Aretha Franklin was the best of us. More than just a national treasure, she seemed like an elemental gift sprung from the building blocks of the universe itself. Though she left us today after years of struggle with illness, Aretha was arguably the most accomplished and sublime vocalist in the history of 20th century recorded pop. No one made music that better tapped into the core of our elemental humanity, confirming our cosmic belonging on the grandest scale imaginable.
Born in 1942 in Memphis and raised in Detroit during World War II strife, Aretha didn’t just become a soul music icon—she became the preeminent standard bearer for superior music excellence in and beyond the 1960s. She is as close as we will ever come to genuine royalty in pop, a woman who came by her totalizing “Queen” and “Lady of Soul” monikers through copious perspiration and creative genius rather than by way of clever marketing. Nobody has ever sung any of her classic songs—“Respect,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools,” “Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business),” “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman,” “Ain’t No Way”—with more verve, authority, and deep feeling, and nobody ever will. Think of all the singers that Aretha influenced: a partial list would have to include Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole, Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Oumou Sangaré, Celine Dion, Mary J. Blige, Yolanda Adams, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, and Beyoncé. Maybe a better question is: Who wasn’t influenced by Aretha?
In 1950s Detroit, factories cranked out automobile parts, Berry Gordy’s Motown label cut its first records, and civil rights demonstrations raged on countrywide. The daughter of famous preacher C.L. Franklin—nationally known for his soul-rocking sermons—Aretha honed her singing chops as a youngster, accompanying herself at the piano in her father’s living room. Mother Barbara, a commanding gospel singer herself, separated from Aretha’s philandering father in 1948, and relocated to Buffalo; she unexpectedly died of a heart attack when Aretha was only 10. Back in Detroit, Aretha hobnobbed with her father’s friends, who also happened to be gospel music’s elite, including Mahalia Jackson, Lou Rawls, and Arthur Prysock. Even in her early teens, Aretha was an unimpeachable “stone” singer: She modeled her style absorbing gospel dynamo Clara Ward’s stop-and-start phrasing and R&B/jazz chanteuse Dinah Washington’s steely ferocity.
Aretha Franklin sometimes sang about material things, and she sang a lot about romantic desire and sex. At her core, however, she was a spirit worshipper, an anointed vessel for divine energy incarnate. The power that girds her singing is rooted in her faith, her profound sense of belonging to God; every vocal utterance she ever made was to confirm and be confirmed by spiritual energy. At her live best, Aretha transformed her audience into a congregation, bringing down the spirit of the Holy Ghost, and fervently bringing people together on one single, soulful accord.
At the end of the day, Aretha’s best album might be 1972’s Amazing Grace, her astounding live-recorded gospel set featuring contributions from James Cleveland and the Southern California Community, along with Albertina Walker and the Caravans, and Clara Ward. Released at the height of Aretha’s success to remind secular skeptics of her sanctified roots, Amazing Grace remains the greatest demonstration that spiritual gospel and emotional pop have long been indelibly interconnected. If the contemporary black church is no longer today the centerpiece of racial community it once was, Aretha remained a gospel singer connected to her Baptist beginnings until the very end.
Six decades after anyone first heard it on wax, it’s still hard to fully account for the sublime command and powerful life force—what the Yoruba call àshe—of Aretha’s voice. On songs like “Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream” and “The Weight,” to name just two, Aretha’s put-your-foot-in-it, spill-your-guts-out singing is ferocious, resolute, and assertive. Capable of sustaining long legato lines, Aretha could also creatively improvise with melodies, showing off with nimble, dexterous runs for days. In her airy, plaintive mid-register, like in the first verses of songs like “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You),” “Share Your Love With Me,” “Angel,” or “Call Me,” there’s a tear, a silent fire sob, that can break your heart while compelling you to move closer to the speaker.
