,” Wexler wrote. “So could Ted White. And so, as it turned out, could one of the trumpeters.” The musician had been a last-minute add-on to the horn section. Also, there had been drinking — something Hall tried to forbid in his studio. White was drinking too, sharing a bottle with the trumpeter. This is where various accounts start to vary. The banter between White and the horn player resulted in animosity when, White said, the latter began to use racist terms — “a redneck patronizing a black man,” Wexler put it — and White told Wexler he wanted the musician fired on the spot. Since this was Hall’s studio, Hall would have to do the firing, yet he resented being dictated to on his own property. Most of the musicians were oblivious.

Wexler and Hall went back to Wexler’s motel to toast the session, then White called from another room. He told Wexler that he and Franklin would be leaving in the morning, heading back to New York; he wasn’t going to stand for this. Meantime, said one witness, “Rick sees it going down the tube and decides to mediate. . . . He shouldn’t have done it tipsy.” Wexler told Hall flat-out not to do it — he’d only make it worse — but Hall wasn’t a man to be bossed. “That evening euphoria turned to horror,” wrote Wexler. “It was Walpurgisnacht, a Wagnerian shitstorm.” Only three people were present in Franklin’s hotel room, but nobody has ever given a uniform account. “I went to Ted and Aretha’s room,” Hall later said. “That just led to a bunch more yelling, with Ted telling me how he never should have brought his wife down to Alabama to play with these rednecks. ‘Who you calling a redneck?’ I said. ‘Who you calling a nigger?’ ‘I’d never use that word.’ ‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’ ‘I was just thinking that you should go fuck yourself.’ That led to Ted taking a swing at me . . . and before I knew it, I was in a full-blown fistfight with Ted White.”

According to one account, Franklin hid out in the bathroom as all this went down. Another has it that she got involved in the fight and helped throw Hall out of the room. In From These Roots, she wrote, “I vaguely recall loud noises and voices shouting and doors slamming. I never learned the details.” Hall reportedly called White from the motel lobby, suggesting he get out of town come the morning. Wexler told one interviewer there had possibly been gunshots.

“The very thing I had worked so hard to avoid was racial animus,” Wexler said, “and that’s exactly what the night session had excited. . . . Ted, though, could not be consoled. ‘You were the one who said Muscle Shoals was soul paradise,’ he said. ‘Far as I can see, Muscle Shoals is soul shit. These honkies down here are some nasty motherfuckers. I will never submit my wife to circumstances like these. We’re outta here.’ ”

The events of that night, as much as the liberating recording session during the day, amounted to breakthroughs for Franklin. She wanted out of Muscle Shoals, no question, and — probably not for the first time — wanted out of her marriage as well. There had been troubling rumors about the couple, but for a time Franklin put up with White’s rule. Etta James said, “Ted gave her an edge she needed. And if things went bad for Aretha later on, welcome to the party. That was the story of how it went with most of us and our men. . . . They dressed us and trotted us out to the stage. . . . though, we became stars.”

The only major player on January 24th, 1967, in Muscle Shoals who did not fuck up was Franklin. White fucked up. Hall fucked up. Even Wexler fucked up. Not Franklin. Yet she disappeared, like a suffering ghost, pondering its heart through the mists. Wexler could not find her. He was angry and embarrassed; how could such a gift get fractured? He knew that he and Franklin were on the verge of something exciting, but an aborted contract would kill off that possibility. Wexler finally realized: “She had been traumatized by this incident, and she was hiding someplace.” Clearly, Franklin was making a statement: She wanted due regard.

By the time Franklin showed up at Atlantic Studios in New York, she had insisted on the presence of the Muscle Shoals band — plus saxophonist King Curtis. She also brought in her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, for harmonies. White was not with Franklin for this occasion — just as well given the drama of the previous month. On February 8th, 1967, Franklin put finishing touches on “Do Right Woman — Do Right Man,” the song that Penn and Moman had been working on at FAME before all hell broke loose. Wexler now had a single — “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” — with a B side, and released the pair two days later. “I Never Loved a Man” peaked at Number One on Billboard ’s R&B Singles Chart on April 15th, and at Number Nine on the pop chart.

Though Franklin had not written either side, the material now identified her. In “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” you can hear Franklin’s rumination on her increasingly troubled marriage to White. “You’re a no-good heartbreaker,” she sang. “You’re a liar, and you’re a cheat/And I don’t know why/I let you do these things to me. . . ./How could ya hurt me so bad/Baby, you know that I’m the best thing/That you ever had/Kiss me once again.” The lyric might read like a piteous confession, but the voice — that was something else, full of both woe and tenacity. Few singers had brought a voice like this to such words of hardship. Many great black female singers had emanated blues — Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington. But gospel singer and friend Mahalia Jackson wouldn’t grant the blues any sway. “Anybody that sings the blues,” Jackson said, “is in a deep pit, yelling for help.” She added elsewhere, “With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.” But that was not what Franklin would allow for herself.

F or millions, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the big cultural marker of 1967 — a quintessence of the emerging culture and its values. Looking back, though, it’s apparent that if the year had a cultural marker that truly changed things, it was Franklin’s debut Atlantic album, I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) , released March 10th. It called to several audiences at once: It was a bold and unanticipated claim to pride that spoke to and for a black audience and for a nascent women’s movement.

In 1965, when Otis Redding wrote and recorded “Respect,” he was already being cited as the king of the new fervent style of R&B. Franklin had been singing her own rendition for some time in her nightclub shows. In Redding’s version, the song was a man’s plaint to the woman he loved, but when Franklin recorded “Respect” for her next single, she gave it a twist of her own: “I’m about to give you all of my money/And all I’m askin’ in return, honey/Is to give me my propers.” It wasn’t a yearning plea — it was a demand.

Franklin and her sisters served it up with style and humor (they used the title to reiterate the singer’s nickname, “Ree, Ree, Ree”), and they added a bridge that both became legendary and gave the song new identity: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB/Oh (Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me).” In Franklin’s voice, “Respect” was no longer a man’s petition; it was something of a threat that switched gender tables. It was something wholly new. When Wexler played the new version for Redding, he said, “I just lost my song.” 

“Respect” and “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” were enough to put Franklin forever on the American stage. Author Guralnick remembered the day the single “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” was released, February 10th, 1967. “I had gone over to Skippy White’s Mass Rec-ords: Home of the Blues,” he wrote in Sweet Soul Music, “and the little speaker over the door that was beamed to the sidewalk trade was filled with Aretha. People were dancing on the frosty street with themselves or with one another and lining up at the counter to get a purchase on that magic sound.”

Franklin’s “Respect” made plain a woman could do more than just hope for it: She could command it on her own terms. Poet Sherley Anne Williams said, “Aretha was right on time. . . . When she even went so far as to spell the word ‘respect,’ we just knew that this sister wasn’t playing around.” Franklin herself, though a lifelong Democrat and civil-rights advocate, admitted she didn’t record the song with that purpose in mind. “I don’t think I was a catalyst for the women’s movement,” she said. “Sorry. But if I were? So much the better!”

“Respect” came to represent other shifts underway in black culture and politics. Franklin, like her father and his friend Martin Luther King Jr., favored nonviolence in the struggle for civil rights, but others were beginning to feel their wait had gone on too long. There were activists in the streets and on the campuses, and then there was Franklin on the radio every hour, proclaiming change in a voice that nobody — black or white — could ignore. Franklin later wrote, “I don’t make it a practice to put my politics into my music or social commentary. But the fact that ‘Respect’ naturally became a battle cry and anthem for a nation shows me something.”

In 1967 and 1968, Franklin scored four Top 10 albums ( I Never Loved a Man, Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul and Aretha Now ) and nine Top 10 singles. All were produced by Wexler (sometimes with Arif Mardin). The songs were often augmented by saxophonist King Curtis and Franklin’s sisters or the Sweet Inspirations; many featured some of the same Muscle Shoals band as on her first single. The music was either hard soul — “Chain of Fools,” “Baby, I Love You,” “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone” — or deep blues (“Drown in My Own Tears,” “Ain’t No Way”), sexy (“Dr. Feelgood”) or even, in a way, devotional: the transcendent “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

The overnight fame came at a cost. “She’d been using booze to numb the pain of her lousy marriage,” said her publicist Ruth Bowen. At a show in Columbus, Georgia, in May 1967, Franklin fell off the stage and broke her arm. She later claimed she’d been blinded by stage lights, but Bowen had been told it was caused by alcohol.

Two incidents in 1968 changed Franklin forever. The first was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th. C.L. Franklin and his children had been close to King for years; they had socialized and campaigned together. Riots erupted in more than 100 cities across America. Aretha attended King’s funeral in Atlanta and visited with his widow, Coretta Scott King. On May 2nd, she released “Think,” the keynote of her upcoming album, Aretha Now . The song seemed in part a response to the terrible times: “People walking around every day/Playing games, taking scores/Trying to make other people lose their minds/Ah, be careful you don’t lose yours.”

The other troubling 1968 event was more personal. On June 28th, Time placed Franklin on its cover, declaring her the face of soul music. The article praised her talents but also portrayed her as despondent and described “Dr. Feelgood” as the tale of “a woman [who] works all day cooking and cleaning a house for white folks. . . . Sex is the only thing she’s got to look forward to.” The implication was that the singer was paying some dues — a platitude commonly applied to blues singers. “What one of [Franklin’s] burdens might be,” Time disclosed, “came out last year when Aretha’s husband, Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta’s Regency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the first such incident.”

Franklin resented Time ’s representation of her. As she herself noted, there was always much more to her voice than the accommodation or even transcendence of pain. There was also a lot of sass and demand of freedom; there was moral attestation. After both Time ’s story and the troubles of her marriage, Franklin gained a new reputation that she never shook, and perhaps never wanted to: She was now seen as aloof and unforthcoming, and that seemed fine with her.

Franklin was a battered woman whose voice gave a lot of other women recognition and courage. She divorced White in 1969. Until then, he still managed some of her business and tour dates and was credited as the co-writer of a handful of her songs. White also found “I Never Loved a Man” for Franklin. She was always reticent on the subject, though she later admitted, “Alcohol played a destructive role.” Rod Hicks, a bassist who toured with Franklin at the time, told Vanity Fair , “[White] didn’t have no pussycat. He had a tiger on his hands when that girl got drunk.”

What some have called Franklin’s golden era at Atlantic ran from early 1967 to early 1972. During that time, she was unquestionably the top solo female singing star, while also manifesting ongoing changes in black America’s consciousness. “The black revolution certainly forced me and the majority of black people to begin taking a second look at ourselves,” she later said. “But I must say that mine was a very personal evolution — an evolution of the me in myself. . . . I’ve gained a great deal of confidence in myself.”

Between 1970 and 1972, Franklin released her deepest series of recordings — three studio works ( This Girl’s in Love With You and Spirit in the Dark, both from 1970, and Young, Gifted and Black, 1972) and two live sets, Aretha Live at Fillmore West (1971) and Amazing Grace (1972). But these years also proved intense and variable for the singer. She was still in the aftermath of her volatile marriage to White while starting a new relationship with her road manager, Ken Cunningham (in March 1970 she gave birth to their son, Kecalf). As a result, Franklin’s live appearances were infrequent. “The sudden disappearance of Aretha was a frequent occurrence,” said Wexler. “No one used the words ‘nervous breakdown,’ but we knew.” But when Wexler got Franklin into his Miami studio, it resulted in what he described in his autobiography as “the sanctified sessions that produced Spirit in the Dark .”

The album was perhaps Franklin’s most inspired studio work — “a motherfucker,” as Wexler put it — and felt more personal than anything prior. Like most clues in her life, it was made of polarities: wounded (“Don’t Play That Song”) at the same time it was bitter (“When the Battle Is Over”); devoted (“You and Me,” “Honest I Do”) yet betrayed (“One Way Ticket”); and sensual yet mystical (“Spirit in the Dark”). On one magnificent track, “The Thrill Is Gone (From Yesterday’s Kiss),” Franklin sang of a disillusion that reflected on both her failed marriage and America’s ongoing mistreatment of its black people. Yet Franklin also reaffirmed hope on 1972’s Young, Gifted and Black, in a church-choir-like cover of Nina Simone’s title song: “When you’re feeling real low/Here’s a great truth you should remember and know/That you’re young, gifted and black/You got your soul intact — and that’s a fact.” Franklin arrived at her worldview through the prism of gospel politics. The suffering and hope in those songs wasn’t simply a promise of freedom in heaven, but ultimately freedom on Earth.

