Aretha Franklin, America’s Queen of Soul, Has Died

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, the “voice of the civil rights movement,” the “greatest singer of all time,” and “a soaring spirit in the dark,” died today at her home in Detroit, surrounded by her friends and family. She was 76 years old.

Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942, the fourth of five children of the famed activist and Baptist preacher Rev. C.L. Franklin (known as “The Man With the Million Dollar Voice” for his dozens of albums of recorded sermons for Chess Records) and Barbara Siggers Franklin, a gospel singer who died when Aretha was 10. From an early age Aretha’s musical gifts were evident; she got her start singing in front of her father’s congregation, which recognized her as a child prodigy, and she later made some of her earliest musical recordings at her father’s church, where she was frequently in the care of family friends and gospel legends like Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward. Aretha joined her father’s Gospel Caravan, a traveling revival show, as a preteen. It was while touring that she befriended fellow musicians Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls, whose transitions to R&B and mainstream success would serve as inspiration for her own segue into secular music, at around age 18, and her eventual superstardom.

After an initial failed partnership with Columbia Records in 1960, Franklin signed with Atlantic Records in 1966—teaming up with producer Jerry Wexler and the famed Muscle Shoals studio band—and quickly hit her stride on the charts over the following years, with indelible pop hits like “Baby I Love You,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Respect,” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” By 1968, she made the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The Sound of Soul,” a genre of music Franklin once described as “being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside . . . to make people feel what you’re feeling.”

In 1972, Franklin returned to gospel music, recording the album Amazing Grace at L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church over two nights that were filmed by Sydney Pollack for an as-yet-unreleased documentary film project. That album went double platinum and has been hailed as the “greatest gospel album ever recorded.”

From the outset, Franklin was a singular figure on the music scene: “Most artists go into the studio for a week, a month, and some—without naming names—go for months until they get the right performance,” her longtime collaborator Clive Davis told Billboard in 2016. “Aretha is a perfectionist. She comes fully rehearsed to the studio. She nails it at that same session. She never does more than three takes. She comes [in after] living with the song before she goes in the studio.”

Franklin, whose father had co-organized the June 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—what would become the largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history, until the March on Washington two months later—became a leading figure in the civil rights movement in her own right, and in 1968 performed “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at Dr. King’s funeral. Bernard LaFayette, chairman of the board of the SCLC and head of the Emory University Center for Advancing Nonviolence told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Franklin’s contribution to the civil rights movement cannot be overstated. “She brought the message through music,” said LaFayette. “She was very clear and unequivocal in her support of the movement for social change.” In 1970, when political activist Angela Davis was arrested, Franklin vowed to post bail. “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.” Davis, who was later acquitted, told reporters that “Aretha’s music speaks for itself—“Respect,” “Natural Woman”—all of these are anthems for the movement. She did not have to do anything besides her music to raise people’s consciousness. That is her most important contribution.”

Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s testosterone-filled “Respect” became one of the most potent feminist anthems of the decade. “My sister and I, we just liked that record [“Respect”]. Otis Redding was an Atlantic Records artist, and that’s where I first heard it. I loved it, and I wanted to cover it just because I loved it so much. And the statement was something that was very important, and where it was important to me, it was important to others,” she told Vogue in 2016, in an interview after a performance at the Kennedy Center, in which she moved President Obama to tears. (This wasn’t her first brush with the executive branch, she reminded Vogue’s Alex Frank at the time: “President Bush bestowed the Congressional Medal on me. President Carter stood up and boogied in the balcony to ‘Rock With Me.’ President Clinton, I sang at his post-inauguration party out in Maryland.”) “It’s important for people. Not just me or the civil rights movement or women—it’s important to people. And I was asked what recording of mine I’d put in a time capsule, and it is ‘Respect.’ Because people want respect—even small children, even babies. As people, we deserve respect from one another,” she added.

That’s not to say that Franklin was immune to the particular struggles of women in this world. She was likely more aware than most, giving birth to the first of her four sons when she was 12 years old and famously bringing her bag onstage with her and keeping it within eyeshot even well into the level of fame that presupposes that people won’t mess with your dressing room. She told Vogue: “I think that women have to be strong. If you don’t, some people will run right over you.”

In 1987, Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; a year prior, the state of Michigan declared her voice a “natural resource.” An asteroid was named after her in 2014. For an idea of her influence, Chaka Khan, Gwen Guthrie, and Cissy and Whitney Houston all at one point served as Franklin’s backup singers. She won her last Grammy in 2008, her 18th from that particular institution, ranking her among the most honored artists in the award’s history. “What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalog or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. ‘Respect’ is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase,” David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker in 2016, in a profile in which he called Franklin’s “central place in American music and spirit . . . undeniable” and quoted the late musician Billy Preston, hailing her as the “the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

She was plagued with health problems in her later years, and in February 2017, Franklin told a local Detroit radio station that she was planning to retire. “I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from and where it is now,” she said, though that didn’t mean she’d disappear: “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.” She told outlets that she had full “creative control” over a forthcoming film based off of her 1999 autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots, and in January 2018 it was announced that Jennifer Hudson would be playing the title role. It will be a hard act to follow, let alone emulate on-screen. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock ’n’ roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” President Obama told Remnick in 2016. “American history wells up when Aretha sings.”