But then there’s Aretha’s universe-rattling upper register—muscular, resilient, and marked by unbridled lung capacity. Her legendary wail can really take you out: It’s like the crackle of volcanic lightning or like a 200 mph tropical cyclone coming straight at you, exploding out of the microphone and vibrating against your eardrum. Rangy, intense, and dynamic, Aretha’s chitlinized, ham-hocks-and-gravy vocalizing does not allow you to be immobile or unmoved—you can feel it in your heart, in your spleen, under the soles of your feet, in your bone marrow, in your atoms. Especially in the ’60s and ’70s, Aretha’s hard-driving, divine-force sound was also the direct expression of black feeling and consciousness at a profound moment of racial self-determination.
To honestly account for the primal power of Aretha, you have to acknowledge the underexplored history of African pre-colonial aesthetic genius; you have to understand how the global slave trade brutally remade the world; how that brutal institution violently turned dispossessed black bodies into commodities and chattel; how black women in particular were whipped, flayed, defiled, raped, and diminished, their labor stolen and exploited, and their wombs hijacked to breed future profits for slave owners. W.E.B. Du Bois once called the culture of glorious Afro-Christian black music that emerged out of the dung of slavery that barbaric institution’s only great redemption; as black folk, we transmogrified traumatic experience into field hollers, work songs, and ring shouts; and eventually, over time, into the stylized blues and jazz of artists that directly inspired Aretha Franklin, including Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughn, and Dinah Washington. When Aretha opens her mouth to wail, all of that unassailable tragic-beautiful black history, those soul-shocking scenes of subjection that are at the horrific core of American history, comes barreling at you. That’s the essential root of her sound.
Some folks, often white ones, tend to exoticize and simplify Aretha’s talent by reducing her sound to “pain.” But I hear the widest possible range of emotions, moods, and sensibilities in her music, from abject lonesomeness (“Tracks of My Tears”) to quiet resignation (“Don’t Play That Song”) to sassy indignation (“When the Battle Is Over”) to blissful contentment (“First Snow in Kokomo”) to sly flirtatiousness (“Something He Can Feel”) to unfettered exuberance (“Freeway of Love”). James Baldwin once called the confluence of freedom and unfreedom that defines African-American existence “ironic tenacity”—our audacious optimism borne out of a terminal, unredeemable suffering. During a bitter period in American history—marked by destructive race riots, by the repressive tactics of the Nixon administration, the disillusioning assassination of key civil rights leaders, and the terrible moral failure that was the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War—few artists made tenacious music more rich with emotional gravitas, full of moral heaviness, or brimming with utopian possibility. Few artists gave us the gift of music that made people, especially black people, love each other, more forcefully than Aretha Franklin.
Legendary A&R executive John Hammond signed Aretha to Columbia Records in 1960, but he mostly hemmed in her talent with buttoned-up, apprehensive jazz and pop repertoire. By 1967, she hopscotched to Atlantic Records, where visionary producer Jerry Wexler put her on a plane to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, assembled a biracial studio band at FAME Studios, and delivered the groundbreaking I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You. Each of Aretha’s successive “golden period” albums released on Atlantic between 1967 and 1976–including 1968’s Lady Soul, 1968’s Aretha Now, 1969’s Soul ’69, and 1971’s Young, Gifted and Black—are the distilled essence of blues-soaked soulfulness and musical excellence, emblematic of the ongoing political and social changes in black culture.
Aretha’s Atlantic era remains among the greatest in all of recorded music history. During those years, she created so many cherished new standards—from chugging confections like “Sweet Sweet Baby (Since You’ve Been Gone)” to pressure cooker startlers like “Rock Steady” to cloud-parting power ballads like “Natural Woman”—songs that still endure at open-mic nights and karaoke bars, and on TV singing competitions to this day. Working with the likes of producer Jerry Wexler, arranger Arif Mardin, and engineer Tom Dowd (who effectively recorded the velocity of her belt), Aretha consistently received (or created) better material than pyrotechnical peers like Etta James, Tina Turner, and Mavis Staples. A creative and savvy arranger, Aretha reconstructed covers of tunes like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to the degree that they sometimes excelled beyond the originals, and she could also pen originals like 1971’s soothing “Day Dreaming” and seismic “All the King’s Horses.” Even the most sublime voice needs the right material in the right musical context to make it legible to a wider audience, and Atlantic Records—who supported Aretha with incredible personnel on those classic albums like musical director King Curtis, pianist Donny Hathaway, bassist Jerry Jemmott, guitarist Cornell Dupree, and drummer Bernard Purdie—provided a substantial musical context in which we could finally hear the total range of Aretha’s tonal majesty and her masterful interpretive abilities, changing the course of popular music along the way.