The same year Franklin released Young, Gifted and Black , she also recorded her gospel tour de force, Amazing Grace . Some had criticized her for switching to secular music in 1959, and gospel audiences were notorious for shunning singers who had taken that route. In 1961, Franklin wrote a column for New York’s black newspaper Amsterdam News, saying, “I don’t think that in any matter I did the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind two years ago to switch over. . . . After all, the blues is a music born out of the slavery-day sufferings of my people. Every song in the blues vein has a story to tell of love, frustrations and heartaches. I think that because true democracy hasn’t overtaken us here that we as a people find the original blues songs still have meaning for us.”

Franklin recruited the Rev. James Cleveland as pianist and moderator for the event, as well as his Southern California Community Choir for the performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, plus she brought in her core electric band — an anomaly in a church setting. Over two nights in mid-January 1972, Wexler recorded the live services for a double-length album. New Temple had an ambience no studio could ever have provided, and more important, it had a fully involved audience who knew what true gospel music was. (Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts attended one of the evenings, and the music influenced Exile on Main St .)

Franklin paired secular songs with Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” She also sang hallowed spirituals such as “Climbing Higher Mountains,” “Amazing Grace” (a 1779 Christian hymn by an Anglican clergyman and slave trader who believed God would grant forgiveness for his sins) and “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” The latter is among Franklin’s most haunting vocals, delivered at New Temple as a deathly, rocking march with the ghostly thunder of the choir pressing her on.

Amazing Grace was Franklin’s most ambitious effort and most meaningful creation. With it she connected antebellum black history with modern-day black existential dread and its need for hope. It was a spiritual and political declaration, as well as a commercial triumph: Contrary to expectations, it became the singer’s best-selling album. It capped what had been called “the Age of Aretha” — a spirit of optimism that was also informed by the knowledge of suffering. It was Franklin’s own summation of, in the words of a Clara Ward song on the album, how she “got over,” how she made it through a wondrous yet tumultuous period: “My soul look back and wonder how I got over.” That had to be some comfort, because Amazing Grace was also one of the singer’s last great successes for a long time. The age of Aretha was over.

A round 1972, Franklin had developed a friendship with Quincy Jones and wanted to work with him; he had a wide-ranging and impeccable sensibility. “The problem,” said a miffed Wexler, “was that Quincy took forever and a day to cut the sides, well over a year, a critical period when Aretha could ill afford to be out of the spotlight.” The album that finally resulted in June 1973, Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), was the most controversial of Franklin’s career — although its complex ambitions have weathered the test of time, making it perhaps Franklin’s lost masterpiece.

Wexler returned for three of Franklin’s mid-1970s albums, but while they weren’t as terrible as some claimed, they were pro forma and never reached for new heights. In 1975, Wexler left Atlantic and worked largely as a freelance producer. Franklin herself enjoyed a fleeting resurgence in 1976 with Sparkle, a soundtrack album. Written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, it was the sort of wonderful one-shot soul-school miracle that made plain that Franklin could still find those heights with the right material. Instead, after Sparkle her quality bottomed out.

Franklin, like her father, was a complicated person, but she didn’t want anybody to know just how much. Several close to her — including family — described her as depressive. Shortly after Franklin moved into a Manhattan townhouse in 1973, she fell into nightmares. “[Aretha] was really off-kilter,” said Carolyn Franklin. “Ultimately, we had no choice but to get her to a hospital.” Franklin was furious when the incident was reported, and she pressured Jet magazine to run an article portraying her positively, under the title aretha buries rumors about “going crazy.” Soon after, though, according to her brother Cecil, “Aretha fell back into depression. . . . I couldn’t figure out how to break her out of the blues. These blues were deep.” Said Erma, “Here’s the thing about my sister. You think these breakdowns are a pervasive pattern. And in a sense, they are. Ultimately, though, she doesn’t stay down. . . . It may take her a while, but her commitment to her career is strong as steel.”

In the winter of 1975, Franklin moved to Encino, California, with her boyfriend Ken Cunningham. In June 1977, Jet ran another feature: still on a throne, aretha loses weight, looks ahead. She had lost 40 pounds and was proud of it. Clearly, she believed she still had a regal reputation to uphold, and breakdowns or not, she wanted to appear happy and assured to the public. Cunningham helped Franklin curb her drinking and bore influence on her sense of black pride. The couple had a son together, but never married, and came to a cordial parting within a year of moving to the Los Angeles area. In January 1977, Franklin started a new relationship with actor Glynn Turman. The two married in April 1978 at her father’s church in Detroit, with C.L. officiating. At the time she told Jet , “I have no emotional hang-ups. No problems. Just those of everyday nature that all people have. . . .  Above all, I am happy.”

Some saw this as a front. “If you read the version of her life that Aretha gives to the magazines,” said her younger sister, Carolyn, “you’d never think she had a care in the world. I know that was her heart’s desire. . . . But if you think she stopped thinking about how to get her career back on track, you’re wrong. And if you also think there weren’t career clashes between her and Glynn, you’re doubly wrong.”

In June 1979, Franklin got offstage in Las Vegas and learned that her father had been near death at his home on LaSalle in Detroit. He had confronted a team of robbers invading the house, and one had shot him in the right knee and right groin. C.L. had lain on the floor for some time, bleeding. The preacher had already been on a decline. Though he was still royalty in Detroit, he was no longer formidable. “Toward the end, sickness and drink ravaged the once-brave voice,” wrote Anthony Heilbut in The Fan Who Knew Too Much . “On a rare healthy Sunday, he could still manage to whoop, holler, and shout the house.” When Franklin arrived at the hospital, the reverend was in a coma that he would never emerge from.

C.L. Franklin died at home on July 27th, 1984. For three days, mourners stood in the city’s sweltering heat so they could pass his coffin and pay their last respects. The funeral itself, on August 4th, at New Bethel, was among the largest in Detroit’s history. The Rev. Jesse Jackson — who had known the family for years and who had campaigned that spring for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination — was the first to speak. He told the gathered that C.L. “was a prophet” and that his voice had uplifted black Americans for decades.

A s some close to Franklin knew well, the singer’s grief could turn into anger. A short time after their father’s funeral, her sister Carolyn told an interviewer the family was worried whether Aretha could survive C.L.’s death. “My mouth fell open,” Aretha wrote in From These Roots . “Had she forgotten about my faith and trust in God? We were all raised by the same father, who instilled in us the spiritual strength to survive the most trying times.” Franklin wouldn’t talk to her sister for months after that.

Meanwhile, there had been tensions between Franklin and Turman. He was an actor, and adjusting to second place behind Franklin hadn’t been easy for him. During her father’s years in a coma, Franklin eventually moved back to C.L.’s house, effectively declaring that the family and her career were now paramount. In the summer of 1982, Franklin suddenly and enigmatically separated from Turman; they divorced in 1984. Some saw it coming. Franklin would never comment on the dissolution. In his biography of Franklin, Mark Bego wrote, “The most widely circulated rumor stated that Aretha — allegedly — discovered Glynn having an affair with someone who was quite close to her, and that it instantly marked the end of their relationship.”

In 1980, Franklin signed with Clive Davis’ label, Arista. Whereas Wexler was respected and daunting, Davis was beguiling and had the golden touch. If anybody could rejuvenate Franklin’s puzzlingly stuck career, it was Davis. He brought in Arif Mardin, who’d worked with Franklin at Atlantic, and Chuck Jackson (who’d helped launch Natalie Cole’s career) to co-produce her October 1980 kickoff for the label, Aretha . “Aretha and Clive were very clear in that they wanted this rec-ord to have a certain sheen,” said Mardin. Both Aretha and its 1981 follow-up, Love All the Hurt Away, were clearly transitional: She was trying to find her voice and soul amid bigger and slicker arrangements. However, the musical framing fit the fashion of the early 1980s, at the cost of too often containing her vocals.

Franklin was on Arista Rec-ords from 1980 to 2007: 27 years, a much longer period than with Atlantic. Davis believed that the right production team made all the difference — psychologically as much as musically. Franklin wasn’t receptive to producers who told her how and when to sing. In 1981, Davis brought in Luther Vandross, whose mellow, silken-voiced solo debut, Never Too Much, was sailing near the top of the charts. Franklin was standoffish at first — “formal,” said Vandross. “Miss Franklin wanted to know if Mr. Vandross had any songs that were suitable for her. . . . Clearly, I had to audition.” It turned out that Mr. Vandross had “Jump to It” for Miss Franklin: a song that awakened her gospel sensibility but sublimated it through layers of sound that were rich, pulsing, tuneful and savvy to the moment. The result yielded her first Top 40 hit in years, and an album of the same title that peaked at Number 23. Jump to It fit the times — rather than embodying them — but that was just enough at a crucial moment: Franklin was back.

The problem was, along with all that greatness came Franklin’s temperament and the deep mystery of her selves — one she claimed, one she concealed; one self that raised her, another that sabotaged her. Vandross came to know them all. In 1983, as they recorded Get It Right, the follow-up to Jump to It, said Vandross, “Anytime I gave the slightest comment, she screamed, ‘If you think you can do it better, then you sing the damn thing.’ ‘Fine,’ I finally said. ‘I’ll see you later, Miss Franklin. . . .’ ‘Just apologize,’ said Clive. ‘That’s all she wants.’ I listened to the man and apologized.” He and Franklin had an up-and-down relationship from then on, but after Vandross died on July 1st, 2005, from a heart attack,   Franklin sang at his funeral.

By that time, a plane trip wasn’t a simple effort for Franklin. In 1983, eager to return home to

Detroit after some shows in Atlanta, she decided to take the last flight out — a two-engine prop. The plane did a couple of drastic drops (and, Franklin claimed, turned upside down at one point), provoking fear in everybody aboard and opening an everlasting anxiety for Franklin. She felt terrorized by the incident and never flew again. To get to Vandross’ New York funeral, she traveled by bus.

Franklin both flourished and floundered in the years after her fear of flying set in. In 1984, she recorded Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, with Narada Michael Walden as primary producer. It would become her first platinum album. Walden was imaginative and diverse: He had drummed with John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and with Jeff Beck, and had made R&B-dance-pop of his own for Atlantic. He co-wrote the album’s two Top 10 hits, “Freeway of Love” and the title song. Who’s Zoomin’ Who? also included a third hit single, “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,” a feminist declaration, sung with Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox. Wexler, watching from afar, said, “[Walden] helped Aretha move into what became the most profitable chapter of her career. But when I listen to their work together, I don’t hear her voice soaring. I hear her screaming. . . . As a vocalist, you age gracefully. Did Aretha do this? I’m afraid not.”

In 1987, Franklin returned to the source of her greatest glory, gospel music, for another live double album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, recorded this time at the family’s New Bethel Baptist Church, and produced solely by the singer. But this gospel outing disappointed. In part it was the flow — too many guest singers and sermons — and some tracks ambled then faded unnaturally. Behind the scenes, the album also illustrated traits that Franklin had increasingly become known for: her mistrust of others and her perplexing discourtesy. Franklin had sung a live duet with Mavis Staples on “Oh Happy Day” at New Bethel, but Franklin — worried that Staples outperformed her — re-recorded the vocals in the studio.

Sometimes Franklin’s feuds became as fabled as her singing. Over the years she had tensions with Martha Reeves, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, Mavis Staples, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle. In fact, Franklin and LaBelle refused to be onstage together. Some saw Franklin’s quarrels as a career strategy. “I call it the diva-fication of Aretha,” said Erma. “And it all came about because of Clive. He saw that the public loved divas. . . . Through sheer will, they can overcome anything.”

That sheer will got hard-tested for Franklin. Her sister Carolyn — who’d often sung backup for Aretha — developed breast cancer, yet was working toward a degree at Detroit’s Marygrove College. Aretha moved Carolyn into her home and hired full-time care. When the cancer grew more virulent, Aretha helped arrange for Carolyn to receive her diploma in bed, in cap and gown. Carolyn Franklin died on April 25th, 1988, at 43. Then came Cecil: Though Aretha had refused to acknowledge it, her brother had fallen into a heavy freebase-cocaine addiction in the 1980s. He entered rehab, but in the summer of 1988, he faced another setback: Doctors found a spot on Cecil’s lungs. The proximity to Carolyn’s death made Cecil’s news particularly difficult for the singer. On December 29th, 1989, at 2 a.m. Ruth Bowen called the singer. “Aretha,” she said, “get to the hospital.” By the time Franklin arrived, Cecil was gone. “ Ebony once wrote that he was ‘my greatest asset,’ ” said Aretha. “Amen. No other manager, no other person, no other living spirit could ever replace him.” Said Bowen, “Without Cecil, and by managing herself, she became completely impossible.”

Franklin never again had huge hits, though her 1998 single “A Rose Is Still a Rose,” co-written by Lauryn Hill, hit the Top 40. Clearly, Franklin still possessed a remarkable instrument. In February 1998, MusiCares — the Recording Academy and Grammys’ nonprofit charity on behalf of musicians in need   — awarded its Person of the Year Award to operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Among the artists paying tribute that night was Franklin, who sang Pavarotti’s signature aria, “Nessun Dorma,” from the final act of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot . After MusiCares, Pavarotti told her, “Opera purists may take issue with your liberties, but I loved your interpretation. Puccini has great soul, but you made his soul even greater.”

Two nights later, Franklin sang “Respect” at the Grammy telecast at Radio City Music Hall, where Pavarotti was also scheduled to perform “Nessun Dorma.” When Pavarotti fell ill and canceled, producer Ken Ehrlich asked Franklin: Since she knew the aria, would she step in for Pavarotti? “This was do or die,” said Franklin. Looking regal as she opened the aria with a gospel-like growl, Franklin proceeded with a greater dynamic range than is available to most grand opera singers. In “Nessun Dorma,” Franklin was able to maneuver a glissando from a whisper to a scream; her pop and soul training rendered it more vulnerable. She turned its final burst — declaring “Vincerò” (“I will win”) — into a mystic soul yowl. It was the most spectacular public moment of her career. Radio City Music Hall erupted in a standing ovation. Wexler said, “She wasn’t afraid of the aria. She owned it, claimed it and made it her own.”

Franklin had another spectacular moment in January 2009, when she sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Franklin’s big-bowed hat — designed by Seoul, South Korea-born Luke Song — famously stole the show, quickly earning a Facebook page. The Smithsonian was rumored to have requested guardianship of the hat; a backup hat went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In August 2001, Erma (the first person to record “Piece of My Heart,” made famous by Janis Joplin) was diagnosed with cancer. When Erma’s daughter Sabrina called Aretha to tell her the news, “Aretha became furious,” Sabrina told David Ritz. “She flew off the handle. . . . She kept saying, ‘Don’t call me with bad news like this. I just don’t want to hear it. I don’t believe it, not for a minute.’ ” Soon, though, Aretha had little choice but to accept the truth. Erma died in September 2002, at 64. Nine weeks later, Aretha’s half brother, Vaughn — who had taken up much of Cecil’s work on behalf of the singer — died at 67.

Franklin had become the last living member of her immediate family. Several had fallen to cancer, and it would be only natural for her to fear its bequest. In August 2010, Franklin reportedly fell in her shower. By November, it was apparent that the singer had become seriously ill; she was suffering “excruciating stomach pain,” according to Ritz.

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After medical tests, and at her doctors’ insistence, Franklin canceled all upcoming appearances. In early 2011, she invited talk-show host Wendy Williams to meet with her for an interview. She said she had gradually lost 85 pounds — but that was as much as she would offer up. When Williams remarked, “We all found out that you were having abdominal surgery,” Franklin shut the door on the inquiry. “Is that what you heard?” she responded. “Well, that’s what was said,” replied Williams. “OK. Well,” said Franklin, “a lot of things were said. I’ve left that behind. I’m feeling wonderful. I’m feeling great. And I couldn’t be feeling any better than I’m feeling right now.”

This pattern would repeat itself again and again. Shows would be scheduled, then called off; mourners would gather outside a Detroit hospital. Then, in October 2014, she released her final great album, Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics . She also, when she could, showed up for concert and TV appearances in her final years. Some proved among the best performances of her life.

Franklin’s most famous latter-day showing was at the 38th annual Kennedy Center Honors, held on December 6th, 2015, in Washington (and later broadcast on CBS). Honoring songwriter Carole King, Franklin sat at a grand piano, wearing a floor-length gown, singing “Natural Woman” as if it were her own declaration rather than King’s composition — a hard-won epiphany that brought President Obama to brush aside some reflexive tears. With an orchestra swelling along beside her, Franklin took up the microphone two-thirds of the way through the song, stood and walked to the front center of the stage, and — while ululating the song’s peak moment of self-discovery — slipped her arms from her fur and let it drop to the floor. It was a moment that echoed back to those times when gospel queens would toss their furs on top of the coffins of other gospel queens — a gesture that honored the dead but castigated death itself, covering a casket with something better than dirt. The Kennedy Center performance was a moving and historic moment: the queen who abided, singing about hope and forbearance and love for America’s first black president.

No matter what else ever went on in her life, singing became Franklin’s affirmation, from the time she was a child seeking a solution for the day her mother walked out of the house and never came back. “Things can never be that bad,” Franklin told Bego. “For the blind man, there is always the fellow with no feet. I’ve been hurt. You can’t get over it all, but you can go on living and keeping on looking. . . . I’m not free yet, but I will be. I will be!” Franklin could be perplexing, private, proud, cold, contentious, intimidating — but she also proffered a love that badly needed the same avowal in return. Pianist Teddy Harris, who served as one of Franklin’s musical directors in the 1960s, said, “Aretha is the kind of girl, you’ve got to love her hard.” When that love fled her, she grew resentful, but she also resolved never to let it break her or keep her down.

Figuring out Aretha Franklin could be difficult, but her enigma probably allowed her enough shielding to put the best of herself into her music. Perhaps we read too much of the times and needs into Franklin, creating a burden for her. In What the Music Said , Mark Anthony Neal wrote that “the notion of Aretha being the ‘voice’ of the black liberation movement has been overstated.” If so, it was necessary to the times — and even Franklin couldn’t have undone that. The liberation she invoked lifted people, even rescued them. In Gerri Hirshey’s Nowhere to Run (1984), a Vietnam veteran told the author, “We had been fucked over, and we knew it, right off. This woman, Miss Ree, saved some of us, I swear. . . . After one of those suicide missions . . . after we fitted as many pieces as we could find into the body bags, we put on . . . ‘Chain of Fools.’ . . . This may seem weird, but we danced. Like the fuckin’ fools we were. . . . And I tell you, if we hadn’t have done it, I might have lost my mind. I might have gone and died.”

Franklin told Hirshey, “I’ve had a lot of servicemen — Vietnam vets — come up to me and tell me how much my music meant to them over there. I’m sure all those guys were in a lot of pain. . . . But if they found pain in my music, it has to be their personal interpretation. What I feel singing it, and where it comes from, is something I keep to myself. Music, especially the kind I make, is a very emotional thing. And as an artist you’re happy when people get involved, you know? But what they hear and what I feel when I sing it can be very, very different. Sometimes I wish I could make them understand that.” Whatever went on in Franklin’s voice was a strange alchemy of hurt and persistence. What moved her soul, though, remained inscrutable and private.

In the days after her death on August 16th, when it was learned that she died intestate (meaning, under Michigan law, that her estate would likely be split evenly among her four sons), observers were bewildered: How could somebody who was reported near death for so many years neglect to leave a will? Perhaps Franklin never intended to die. She had denied death’s imminence for years — her sheer will, combined with the best medical care, carried her over at improbable odds. Franklin still expected to get off any deathbed and sing another show, finish another album. Without what some saw as her stubborn denial, she’d have been dead a long time ago, and we wouldn’t have had those final great performances and Sings the Great Diva Classics, her best album since the early 1970s.

Franklin wanted to live. Indeed, she believed God wanted her on Earth: Aretha Franklin. Faith, combined with the instinct for self-preservation and buoyed by the world’s love, really can make miracles. Franklin not only exemplified perseverance at the end, but all along she had given nerve — at crucial moments — to countless others who recognized themselves in both the pain and strength of her voice. She once defined her singing as “me with my hand outstretched, hoping someone will take it.” A lot of people took that hand and felt themselves raised up by it. Maybe we’ll never know if that was enough to rectify the sorrow in Aretha Franklin’s eyes.

Rolling Stone teamed up with Audible to bring you an Audible Original, transporting the listener through Aretha’s tumultuous life, meeting those who most inspired her and those who caused her the greatest pain. Click here to find out more and download .

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About the Aretha

The Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre is a majestic, 6,000-person waterfront venue, recognized as one of the top 100 concert venues in the world. A cultural jewel, it is a destination of choice for major recording artists and entertainment superstars from around the world. Located along the shore of the Detroit River, The Aretha is situated on an international border between the U.S. and Canada which is considered one of the busiest waterways in the world. Formerly known as Chene Park Amphitheatre, it was rebranded in 2019 to honor Detroit’s own music icon Aretha Franklin.   

With a who’s who of world-class artists on its stage, for summer fun The Aretha is one of Detroit’s best outdoor concert venues for live music.  The breadth and diversity of its envied programming reflect the region’s multi-cultural spectrum and cosmopolitan spirit. In 2021, a major capital improvement campaign began, with additional enhancements done in 2022 including new LED screens, 3 prominently placed facing Canada and the Detroit River.  Boaters regularly gather on this international waterway to soak up the sounds. There’s truly no better entertainment venue destination in Detroit than on the beautiful banks of the Detroit River, at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre. 

About the Right Productions

Since 2004, The Right Productions, Inc. (TRP) has managed and operated the 6,000-seat Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre (formerly known as Chene Park) under contract to the City of Detroit. A true family affair, TRP was formed in 1996 by Shahida Mausi.  Shahida, and The Right Productions have a 25-year track record of success.  

Their individual and collective expertise has positioned the company as a powerhouse brand for live entertainment, curated events and experiential activations. Despite a global pandemic, in 2021, TRP produced over 70 events and concerts hosting more than 150,000 attendees. With a reputation for quality and excellence, TRP clients have included Quicken Loans, MGM Grand Detroit Casino, Lincoln Motor Company, the United Auto Workers (UAW), Detroit Opera, the Detroit Regional Chamber and more.  

Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre 2600 Atwater Street. Detroit, MI 48207

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Past Performers (partial list)

50 CENT A TRIBE CALLED QUEST AFTER 7 ALEX BUGNON ALEX REYMUNDO ALEXANDER ZONJIC ANGELA WINBUSH ANGIE STONE ANTHONY HAMILTON ASHFORD & SIMPSON AVERAGE WHITE BAND B-52 KENNY “BABYFACE” BELL BIV DEVOE BERES HAMMOND BILAL BLACK BYRDS BLUE NOTES BONE CAMEO CARMEN McRAE CHANTE MOORE CHARLIE WILSON CHERRELLE CHICO DEBARGE CHRIS BOTTI CHRISETTE MICHELLE COCO CHAKA KHAN DAVE KOZ & FRIENDS DAS EFX DAY 26 DE’ANGELO DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER DETROIT BLUES FESTIVAL DIGITAL UNDERGROUND DJ QUIK DMX GO GO’s KENDRICK LAMAR MICHAEL MCDONALD MINT CONDITION MORRIS DAY AND THE TIME NAUGHTY BY NATURE NE-YO NEW EDITION NEW STYLISTICS NICKI MINAJ NORMAN BROWN OMARION PHIL PERRY PIECES OF A DREAM PLIES PUBLIC ENEMY PUENTE, MACHITO AND RODRIGUEZ R THOMPKINS RACHELLE FERRELL RAHEEM DEVAUGHN RAKIM RALPH TRESVANT RAMSEE LEWIS RASHAAN PATTERSON REDMAN REGINA BELLE RICK ROSS ROBIN THICKE ROSCOE DASH ROY AYERS SALT N’ PEPA SHELIA E SLICK RICK SLUM VILLAGE SNOOP DOGG & THE DOG POUND THREE DOG NIGHT SOMMORE SOULJA BOY TELL ‘EM SWING OUT SISTER DON DC CURRY DONNELL JONES DRAMATICS DRU HILL DWELE EARL KLUGH EDDIE GRIFFIN EPMD EN VOGUE ERYKAH BADU FANTASIA BARRINO GARY TAYLOR GATO BARBIERI GEORGE CLINTON HERBIE HANCOCK HIROSHIMA ICE CUBE KEM KENNY G LAYLA HATHAWAY LIZ WRIGHT LYFE JENNINGS MARY J BLIGE MARQUES HOUSTON MAYSA MUSIQ SOULCHILD NAJEE NAS MC HAMMER MC LYTE MICHAEL COLYAR MAYSA MICHAEL FRANKS MIKKI HOWARD MILLIE JACKSON STEVIE WONDER STROKES SUGARHILL GANG SWV

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Why This Aretha Franklin Documentary Took 46 Years to Make it to Theaters

The documentary was long beset by technical and legal woes, but Franklin’s family members recently gave it their blessing

Brigit Katz

Correspondent

Over two stunning nights in 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded a live gospel album at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. A documentary film crew was on hand to capture the performance, regarded as one of Franklin’s finest, but due to a series of technical and legal setbacks, the film was not released. Yesterday, as the Associated Press reports, the documentary finally hit theaters, 46 years after the Queen of Soul put on the show of a lifetime.