There’s no question that Aretha was a masterful balladeer and crooner: listen to the sheer drama she can generate on tunes like “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and “Ain’t No Way.” (Aretha always sang better when she accompanied herself on piano—she’s an underrated player in a similar sphere as peer Valerie Simpson. One wishes she’d recorded at the keys with a stripped-down trio or quartet in her later years). In the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was still remarkably risky for sacred singers to seek popularity singing about sex and desire, but Aretha Franklin went there with aplomb, ripping our hearts out of our chests with tunes about love lost and gained. (1981’s underrated Love All the Hurt Away, on Arista Records, is one of her most romantic and heart-wrenching albums.)
Beyond ballads, Aretha had serious rhythmic dexterity: you can hear it on her self-penned funk grenade “Rock Steady,” but also on insouciant 1980 patter track “School Days.” By the late ’70s, the disco craze nearly did her in—her 1979 La Diva album was a low point—but she later made good with ’80s synth pop like Detroit-retro finger snapper “Freeway of Love,” as well as house-inspired pop with Clivilles & Cole’s 1994 “A Deeper Love,” and hip-hop inspired production on her 1998 A Rose Is Still a Rose set, featuring behind-the-glass contributions from Lauryn Hill and Jermaine Dupri. Aretha was adept at nearly every persona of soulful black music at which she tried her hand.
Even by the late ’60s, as she rose to mainstream visibility in the funky black power era, Aretha was the black female singer most beloved by the white establishment, next to Nina Simone. That’s partly because she covered songs by rock artists like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Her saucy 1980 film cameo in The Blues Brothers is a reminder of how deeply she ingratiated her artistry into the lives and imaginations of white communities throughout her career, even as she became an emblem for ’60s and ’70s racial and gender identity movements. Aretha was never a feminist in any explicit sense—and she certainly had her share of disastrous and abusive relationships with men, including first husband Ted White. She nonetheless delivered some of the most world-defining feminist anthems in pop history, from raucous “Think” to “Respect” to Eurythmics collab “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.”
On another level, Aretha’s remarkable audacity as a singer contributed greatly at the intersection of feminist power and black power, emblematized in her deployment of MLK’s “Thank God almighty I’m free at last” in her cover of B.B. King’s relationship-gone-sour tune “The Thrill Is Gone.” In the ’60s, she lent her impressive talents to numerous civil rights causes, and she was an outspoken supporter of Angela Davis. She also famously sang at the funerals of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, not to mention her contributions to Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama’s respective presidential inaugurations. Aretha delivered all-purpose, intersectional anthems that any dispossessed community could adopt as their own: “Respect” is an equal rights anthem for anyone who ever had a dream of being more than a second class citizen.
Along the way, Aretha became the soundtrack of moral affirmation to black communities during an especially turbulent era. She was never a conventional beauty nor was she consistently marketed as a sex symbol per se—by the ’80s she’d begun making eccentric, quixotic fashion choices, to put it mildly. In the ’60s and ’70s, however, she defined and represented that which was most beautiful about black culture at a time when we needed it most. Moving from wigs and processed hair to natural hair to the Nina Simone-esque Afrocentric fashion choices on the covers of Amazing Grace and Young, Gifted and Black, and then later into sequined glitz and gown glamor that defined much of the rest of her career, Aretha captured the democratic diversity of black style. At a time when some artists felt they needed to curb their blackness to reach lucrative white audiences, Aretha was unabashedly black in her sound and image, at least during those Atlantic Records years when it mattered most. Aretha showed many of us that it was possible to maintain racial dignity while striving for inclusion and acceptance in a country founded upon systematic anti-blackness. Perhaps “Respect” also became Aretha’s signature anthem because we gave her so much of it.