Amazing Grace , which borrows its name from the title of Franklin’s live album, premiered at DOC NYC festival, and subsequent week-long screenings are planned for Los Angeles later this month and New York in December. A wide release of the film could happen as early as January, Alan Elliot, one of the film’s producers, tells Brooks Barnes of the New York Times .

The documentary was helmed by the director Sydney Pollack , known for films like The Way We Were and Tootsie. But Pollack made a grave mistake during the shoot: He didn’t use clapper boards, “a crucial tool in matching sound with filmed images in a predigital era,” Barnes explains . As a result, he ended up with 20 hours of footage with sound that wasn’t synced.

Pollack was not able to get the film ready by the time the album Amazing Grace was released, and executives at Warner Brothers, which had financed the production, decided to shelve the project. Decades later, Elliot, who tells Barnes that he became “obsessed” with the footage while working as a music executive in the '80s, bought the neglected reels. He recruited a team to patch the film together, and in 2011, started making plans to release it.

But Franklin, who died in August at the age of 76, did not seem to want the film to be made public. She sued Elliott in 2011 for planning to release the film without her permission, and her lawyers blocked the film from premiering at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals in 2015, according to Variety ’s Chris Willman. Elliot and Franklin’s representatives started negotiations to make Franklin a partner in the movie, but discussions fell by the wayside when Franklin became increasingly ill.

The reasons for Franklin’s resistance to releasing the documentary are not entirely clear. She once said that she “loved” the movie, according to Willman, and Amazing Grace documents one of her most iconic performances; the album of the same name remains the best-selling gospel album of all time. “[Franklin’s] resolve for it not being shown is so intense, and I don’t think any us really understand it all the way,” Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger told Kristopher Tapley of Variety last year.

But the film’s story took a turn in the wake of Franklin’s funeral, when Elliott approached Sabrina Owens, Franklin’s niece and the executor of her estate, about the possibility of reopening talks. Owens invited Elliot to screen the documentary for Franklin’s family. They loved it.

“There was clapping and crying,” Owens tells Barnes of the Times.

With the blessing of Franklin’s family members, fansnow have an opportunity to see a young Aretha sing her heart out during a performance that included an 11-minute rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

“It’s in a very pure environment, very moving and inspirational, and it’s an opportunity for those individuals who had not experienced her in a gospel context to see how diverse her music is,” Owens tells Variety ’s Willman. “We are so excited to be a part of this.”

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Brigit Katz | | READ MORE

Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World.

Aretha Franklin Wasn’t Just a Music Legend. She Also Raised Her Voice for Civil Rights

Aretha Franklin will forever be remembered as the legendary Queen of Soul , but her six decade career (during which she won 18 Grammy awards and was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) isn’t the only legacy she’ll be leaving behind. The musical icon, who passed away at the age of 76 in Detroit, Michigan on Thursday, was also an integral part of the Civil Rights movement, using both her platform and her voice to advocate for racial equality.

Born to preacher and civil rights activist Clarence L. Franklin ( who organized the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom ahead of his good friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s March on Washington ) and his wife Barbara Siggers, Franklin grew up singing gospel music in the church. In her youth, she was mentored by Mahalia Jackson , the “Queen of Gospel” and a noted civil rights activist who was also good friends with King.

In 1967, Franklin released “Respect,” arguably her most famous song, which became an anthem for the racial and gendered political movements of the time, something that wasn’t lost on Franklin who said of her signature track in her memoir Aretha: From These Roots : “It [reflected] the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher—everyone wanted respect,” Franklin wrote. “It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.”

The following year, in 1968, Franklin sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a song made famous by Jackson, at King’s funeral. That same year, she also performed the National Anthem at the Democratic National Convention.

The activism that Franklin was surrounded by in her youth quickly became something she was personally and actively engaged in; according to a Detroit Free Press interview with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Franklin often used her talents to help further the civil rights movement, even going so far as to tour with King and fellow singer/activist, Harry Belafonte.

“When Dr. King was alive, several times she helped us make payroll,” Jackson said. “On one occasion, we took an 11-city tour with her as Aretha Franklin and Harry Belafonte…and they put gas in the vans. She did 11 concerts for free and hosted us at her home and did a fundraiser for my campaign. Aretha has always been a very socially conscious artist, an inspiration, not just an entertainer. She has shared her points of view from the stage for challenged people, to register to vote, to stand up for decency.”

One of the most prescient examples of Franklin’s commitment to civil rights was when she offered to post bail for revolutionary activist and scholar Angela Davis in 1970 , after Davis, a member of the Communist Party, was accused of assisting in a courtroom takeover that ended in four deaths. In an interview with Jet , Franklin advocates for not only Davis, but for black liberation.

“Angela Davis must go free,” Franklin said. “Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people — they’ve made me financially able to have it — and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”

Not many people know this story... pic.twitter.com/tdNRl2eqED — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 16, 2018

Franklin’s investment in her community and her dedication to social justice is perhaps best summed up by Barack Obama, a huge fan of the singer and who immediately requested that the soul singer be the performer for his first presidential inauguration in 2009.

i don’t talk a lot about private conversations me and @POTUS44 ever had but when I started a conversation with him about talent for the first inaugural he cut me off and said “Aretha” #RIPArethaFranklin — alyssa mastromonaco (@AlyssaMastro44) August 16, 2018

In an interview with The New Yorker following a performance of Carole King’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” (a performance that memorably brought him to tears,) the former president had this to say: “American history wells up when Aretha sings. Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll ― the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope.”

Following the news of her death, Franklin was mourned by not only fans of her music, but those who recognized her role in the Civil Rights Movement, many of whom worked alongside her in fighting for equality.

https://t.co/LgBOr5vgkA : #RestInPower ... #RestInPeace ... #ArethaFranklin ... We will always love you. All hail to the Queen! pic.twitter.com/QzfIQIs4og — Rev Jesse Jackson Sr (@RevJJackson) August 16, 2018

We were blessed to live in a world with #ArethaFranklin . Beyond her tremendous singing voice, she was a voice in the Civil Rights Movement. An instrument... pic.twitter.com/cTOdv3UGoP — Be A King (@BerniceKing) August 16, 2018

We have lost one of the great artists of our time. Aretha Franklin was one of God’s precious gifts to the world—one of God’s shining jewels. She is deeply loved by millions of people as the Queen of Soul. Her voice is still a guiding light to vocalists today. — John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) August 16, 2018

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Vault aretha franklin, from the vault: aretha franklin at the mann center.

Jet magazine, August 2, 1992

The Philadelphia Inquirer , August 28, 2017

Aretha Franklin performing at the Mann Center on August 26, 2017. Photo by Jordan August Photography

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2017

MANN MUSIC ROOM: VAULT

Blog Entry by Jack McCarthy, Historian, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts

The Mann Center traces its history to the Robin Hood Dell, which opened in 1930 in East Fairmount Park as a summer home for The Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1976 the organization moved to a new venue in West Fairmount Park. Originally called Robin Hood Dell West, it was later renamed the Mann Music Center in honor of its longtime director and benefactor Frederic Mann, and subsequently renamed the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.  

Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” one of the great voices in the history of American popular music, gave the second-to-last full public concert of her nearly sixty-year career at the Mann Center on August 26, 2017. Battling cancer and with her concertizing future in doubt, Franklin used the occasion to reflect on her long history with Philadelphia and the city’s importance in her early years, noting at one point during the show, “I started, really, in Philadelphia.”

Born in Memphis in 1942, Aretha Franklin grew up in Detroit, where her father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, a renowned preacher and singer known as the “Man with the Golden Voice,” was pastor at a Baptist church. Steeped in the African American gospel tradition from birth, Aretha was mentored by several great gospel singers, including Clara Ward, leader of the Philadelphia-based Famous Ward Sisters, the most successful gospel group of the mid-twentieth century. C. L. Franklin had a longtime relationship with Clara Ward, who was a mother figure to and major musical influence on Aretha, as was another member of the Famous Ward Singers, Marian Williams.

From 1960 to 1965 Aretha recorded for Columbia Records, during which time she performed frequently in Philadelphia jazz and R&B clubs, such as Peps, the Showboat, and the Cadillac Club. She also appeared on the multi-act bills at the Uptown Theater, the famous North Philadelphia mecca for R&B and soul music. Some of these engagements were arranged by Del Shields, a DJ on WDAS, the city’s premier Black radio station. Another WDAS DJ, Louise Bishop, would soon play a role in Aretha’s rise to superstardom.

Aretha had begun to make a name for herself in the early 1960s, but never achieved great success with Columbia Records, which was trying to mold her as a jazz and pop singer.  By the mid-1960s she had become disillusioned with the label. Aware of this, in 1966 Aretha’s friend Louise Bishop called Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, who had had success with Ray Charles, Wilson Picket, Solomon Burke, and other singers in the new gospel-influenced style called “soul” that Atlantic had helped to popularize. Wexler signed Aretha to Atlantic Records and gave her the freedom to craft her music the way she wanted, allowing her to choose songs and create arrangements in keeping with her gospel roots and that showcased her unique vocal gifts. The result was a string of hits beginning in 1967 that have since become iconic songs in American popular music: “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,”  “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” and many others. 

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Aretha had outgrown clubs and was headlining shows at Philadelphia’s largest concert venue, the Spectrum. Her career ebbed and flowed somewhat in the years that followed as musical tastes changed and new styles emerged, but she remained a major star. She first performed at the Mann Center on July 3, 1992, in a free concert that opened the city’s three-day July 4th “Sounds of Freedom” festival. Accompanied by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Franklin sang many of her hits, as well as Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song that had become one of her concert staples. An excellent pianist, she sang the song accompanying herself on the piano. A highlight of the night was when she brought out soul singer and Philadelphia native Teddy Pendergrass to sing a few songs with her. Pendergrass had been one of the biggest performing and recording artists in the world when he was paralyzed in car accident on  Lincoln Drive in Philadelphia in 1982. He made a successful comeback several years later, singing from a wheelchair, which is how he performed with Aretha at the Mann.

Aretha Franklin headlined at the Mann Center again in 2002 and 2010. The latter was a benefit concert on July 27, 2010, for the Mann’s educational and community engagement programs. It drew considerable attention for the fact that Aretha shared the stage with former U.S. Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, who is also a classical pianist. After opening the concert with Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture , The Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Rossen Milanov, then Artistic Director at the Mann, accompanied Rice in the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor . The second half of the concert was devoted to Aretha, who sang her many hits but also two opera arias, a genre she had begun to explore later in her career. She had famously stepped in at the last minute for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti at the 1998 Grammy awards to give a stirring rendition of the beloved Giacomo Puccini aria “Nessun Dorma,” a performance that soon became legendary. At the 2010 Mann concert, Aretha sang “Nessun Dorma” and an aria from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice . The concert concluded with Rice returning on piano to join Franklin in the latter’s 1968 hit “I Say A Little Prayer” and “My Country ‘tis of Thee.” Almost 10,000 attended the concert, which raised nearly $600,000 for the Mann’s education and engagement programs.

Franklin’s next and final  concert at the Mann seven years later almost did not happen. She had been battling pancreatic cancer, a slow moving disease, since 2010 and by the mid-2010s the illness had begun to impact her career. She embarked on a series of concerts in the summer of 2017 that were billed as a farewell tour, with most of the shows spaced several weeks to a month apart, but even that schedule was proving too much.  A June 10th concert in her hometown of Detroit was touch and go until the very last minute, due to her frail condition. She ultimately did the show, but had to cancel a July 1st concert in Toronto. Then she rallied for shows at Wolf Trap in Virginia on July 29th and the Mann on August 26th.

The 90-minute Mann show was filled with many of Aretha’s hits, along with some lesser-known numbers and a spirited ten-minute gospel medley. She introduced the latter by noting that the songs were made popular by “one of my mentors, who comes from the City of Brotherly Love … Clara Ward and the Ward Singers. They were so bad [i.e., good], it was ridiculous.” Later, while noodling at the piano as she was about to sing “Brand New Me,” she reminisced, “You know I started, really, in Philadelphia. I played all over Philadelphia,” giving shout outs to Peps, the Cadillac Club, and Del Shields. She closed the show with a lively version of her 1985 hit “Freeway of Love,” followed by her enduring anthem "Respect” as an encore. After singing the final verse, Aretha slowly danced her way off the stage—gingerly, but with obvious joy—as the band closed the song out. (There are many videos of the concert on YouTube.)

Aretha Franklin’s final full concert was at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago on September 3rd.  Then on November 7th she did a short set at the Elton John Aids Foundation benefit concert at a church in New York City, her final public appearance. She died on August 16, 2018, at her home in Detroit.  

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Aretha franklin, the queen of soul, we all need respect. everybody wants respect of some kind..

Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis Tennessee, but at an early age, her family moved, first to Buffalo, New York, and finally to Detroit, Michigan, where she spent her formative years.  Although Aretha Franklin spent much of her adult life in New York and Los Angeles, she would always regard Detroit as her hometown and returned to the city for the last three decades of her life.

Aretha’s mother died when she was ten, and she was raised by her father, a Baptist minister.  For 33 years, Rev. C. L. Franklin was pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit.  Rev. Franklin was not only a popular pastor but an influential civil rights activist, in demand for speaking engagements around the country.  Several of his sermons were recorded and issued as phonograph records. Admirers called him the “man with the million-dollar voice.”  Notable figures from the civil rights movement were regular visitors to New Bethel Church and were welcome guests in the Franklin home.  The country’s premier gospel singers — Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward — as well as secular jazz and blues musicians, also paid calls on Rev. Franklin, Aretha, and her brothers and sisters.

Aretha’s father encouraged her to sing.  When she was very small, her father would stand her on a chair to be seen from the pews when she sang in church.  She learned to play piano by ear, although she resisted formal lessons, and by age ten, she could foresee a career as a gospel singer.  In her teens, she joined the junior choir that traveled with her father on his speaking engagements.  While in California, the Franklins met the young Sam Cooke, lead singer with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers; they followed his career with interest as he left the Soul Stirrers to focus instead on secular pop music.  Sam Cooke’s success made a deep impression on young Aretha, who began to wonder if she too might pursue a music career outside of the church.

Her teenage years were difficult; while still a teenager, she gave birth to two sons by different boyfriends.  Her grandmother and older sisters helped raise the children while Aretha continued to work at her music.  With Rev. Franklin acting as manager, she recorded some gospel songs for a local record label, but her father felt she could do better with a larger national record company.

Passing on an offer from Berry Gordy’s Motown Records in Detroit, Rev. Franklin prevailed on musician friends to form a small group to make a demonstration recording for Columbia Records.  An executive at Columbia, the legendary producer John Hammond, was impressed with Aretha’s demos and invited her to New York for a live audition.  Hammond and his colleagues were sold, and at age 18, Aretha Franklin was signed to a contract with the most prestigious of American record companies.  Leaving her daughters with her family in Detroit, she moved to New York City to make her first major-label recordings.

Hammond teamed Aretha Franklin with some of the best arrangers and musicians in the business and recorded a variety of material, emphasizing the breadth of her talent.  Her early sessions included some blues and gospel-tinged numbers, but for the most part, Columbia seemed to see Franklin as a jazz and pop vocalist in the mode of Dinah Washington.  Her first single for Columbia, “Today I Sing the Blues,” placed in the Top Ten on Billboard magazine’s Rhythm and Blues (R&B) bestseller chart in 1960.  In January, Columbia released her first album,  Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo . Her first single on Billboard ’s pop music Top 40 chart was a 1920s standard, “Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.”

In 1961, Franklin married Ted White, a friend from Detroit who became her manager. Her records were well reviewed, and she swiftly acquired a reputation in the industry as a compelling new voice.  Shy and unassuming by nature, Franklin worked with the veteran African American dancer and choreographer Charles “Cholly” Atkins to acquire a more forceful stage presence.  By the mid-‘60s, she was winning an enthusiastic following for her live performances, and critics had begun to call her the “Queen of Soul,” a title that would never be challenged.

Despite her popularity with critics and audiences, Franklin’s record label seemed uncertain about which direction to take her career. Columbia had her recording both R&B and “easy listening” pop songs.  She scored hits on both the R&B and Easy Listening charts, but with the new sounds of rock and soul music dominating the charts, Franklin did not believe Columbia was providing the best opportunity to fulfill her true potential.

Determined to make a change, in 1967, Franklin moved from Columbia to Atlantic Records, the R&B-oriented label founded by Ahmet Ertegun.  Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat, had spent his student years in Washington, D.C., where he fell in love with jazz, blues, and the entire rich tradition of African American music.  He had focused on bringing black artists to the attention of a larger public, enjoying particular success with singer and pianist Ray Charles.

Ertegun assigned producer Jerry Wexler to work with Franklin. Rather than selecting material for her, Wexler urged her to choose her own songs.  Rather than having elaborate orchestral arrangements written for her, he urged her to accompany herself on the piano and create the groove for each song, allowing improvising musicians to follow her lead. Her first single for Atlantic, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” shot to number one on the R&B chart, and to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and gave the title to her first album. In December of 1967, the B-side of her first single, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” also made the R&B Top 40.

The following spring, Atlantic released the single that will forever be inextricably associated with Aretha Franklin. The soul singer Otis Redding had originally written and recorded the song “Respect” in 1965.  Franklin rearranged the song, adding the break in which she spelled out the word  “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” while her sisters rapidly sang the words “sock it to me,” a popular catchphrase of the day.  The new arrangement, her performance — and the unmistakable significance of a woman rather than a man demanding respect from her loved one — spoke to the pent-up frustrations of men and women around the world. The song was embraced as an anthem by both the civil rights movement and by the burgeoning women’s movement.

“Respect” brought Franklin two Grammy Awards, for Best R&B Record and Best Female R&B Performance. Her first Atlantic album became a gold record, selling half a million copies. Franklin scored two more Top Ten singles in 1968: “Baby I Love You” and the unforgettable “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” which was written by Carole King. The following year, she released two Top Ten albums,  Lady Soul and Aretha Now!  The year also saw some of her most successful singles, “Chain of Fools,” “Ain’t No Way,” “Think,” and “Say a Little Prayer.”

In February 1968, she was presented with the Drum Beat Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she had known since she was a teenager.  When Dr. King was murdered in April, Franklin performed the spiritual “My Precious Lord” at his funeral.  Now an international star, she toured Europe that spring and was featured on the cover of TIME magazine.

Franklin divorced husband Ted White in 1969 and took full charge of her career for the first time. In the early 1970s, she continued her run of hit albums with Spirit in the Dark and Young, Gifted and Black .  She was the first soul artist to play at the San Francisco rock venue Fillmore West, a performance documented on the album Aretha Live at Fillmore West , in 1971. Returning to her roots in gospel music, she recorded a live album at New Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles.  Amazing Grace sold over two million copies, making it the bestselling album of her career and the bestselling gospel album of all time.

Jerry Wexler’s departure from Atlantic left her without a strong partner at the label. A collaboration with Quincy Jones on the album Hey Now Hey was a disappointment. She scored her last R&B hit of the ‘70s with “Something He Can Feel” from the soundtrack of the film Sparkle .  Her last albums for Atlantic sold poorly, and in the middle of the decade, her career was faltering.

Franklin moved from New York to Los Angeles in search of renewed inspiration and opportunity.  In 1978, she married actor Glynn Turman, making a new home for her children as well as his.  Family matters took center stage in 1979.  In Detroit, Rev. C. L. Franklin was shot at his home, presumably by a burglar attempting a robbery.  He survived the shooting but fell into a coma. His children provided 24-hour nursing care at home. Her father lingered in a coma for five years and never regained consciousness.

Franklin ended her 12-year relationship with Atlantic Records in 1979 and began looking for a new label. She was back in the public eye with a memorable performance in the highly successful film The Blues Brothers , singing her 1960s hit “Think.”  She signed with Arista Records, run by proven hitmaker Clive Davis.  Franklin gradually returned to the top of the charts with her albums for Arista, scoring a gold record with her 1982 album,  Jump to It .  The same year, Franklin separated from her husband, Glynn Turman, and returned home to Detroit to be near her family.  With her brother and sisters at her side, she saw her father through his last days. C. L. Franklin died in 1984.

For Aretha Franklin, personal loss coincided with renewed career success.  Her 1985 Arista album,  Who’s Zoomin’ Who, was certified platinum and included the massive hit single “Freeway of Love.”  The same year, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 1987, she recorded another gospel album,  One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, at her father’s old church in Detroit. She enjoyed further chart success throughout the 1990s with the singles “A Deeper Love,” “Willing to Forgive,” and “A Rose Is Still a Rose.”  The album of the same name was also a gold record.  The music industry honored her with a Grammy Legend Award in 1991 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.

In 1998, Franklin was scheduled to appear at the Grammy Awards. When fellow guest performer, the famed operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, was forced by illness to cancel at the last minute, Franklin was asked to fill in his place in the program. The orchestra had prepared to accompany Pavarotti in one of his signature pieces, the aria “ Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s opera Turandot .  Franklin already had sung the aria herself at a benefit concert a few months earlier, in her own key.  To the amazement of producers, musicians, and the audience, she offered to sing it with the orchestra in the tenor’s original key. Her astonishing performance stopped the show.  The aria became a regular part of her concert repertoire and inspired her to further explore classical vocal literature.  In 2003, after 20 years with Arista Records, she recorded her last album with the label, Jewels in the Crown: All-Star Duets with the Queen .

More than a beloved entertainer, Aretha Franklin had become a treasured living symbol of the American spirit.  In 2005, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.  She was no stranger to public ceremonies, having performed at President Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala in 1993. An even more emotional moment occurred when she performed in the frigid open air at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, delivering a memorable performance of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

Her 2014 album,  Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics, included not only her version of “ Nessun Dorma ” but a version of “Rolling in the Deep,” previously a hit for the British singer Adele. Franklin’s version became her 100th song to make the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop chart.  She had now received every conceivable honor from her peers in the music world, in addition to her 18 Grammy Awards.

After canceling some concerts due to health issues, she toured the United States again in 2014. In 2015, she sang “ Nessun Dorma ” for Pope Francis at the World Meeting of Families.  At that year’s Kennedy Center Honors, during a tribute to Carole King, Franklin sang “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” to an audience including President Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama, winning a standing ovation from the audience and moving the president to tears.

On November 7, 2017, she gave her last public performance, singing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, at the 15th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Gala.  Aretha Franklin succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 76 in 2018.  She was mourned around the world.  Speakers at her funeral included former President Barack Obama, who said her life and work “helped define the American experience.”  Her recorded legacy and the example of her passion, endurance, and commitment to her art continue to inspire musicians, music lovers and ordinary men and women the world over.

On September 15, 2021, Rolling Stone released its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” topped the list as the No. 1 song. The outlet said the 1967 hit “catalyzed rock & roll, gospel, and blues to create the model for soul music that artists still look to today…Just as important, the song’s unapologetic demands resonated powerfully with the civil rights movement and emergent feminist revolution, fitting for an artist who donated to the Black Panther Party and sang at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.”

In the late 1960s, the world came to know and love Aretha Franklin as the “Queen of Soul Music.”  Her hit recording “Respect” became an anthem of the civil rights struggle and of the nascent women’s movement.

As a child, she sang gospel at the Detroit, Michigan church of her pastor father; with his encouragement, she pursued a career as a professional singer, signing with Columbia Records at age 18.  A move to Atlantic Records in 1967 led to a series of hit singles — “Think,” “Chain of Fools,” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” — that defined the changing consciousness of the era.

Aretha Franklin continued to record hit albums for the next 30 years, expanding her repertoire to encompass a vast spectrum of music — blues, gospel, R&B, jazz standards, and operatic arias.  She was honored by her peers with 18 Grammy Awards and by her country with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

You were born in Memphis.  What was that like?

Aretha Franklin:   I don’t know what Memphis was like because I was so small when I left there; I don’t even remember being there.  I don’t know.  It’s a very tiny place, what I saw when I went back to the home where I was born.  I can’t say I grew up there because we went to Buffalo from there, I guess when I was maybe about two or three, maybe. I’m not sure.

How did you come to move from Memphis to Buffalo?

Aretha Franklin:  My father moved the family to Buffalo, New York.  He pastored the Friendship Baptist Church there for about four years.  After that, we moved to Detroit and he pastored the New Bethel Baptist Church for about 28 years.

Did your father encourage your singing?

Aretha Franklin:   Oh, sure.  My dad always encouraged me to sing.  Many times, I was too small to be singing, so they would put a chair there, and I would just stand on top of the chair top and sing at the Sunday night broadcast or the Sunday morning services.

So you started singing in the church?

I sang in the junior choir.  And I was one of the lead vocalists for the choir.  I played piano for the choir occasionally.  And customarily on the road when my father would go on the road and have services in major auditoriums and arenas across the country, I would precede him singing, then he would minister from there.

Did you have formal lessons on the piano?

Aretha Franklin:   Yes and no.

Aretha Franklin: I started out playing by ear, and my dad wanted me to take lessons, and I didn’t want to take lessons, so I would run and hide every time the teacher came — hide in the closet behind the coats — and once I thought she was gone, I would come out.  But I wish today that I had taken the lessons.  Now I plan to go to Juilliard sometime soon and hopefully do at least a couple of years there.  So I really wish that I had learned the fundamentals then.

When did you start to think about singing outside the church, as a career?

Aretha Franklin:  I don’t know.  I think maybe about 15 or 16.  Something like that.

I had the occasion to meet Sam Cooke, who came to one of our gospel presentations after church that we would have regularly on Sunday evenings.  And after meeting Sam and listening to him, he left the gospel field and began to record for SAR, S-A-R, Records.  That was Sam Alexander and S. R. Crain, who was one of the Soul Stirrers, and he also was Sam’s manager.  Sam had such great success in leaving gospel, or certainly broadening his horizons, I wondered if I could do the same thing.  I wondered if I could be as successful singing secular music as gospel.  So I talked to my dad about it.  And he said, “If that’s what you want to do, by all means.”

Can you tell us about the journey from singing with the church choir to becoming a secular entertainer?

Aretha Franklin:  Well, there was a lot of rehearsal involved, certainly.  Many hours spent rehearsing, learning the lyrics, and so on. Presentation.  Cholly Atkins, who just passed about two weeks ago (in 2003), was my very first choreographer.  And pretty much, coming up, it was choreography, lyrics, and selection.

Tell us about the first record you made.

Aretha Franklin:  The first record I made for Columbia was “Today I Sing the Blues,” but before that…

Aretha Franklin: I recorded for Chess Records, with whom my dad was affiliated, and in concert out in the Oakland Arena in California. We had services there.  My very first recording really was “Precious Lord” (Part 1 and Part 2).  After that, there were a few things for the Chess label prior to Columbia. And Columbia, in 1962 — I was brought to the company by John Hammond. I did an audition for Mr. Hammond in a little, small room, just a little larger than this one, with a piano; and my manager at the time, Joe King, who took me over to Columbia; my dad, who put a rhythm section together for me, people that he knew. As he and Art Tatum were very good friends, he would always go and see Art Tatum when he would come in town, and Art Tatum would come to church when he would come to town and have dinner at our home or something like that.  But anyway, he knew some of the musicians, so he put a saxophone player — and he called his friend; he asked him to put the rest of the musicians together.  He knew the bass player, but he didn’t know anyone else.  So anyway, the bass player, Mule Holley — who was rather prominent in those days — put the rhythm section together actually.

You were in Detroit while Motown was getting started. We understand that Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, was interested in signing you, but your dad turned him down. Is that right?

Aretha Franklin: He went and he visited Berry (Gordy).  He went to see Berry, and they met, and they talked.  He didn’t feel that Berry had the kind of distribution that he wanted for me.  He wanted me to have national and international distribution, and at that time, Berry was just a fledgling label really.  He was not “the” Berry Gordy that we know today.  Columbia was suggested to him, and it was to my dad’s liking, much better — Columbia — because they had national and international distribution and promo.

You’re lucky to have a father who was so…

Aretha Franklin:  Savvy.

So involved and so supportive.

Aretha Franklin:  Yes, that’s right.

How did you feel about it at that time?  Did you trust him to take care of you and take over your career?

Aretha Franklin:  My dad didn’t take over my career.  He was just the guiding light to New York.  He saw to it that I had the right management and agents and so on before he went back to Detroit.

When did you start writing songs? Was that when you got to New York?

Aretha Franklin: “Without the One You Love” was one of my first compositions.  Bob Mersey at the time — who also did some things for Streisand — was on Columbia.  We were both on Columbia at the same time.  And Mersey arranged that.   I walked in the studio that evening and the string players were there.  I’d never had strings or anything on any of my records.  And just to hear my music being played like that, I just broke down in tears.

How long were you with Columbia?

Aretha Franklin:  I was with Columbia for six years before I went to Atlantic Records and signed with Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun.

That was a big leap.

Aretha Franklin:   Yes.  That was a quantum leap from Columbia.

What was the difference?

Aretha Franklin: At Columbia, everything pretty much was arranged for me by Mr. Hammond.  He would secure the musicians and arrangers — Bob Mersey, who was just magnificent in those days. He probably still is.  Clyde Otis did some of the production work in the early days.  Ray Bryant did some of the production work, a fabulous pianist.  But the difference — I think the main difference was Jerry (Wexler) asked me to sit at the piano and bring in some things, where, at Columbia, they pretty much were telling me what to do rather than just letting me do.  So I think that was the main difference.  I made the selections once we got to Atlantic.

You went for kind of a new sound, didn’t you?

Aretha Franklin:   Well, it was there all the time.  We just hadn’t done it.

Could you tell that you were breaking through at that point?

Aretha Franklin:   Not really.  Not until I heard “Respect” was on the charts, and it was very close to the top of the charts.  Then we kind of knew something was happening.

When you recorded “Respect,” did you ever imagine people would be listening to it and loving it all these years later?

Aretha Franklin:   You never know.  You never know until you put it out there, and the people tell you whether they like it or not, whether you have something or not.  It’s standing up pretty good.  It’s standing up.  That’s what Jerry used to say.  We would record, and sometimes we would be in there for maybe four or five hours, but the proof of the pudding for him was the next day.  If it stood up and it sounded as good the next day as it did the night before, then he felt like we had something.

The thing about that song is not just the greatness of the performance, it became kind an anthem for different movements in our society.

Aretha Franklin:   Well, we all need respect.  Everybody wants respect of some kind.

 How did you feel when you saw that picked up that way?

Aretha Franklin:   I thought it was fabulous. “Hey, go ahead!”

Can you remember how you felt when you won your first Grammy?

Aretha Franklin:  First Grammy? I was not there.  I wasn’t even aware of what the Grammy meant.  Jerry Wexler and Arif (Mardin) and Ahmet (Ertegun) were there, picking up the Grammys.  I didn’t know what Grammys were for maybe the first couple of years, one or two years, and then somebody went, “Hey, you won a Grammy!”  “I did?  Okay.  And a Grammy is what?”  Well, I found out what Grammys were, and what they meant, and I’m very, very proud of the fact that I have a record number of them.

You stayed with Atlantic and Jerry Wexler for a long time.  Was that unusual?

Aretha Franklin:   I don’t think so. I don’t argue with success.  I was there from ‘67 through ‘79.  That’s 13 years.  I think Ray Charles was with the label longer than that.  It’s not very long.

What made that such a successful relationship?

Aretha Franklin:   We were just compatible and had mutual respect, I think, for each other.

Do you ever have stage fright?

Aretha Franklin:   In the early years, yes. After time, I became more confident about it.  You learn a lot as you go

Did you have any tricks to try to get over it?

Aretha Franklin:   No.  I am a trickless artiste.

You mentioned going to Juilliard to get some more training. What do you want to do with that?

Aretha Franklin:   Teach. Teach and coach.  I’d really like to teach a master class in soul at Juilliard, yes.

We’ve all loved hearing you sing Puccini’s “ Nessun dorma .”  Are there other operatic arias or classical songs you’d like to sing?

Aretha Franklin:   “ Nessun dorma ,” yes.  I love that.  That’s one of my favorites, and yes, I love Puccini.  “Song to the Moon” (Dvořák) and some other arias that I’m learning, “Doretta’s Aria,” and “ O mio babbino caro ” — things like that.

There are people who say you are the greatest singer of all time.  Do you agree with that?

Aretha Franklin:  I’ll leave that to other people.  It’s not for me to say.  But as far as singers are concerned, some of the singers that I particularly like would be Barbara Hendricks — classical — and Kathleen Battle, and Leontyne Price, of course.  And I think that Judy Garland was one of the world’s great singers as well.

Have you ever recorded “Somewhere Over the Rainbow?”

Aretha Franklin:  I have.  In fact, it was on one of my first recordings at Columbia.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

Aretha Franklin:   Thank you.

 What a pleasure talking to you.

Aretha Franklin:   My pleasure.  Thank you very much.

• 28 photos

Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin was a  singer, songwriter, pianist, actress, and civil rights activist. Her multi-octave vocal range moved millions of people around the world during an expansive career that spanned six decades. As a child, Franklin learned how to play piano by ear, and by the age of 12 her father, a prominent preacher, began managing her career. She accompanied him on the road as he traveled in his, “gospel caravan” tours where she performed at various churches. At the age of 16, Franklin went on tour with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and years later performed at his funeral. Once she turned 18, Franklin made the decision to transition from gospel to pop music and moved to New York. In 1960, she signed with Columbia records and released her first secular album,  Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo . The album was a mix of diverse genres such as standards, vocal jazz, blues, doo-wop, and rhythm-and-blues. By the end of 1961, Franklin had her first international hit, “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” and she was named the “new-star female vocalist” by DownBeat magazine.

Her career continued to skyrocket, as Aretha Franklin became a household name. By the end of the 1960s, Franklin had come to be known as the “Queen of Soul.” Many of Franklin’s songs, such as “Respect,” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” became anthems of movements for social change. Throughout her life, Franklin was immersed and involved in the struggle for civil rights and women’s rights. She provided money for civil rights groups, at times covering payroll, and performed at many benefits and protests. Aretha Franklin was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was awarded a Grammy Legend Award in 1991 and later awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. Franklin was a Kennedy Center Honoree, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award, presented by Awards Council member and NWHF 2011 Inductee Coretta Scott King. Aretha Franklin’s music has been an inspiration for many artists, and her legacy is enduring.

Year Honored: 2020 Birth: 1942 - 2018 Achievements: Arts

32 Mind-Blowing Concert Films

I consider myself a connoisseur of concert films. There are some I've seen dozens, maybe hundreds of times. While I can appreciate almost any of them, there are some that are just simply mind-blowing, either in how they are constructed or in the music being played. Sometimes they are more like documentaries, and sometimes they are just raw performances, but the impact is the same. Here are some of my favorite ones. 

The Last Waltz (1978)

On Thanksgiving night, 1976, The Band got together with some of their best friends in the music industry and put on what they called their final concert. Martin Scorsese brought in a crack crew of camera operators to film the whole thing and the results are amazing. The Band was joined by guests like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, and Muddy Waters, and they called it, The Last Waltz.

Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll (1987)

When the legendary Chuck Berry turned 60 years old in 1986, a bunch of his friends joined him to celebrate at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in his hometown of St. Louis. With a band led by Keith Richards, Berry played all his iconic early rock n' roll hits with guests like Eric Clapton, Julian Lennon, and Etta James, but the highlight was Berry arriving on stage in the back of his 1973 Cadillac convertible.

Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2018)

Beyoncé's performance at Coachella in 2018 was an instant classic. Luckily for all of us, it was preserved as Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé and released in partnership with Netflix. It's an astounding show, with dozens of dancers and band members (and a marching band), and covers a number of themes important to Black Americans. 

Rattle And Hum (1988)

In 1987, U2 was on top of the world. After the release of their album The Joshua Tree in 1987, they went out on a world tour and filmed some of it for the movie Rattle And Hum. It's not a perfect movie, but there is one moment that makes it all worth it. The first part of the movie was filmed in black and white and then, about halfway through, it dramatically turns to color when a red background lights up behind the band as the play "Where The Streets Have No Name." It's spectacular. 

Monterey Pop (1968)

The 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival was Woodstock before Woodstock. The three-day festival featured some of the biggest stars of the day, but it's really remembered best for one transcendent performance. On the final night of the festival, The Jimi Hendrix Experience played an incredible show that ended with "Wild Thing," when Hendrix laid his guitar on the stage and lit it on fire. It's one of the most famous moments in rock history and it's all in Monterey Pop . 

Rock The Bells (2006)

Sadly, there aren't a ton of hip-hop concert films, and the few that there are, really are hit or miss. One that definitely doesn't miss is 2006's Rock The Bells . The documentary and concert film covers the first Rock The Bells festival in 2004 featuring the reunited Wu-Tang Clan's first show in years.

The Grateful Dead Movie (1977)

The Grateful Dead went on their first extended hiatus after playing a run of shows at The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in October of 1974. These shows featured the return of drummer Mickey Hart as well, and they were captured on film and released in 1977. For years, The Grateful Dead Movie was one of the rare examples for Deadheads to actually watch the band, and not just hear the famous bootlegs. 

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

There isn't much that can been said that hasn't already been about Taylor Swift's unprecedented Eras Tour or the movie that was released in 2023. Both have broken all kinds of records and since most of us don't have the scratch to see the shows, this great movie is what we have, and it's great. 

Amazing Grace (2018)

A movie 46 years in the making, Amazing Grace is an incredible concert film starring the great Aretha Franklin performing gospel music in a Los Angeles church in 1972. There is nothing else quite like it, and it's a rare footage of a full concert by Aretha Franklin at the height of her power. 

Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009)

Michael Jackson's This Is It is a lot different than most of the movies on this list as it's actually the rehearsals for a show, rather than a show. It was filmed just before the King of Pop's death as he prepped for an upcoming run of shows in London that were canceled when he died in 2009. 

Stop Making Sense (1984)

On any list ranking the best concert films, you're sure to find Stop Making Sense at or near the very top. Directed by Jonathan Demme, the Talking Heads movie is everything anyone could ever want in a concert. It's an amazing performance and an amazing presentation. 

Woodstock (1970)

The Woodstock festival in the summer of 1969 is the most famous music festival of all time, and while the movie of the fest, released a year later, is missing a lot of the legendary performances, it's still a mind-blowing film. Santana's "Soul Sacrifice" is jaw-dropping, as is Jimi Hendrix. 

The Song Remains The Same (1976)

In the mid-'70s, Led Zeppelin was huge and they were as self-indulgent as any band, ever. 1976's The Song Remains The Same is the perfect representation of that as bizarre staged scenes are placed between incredible live performances of the band at Madison Square Garden. 

Gimme Shelter (1970)

The Rolling Stones' concert film Gimme Shelter was supposed to be a triumphant movie of their 1969 tour of the U.S. ending with their performance at Altamont raceway near San Francisco. Instead, it turned into a nightmare when a concert-goer pulled a gun at the show and was stabbed to death by the Hell's Angels. The movie has it all on tape, too, in addition to some great concert footage. 

Wattstax (1974)

One of the more under-the-radar festivals at the time and concert film today has to be Wattstax . Documenting the incredible one-day festival in Los Angeles in 1973, it features some of the best soul, funk, and jazz you'll ever hear.

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016)

When Justin Timberlake decided to make a movie about his 20/20 Experience World Tour he hired Jonathon Demme to direct. Demme also directed Stop Making Sense for Talking Heads and was one of the best in the biz. The results are clear, it's a masterpiece. 

Bittersweet Motel (2000)

Long before Todd Phillips became a household name with movies like The Hangover and Joker , he made a documentary/concert film about the band Phish called Bittersweet Motel . Phillips caught the band in one of the most artistically fertile periods and it has some of the best concert footage of the band out there. 

Soul Power (2008)

One of the all-time best documentaries is When We Were Kings about the legendary Rumble In The Jungle boxing match. Part of that doc includes footage of the Zaire '74 music festival that happened around the same time. In 2008, much more footage was released as Soul Power and it's phenomenal. 

Jazz On A Summer's Day (1959)

There is not a ton of film footage of some of the legends of mid-century jazz and early rock and roll, which is what makes Jazz On A Summer's Day so special. With performances by Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, and Chuck Berry among others at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 it's one of the coolest films on this list. 

Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii (1972)

Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii is unique for a couple of reasons. One, it's not performed in front of an audience. The band is along with the film crew in an ancient ruin in Pompeii. The second reason is just that too – it's in an ancient ruin in Italy. What else would you expect from Pink Floyd?

Springsteen on Broadway (2018)

Bruce Springsteen's residency on Broadway in New York was originally scheduled to last about a month in 2017. It ended up running for four years, and well over 200 shows. Two of the shows were captured on film and debuted on Netflix in October 2018. It's an engaging, intimate performance by one of the all-time greats.

Shut Up And Play The Hits (2012)

When LCD Soundsystem decided to make a concert film of their shows at Madison Square Garden in 2011, they were supposed to be their final shows and that's how this movie presents them. They ended up reuniting in 2015, but that doesn't take away from the power of this excellent concert film. 

Elvis: That's the Way It Is

Elvis Presley was in a whole bunch of movies during his career in the '50s and '60s, but his first concert didn't come out until 1970 with Elvis: That's the Way It Is . It features The King's return to live performance as he took up residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. It's a powerhouse performance and a must-see for rock fans. 

Festival Express (2003)

The stories surrounding the traveling festival across Canada in 1970 are too rated R to tell here, but the film gives audiences a glimpse of the wild train rides between gigs and of many of the performances from the tour from the bands on it, like The Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, and Buddy Guy, among others. The bits on the train are the best part, especially an impromptu performance of an inebriated Janis Joplin, Rick Danko, and Jerry Garcia. 

Sign 'O' The Times (1987)

Prince's album Sign 'O' The Times wasn't much of a commercial success so to promote it, he made this concert film and released it in theaters. The movie was a bomb too, and none of it makes sense. The album is incredible and the film is Prince at the zenith of his musical powers in the mid-'80s. Critics loved it, and so will you. 

Instrument (1999)

Washington DC hardcore icons Fugazi are notorious protective of their legacy and while they encourage fans to make bootlegs at their concerts, they've been somewhat stingy about releasing their own videos of live performances. Instrument is an exception and wow is it wonderful to watch if you're a fan of the band. Recorded between 1987 and 1998, it captures a lot of the magic that made Fugazi so special to their fans. 

Let It Be (1970)

When Peter Jackson released Get Back on Disney+ in 2021, it completely changed how many fans saw the demise of The Beatles. The reason the end was seen as so dark was due to the 1970 film Let It Be which was a truncated telling of the story by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Both Get Back and Let It Be end with the triumphant rooftop concert by The Beatles, and that's the reason to watch.

American Utopia (2020)

If you combine the musical talents of David Byrne and the filmmaking abilities of Spike Lee, the results are sure to be amazing. American Utopia doesn't disappoint. Filmed during Byrne's Broadway engagement of the show, Lee's deft touch translates the live show film perfectly.  

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

Director D.A. Pennebaker made a lot of great documentaries during his career. One of the best is Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars , featuring David Bowie's final performance as "Ziggy Stardust" in London in 1973. It's Bowie at his best. 

Truth Or Dare (1991)

Leave it to Madonna to be responsible for one of the most controversial entries on this list. Truth Or Dare , released in 1991, was condemned by some for its most risque parts, but praised by many for capturing a high point in the Material Girl's career. 

In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up (1991)

In the early '90s, one of the craziest bands to see live was the Chicago industrial band Ministry. Their 1991 tour was captured on the home video release, In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up . It can be summed up in one word: "nuts." Words can't even begin to describe the action, but it's easy enough to find online, so check it out. 

Under Great White Northern Lights (2009)

Under Great White Northern Lights documents The White Stripes tour across Canada in 2007. It is a mix of stage performances in front of thousands, and more intimate performances and interviews off-stage. 

There are so many great concert films out there we could never list them all, but these 32 mid-blowers are a great start. 

‘Full of secrets and promises’: Dusty Springfield’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!

Sixty years after her debut album, we rate the pop singer’s best tracks, from a song recorded in a stairwell to a Pet Shop Boys collaboration

20. Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage (1979)

It’s closer to a show tune than soul, but Dusty Springfield kept singing Quiet Please live during her wilderness years for a reason. The version from 1979, the year Springfield’s UK tour was cancelled due to poor sales, is particularly freighted: “She may not be the latest rage, but she’s singing and she means it … give her your respect if nothing else.”

19. Oh No! Not My Baby (1965)

In an era when albums were usually a filler-packed afterthought, Springfield’s were anything but: she clearly saw them as a chance to indulge in the music she loved, rather than simply making hits. From 1965’s Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty, her potent take on Maxine Brown’s recent US hit is the perfect example of what lurks in their grooves.

18. That’s the Kind of Love I’ve Got for You (1978)

A gay icon with a soulful voice, Springfield should have been a perfect fit for disco: with material as strong as That’s the Kind of Love I’ve Got for You, her failure to click seems even weirder. Anyone interested in exploring dancefloor Dusty further should check 1979’s Baby Blue and the Barry Gibb-penned Save Me, Save Me.

17. No Stranger Am I (1968)

In his superb forthcoming LGBTQ pop history, The Secret Public, Jon Savage makes a hugely convincing case for this B-side as one of Springfield’s greatest 60s performances. A delicate, lovely slice of beautifully-sung folk, written by Springfield’s then-lover Norma Tanega, listening to it feels like eavesdropping on a private, reflective moment of calm.

16. I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face (1967)

From her third album, the brilliant Where Am I Going?, I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face is evidence of the sheer class and sophistication Springfield brought to mid-60s pop: a great song, a fantastic arrangement – by Serge Gainsbourg cohort Arthur Greenslade – and a fabulous vocal. Heretical but true: it’s better than Aretha Franklin’s version.

15. Am I the Same Girl? (1969)

Posthumously inducting his friend into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Elton John suggested Springfield could “claim any song as her own”. Here’s a case in point. She floats over Am I the Same Girl? – a ballsy decision considering original vocalist Barbara Acklin’s impassioned delivery – bringing softness and vulnerability: different, but just as good.

14. Someone Who Cares (1972)

That an album as good as Faithful went unreleased for 44 years says everything about how dramatically Springfield’s career unravelled in the 70s. Someone Who Cares snuck out via a B-side, then the outtake hodgepodge See All Her Faces: its jump from beatless ballad to tough danceability and back is really thrilling.

13. Nothing Has Been Proved (1989)

After her glorious cameo on What Have I Done to Deserve This?, the Pet Shop Boys were heavily involved with Springfield’s comeback album Reputation. The Motown-stomping In Private was the biggest hit, but this is the pick of their collaborations, a beautifully hazy reflection on the Profumo affair. Her vocal on the climactic chorus is amazing.

12. I Only Want to Be With You (1963)

A solo debut released weeks after the Springfields’ final gig and a step away from the pop-folk that had made the trio’s name, I Only Want to Be With You offered a British take on Phil Spector’s sound and a killer melody: it was hugely striking, although Springfield would quickly transcend brash pop.

11. In the Middle of Nowhere (1965)

The power of In the Middle of Nowhere lurks in the weird tension at its centre. The music swaggers along unstoppably, finger-snapping and horn-laden, and Springfield’s vocal delivery is utterly imperious, but the lyrics are full of pleading woe: shattered dreams, unrequited passion, a relationship on the rocks.

10. Let’s Talk It Over (1970)

In a more just world, 1970’s From Dusty… With Love would be mentioned in the same breath as Dusty in Memphis. It’s a superb, forward-thinking album, that explores the nascent Philly soul sound with songwriter-producers Gamble and Huff. Beautifully orchestrated, with a distinct gospel undertow, closer Let’s Talk It Over is magnificent.

9. Little By Little (1966)

Written by the same team as In the Middle of Nowhere, Little By Little essentially does the same thing – swaggering brass-heavy music, commanding in-your-face vocal, lyrical despair – but somehow improves the formula, honing it to a point of perfection: an awesome single on which misery somehow sounds like an invitation to party.

8. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (1966)

If Springfield could sometimes sound equivocal when discussing her biggest hit of the 60s – “schmaltz”, she once called it – she certainly didn’t sound equivocal singing it. Apparently recorded while leaning over a stairwell, her vocal is alternately fragile and – at the climax – cathartic. Amid the wilfully over-the-top arrangement, she sounds utterly believable.

7. Breakfast in Bed (1969)

You could make a convincing argument for almost any track from Dusty in Memphis to have a place on this list, but even in such exalted company Breakfast in Bed shines. It’s a wonderful piece of songwriting; moreover, her voice nails the complex cocktail of emotions – seductive, desperate, yearning, sad – at its centre.

6. I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself (1964)

On which Springfield first deployed her signature vocal style – “haunting, husky, full of secrets and promises” in Bette Midler’s memorable summation – and transformed a minor Bacharach-David song into a huge hit. I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself is perfectly poised: dramatic, but never melodramatic.

5. Goin’ Back (1966)

The definitive reading of a Goffin-King song essayed by everyone from Diana Ross to the Byrds, whose David Crosby balked at recording what he considered Brill Building fluff. Perhaps he hadn’t heard Springfield’s version, which is anything but fluffy: it yearns and aches, a stunning direct hit to the heart.

4. The Look of Love (1967)

Originally featured on the soundtrack to Casino Royale, Springfield’s second hit version of The Look of Love pared the song down slightly, and somehow managed to up its sensuality. Her voice sounds almost impossibly direct and intimate, as if someone had draped pillow talk over a bossa nova rhythm.

3. I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten (1968)

British songwriter Clive Westlake’s efforts were largely aimed at the easy-listening market – Cilla Black, Anita Harris – but I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten is too gripping and dramatic to warrant that label. Its emotions surge and ebb, dragging the listener along, amplified by Springfield’s perfectly judged vocal: a masterpiece.

2. Some of Your Lovin’ (1965)

Apparently Springfield’s favourite of her own singles, Some of Your Lovin’ is just superb: a sumptuous Goffin-King girl group ballad (originally sung by the Honey Bees) given a layer of grownup sophistication. It sounds not unlike a dry run for, or a pointer towards, the peerless Dusty in Memphis.

1. Son of a Preacher Man (1968)

It might have been the album she was born to make, but the sessions for Dusty in Memphis were famously fraught: at least one observer has suggested that the insecure singer had to be dissuaded from quitting long before work was finished. It’s hard to believe though, when you hear Son of a Preacher Man, which is the kind of song on which everything – lyric, vocal, melody, beautifully restrained arrangement; smouldering, carnal atmosphere – clicks smoothly into place. It is perfection that sounds like it was achieved without breaking a sweat. That it was anything but only adds to its inarguable greatness.

• Dusty Springfield
• Pop and rock

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‘The Masked Singer’ Reveals Identity of the Poodle Moth: Here’s the Celebrity Under the Costume

By Michael Schneider

Michael Schneider

Variety Editor at Large

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SPOILER ALERT: Do not read ahead if you have not watched Season 11, Episode 10 of “ The Masked Singer ,” “Quarter Finals: Final Four,” which aired May 8 on Fox.

“This Is Us” star Chrissy Metz knew “The Masked Singer” would be a challenge. But that’s why Metz, who was revealed as latest celebrity to be unmasked on Wednesday night’s quarter finals, figured she had to do it.

Popular on Variety

For Poodle Moth, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg got it right with Chrissy Metz. Rita Ora guessed Faith Hill. Robin Thicke went with Shania Twain. Ken Jeong said it was Melissa McCarthy.

The two singers with the least amount of votes were Poodle Moth and Gumball. The two then faced off in a smackdown, each performing their own version of “If I Could Turn Back Time,” by Cher. Gumball won, and will join Goldfish and Clock in next week’s semi-finals.

Back for Season 11 are host Nick Cannon, alongside panelists Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg, Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke, while Rita Ora has joined the desk to fill in for Nicole Scherzinger, who was in London to star on the West End’s “Sunset Boulevard.”

“The Masked Singer” Season 11 features themed episodes including “The Wizard of Oz,” in celebration of the 85th anniversary of the classic film; “Transformers” (marking the brand’s 40th anniversary) and music tributes including “Billy Joel Night” and “Queen Night.” Additional themes include “Girl Groups,” “Soundtrack of My Life,” “TV Theme Night” and “Shower Anthems.”

With sixteen total celebrity singers, including three “wildcards,” Season 11 features new costumes including “Gumball,” “Lizard,” “Ugly Sweater,” “Goldfish,” “Starfish,” “Book,” “Gumball,” “Miss Cleocatra,” “Afghan Hound,” “Beets,” “Poodle Moth,” “Clock,” “Spaghetti & Meatballs,” “Lizard,” “Koala,” “Seal” and “Sir Lion.” According to the show, the Season 11 contestants boast a combined 22 Grammy nominations, 11 platinum albums, 33 Teen Choice nominations, 108 million records sold, 326 film appearances and 1.7 billion Spotify streams.

This means Group B winner Gumball will face off against Group A winner Goldfish and Group C’s Poodle Moth and Clock for the quarter finals.

Here were the performances on Wednesday’s Episode 10, “Quarter Finals: Final Four”:

Goldfish (Group A Champion)

Song: “Unforgettable,” by Nat King Cole

Panel guesses: Nicole Scherzinger, Hilary Duff, Julianne Hough

Phone message clue: “Hey babe, I’m so happy to see you thriving in this competition. But honestly, I knew you would all along. You never back down from a challenge and you absolutely love to perform live.”

Package voiceover: “It feels incredible to be the Group A winner. Best part of being here is getting to do what I love. I feel like I’ve been through a lot in my career. When you’re young and suddenly a role model, there’s a lot of pressure to live up to the expectation. And grow up in front of the whole world. People wanted me to be one thing: Perfect. But perfect is impossible. The one thing that I am is resilient. In Hollywood, you have to keep reinventing yourself. We’re not the same from our teenage years to our adult years. And thank God! Tonight I’m singing ‘Unforgettable.’ And it would mean the world to me to get to the semi-finals. Because while they say goldfish don’t have a great memory, this experience is one I will never forget.”

Previous songs: “Vampire,” by Olivia Rodrigo, “Baby Come Back,” by Player; “The Show Must Go On,” by Queen

Previous panel guesses: Lea Michele, Selena Gomez, Carly Rae Jepsen, Sarah Hyland, Kristen Stewart, Nina Dobrev, Hilary Duff, Vanessa Hudgens

Gumball (Group B Champion)

Panel guesses: James van der Beek, Derek Hough, Taran Killam

Phone message clue: “Hi, Gumball, it’s your wife, Mrs. Gumball. I’m just so proud of you. And watching you on that stage reminds me of your time spent off-Broadway. You’re really back in your element, and I’m excited to watch.”

Bonus Prime delivery clue: Kids doctor kit.

Package voiceover: “I am still amazed that I made it to the quarterfinals. I wasn’t kidding when I told you I had doubts that I belonged on this stage. I think that is what landed me in the smackdown in the first round. But, that turned out to be the awakening I needed to dig deep. As much self doubt as I had, I think I have as much fight in me. As someone who was an athlete, I felt like I was back on that field. I felt it was time to leave it all on the stage. And that’s why I’m singing ‘I’m Yours’ tonight. It’s my battle cry for this competition. I am all in. I’m yours.”

Previous songs: “If I Only Had a Heart,” by Jack Haley; “Wide Open Spaces,” by the Chicks; “Carry On Wayward Son,” by Kansas

Previous panel guesses: Chace Crawford, Kevin Jonas, Jamie Dornan, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Derek Hough, Taran Killam, Jack Black, Zachary Levi, James Marsden

Clock (Group C Champion)

Song: “Get on Your Feet,” by Gloria Estefan

Panel guesses: Stephanie Mills, Sister Sledge, Shirley Bassey

Phone message clue: “Hi mom, you never cease to amaze me. I’ve seen you perform thousands of times. I know you’re nervous tonight, but remember, you performed for the Pope! Ken Jeong should be a piece of cake.”

Package voiceover: “It’s incredible to be in the quarterfinals as the Group C champion. And winning against all these young whippersnappers still has this clock in shock. When I was younger, everyone loved hearing me sing. Until I told them I wanted to do it for a living. Suddenly, it was all, ‘what? Are you crazy?!’ You see, I was a young mother, and most concerned was my own mom. She said, ‘how are you going to take care of these kids and sing in nightclubs?’ But that all changed when she saw me sing one night. She was mesmerized. And from that moment on, it was a family affair. She helped out where she could, and now my son actually works with me on tour. And I’ve been able to stay on my feet for all these years because of their support. Now tonight, I plan to get you on your feet. Because this clock is ticking for a spot in the semi-finals!”

Previous songs: “Piano Man,” by Billy Joel; “Good Times,” by Blinky and Jim Gilstrap; “Respect,” by Aretha Franklin

Previous panel guesses: Anita Baker, Evelyn Champagne King, Diana Ross, Stephanie Mills, Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, Tina Knowles, Denice Williams

Poodle Moth (Group C Panel Save)

Song: “Price Tag,” by Jessie J. ft. B.O.B.

Phone message clue: From her sister,“Ooh, Poodle Moth. Is there anything that you can’t do? Seriously, from performing in that costume to earning a Golden Globe nomination, your talents are endless. Keep singing your heart out. I love you to the moon and back.”

Package voiceover: “I was so disappointed when I lost the Battle Royale. So when the entire panel saved me, I was so grateful. Being saved reminds me of another time in my life when I was saved, right when I needed it most. Before my big break, I had no cash. A credit card gaining interest, and even had to borrow money for gas. I was afraid of answering my phone, just in case it was the debt collectors. Again. Until one time I was this close to ignoring it. But for some reason, something in me made me pick it up. And thank goodness, because that call changed everything. I got my big break, and well, the rest is history. And now all of these years later, I’m here on the most fantastical stage, singing my heart out as the adorable Poodle Moth. And I’ve learned that you can’t put a price tag on fate.”

Previous songs: “Just the Way You Are,” by Billy Joel; “Unwritten,” by Natasha Bedingfield; “The House That Built Me,” by Miranda Lambert

Previous panel guesses: Trisha Yearwood, Wynonna Judd, Rita Wilson, Melissa McCarthy, Lauren Graham, Connie Britton, Sharon Stone, Brooke Shields, Shania Twain

Last season’s performers included Ne-Yo as Cow, John Schneider as Donut, Macy Gray as Sea Queen and Janel Parrish as Gazelle join John Oates as Anteater, Keyshia Cole as Candelabra, Sebastian Bach as Tiki, Ginuwine as Husky, Ashley Parker Angel as S’more, Metta World Peace as Cuddle Monster, Luann de Lesseps as Hibiscus, Tyler Posey as Hawk, Billie Jean King as Royal Hen, Michael Rapaport as Pickle, Tom Sandoval as Diver, Anthony Anderson as Rubber Ducky and one-time special guest Demi Lovato as Anonymouse.

Fox Alternative Entertainment is behind “The Masked Singer,” which is exec produced by showrunner James Breen, Craig Plestis, and Nick Cannon. The series is based on the South Korean format created by Mun Hwa Broadcasting Corp.

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