Some critics felt that Aretha’s foray into strategic duets and slick, digitally-programmed music on the heels of her ’80s move to Clive Davis’ Arista label diminished her legacy, even as it brought her successive hits and lots of bank. After 1976, Aretha’s albums are a mixed bag, but she still delivered lots of cherished material, from the post-disco funk of Luther Vandross-produced 1983 “Jump to It” to the evocative MTV-inspirational-pop of 1987’s George Michael duet “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me.” A longtime smoker, Aretha’s voice thickened significantly by the mid ’80s; the natural progression of age striated it even more by the ’90s. Still she never lost her verve, and glimpses of her vocal greatness show up consistently until the end (even on her better-than-expected 2014 Aretha Sings the Great Diva Classics).
Aretha’s entire career is a commentary on resilience from trauma and adversity: It starts with the early tragic loss of mother when she was ten years old, and then to a series of successive deaths, including her father and all of her brothers and sisters during the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. Taken as a whole, these deaths must have exacted a serious toll. Though she eventually publicized herself by way of a hardscrabble soul survivor image, Aretha never made an exposing, confessional album à la Joni Mitchell; instead, she remained intensely private, aloof, and unknowable, in a way that’s fairly consistent with the head-high composure of some regal women in the black church. Sometimes Aretha’s intense need for opacity, mixed with her occasional penchant for pettiness and self-interested behavior, could get the best of her: In 2015, David Ritz’s scorched-earth unauthorized biography bit the bullet to expose a lot more about Aretha than she’d ever cared to talk about publicly.
Aretha had a bit of a dark side. She was full of competitive insecurity and unexamined trauma, and forever in squabbles with friends and loved ones, including her sisters Erma and Carolyn, her pal and producer Luther Vandross, and friend Dionne Warwick. Aretha earned her “diva dues” and wasn’t afraid to let anybody know it, at any time. That meant everything from shading younger competitor-to-the-throne Natalie Cole in the ’70s, to subtly throwing shade at Taylor Swift (asked by a reporter in 2014 to give commentary on a range of pop singers, Aretha had complimentary things to say about artists like Whitney Houston and Adele; she could only come up with the obfuscating “great gowns, beautiful gowns” for Swift.) If Aretha’s now become a cherished meme for her unfiltered facial expressions, that’s partly her own doing. I have no sense of what it must be like to stand in for an entire community as a racial emblem for decades, or to have to feel compelled to keep up one’s regal status as the queen of anything all the time: I’d imagine it could damage the spirit irreparably. But Aretha fans always wanted to see her at her best, to watch her emerge triumphant, like when she belted out her last-minute rendition of “Nessun Dorma” at the 1998 Grammys or flung off her fur coat at that astonishing 2015 Kennedy Center “Natural Woman” performance. She certainly earned her stripes as the singular materfamilias of black popular music for six decades, and we were all happy to keep her in that role.
For the most part, Aretha stuck to R&B, gospel, pop, blues, and jazz: She never did a tangential rock album, never really tried her hand in alternative or underground genres, and she never cursed on record. You could never describe her as a poser or a scenester, and there’s not an ironic or postmodern moment in her entire career. That’s not to say that Aretha was immune from musical trends—just the opposite, she enlisted Clive Davis to help her seek them out with zeal in the ’80s and beyond—nor is it to say that she didn’t deploy the latest hipster jive in songs like “Rock Steady” or in those hilariously rapped, improvised lyrics in “Jump to It” and “Who’s Zoomin’ Who.” Aretha was always her eccentric, sometimes kooky self, no matter how many people she pissed off along the way.
In listening to Aretha’s best songs—songs that innervate the nervous system and rattle us to our bones—we’re reminded of who we are at the spiritual level and how we are all deeply, and even maybe inconveniently, interconnected as souls. That’s what soul music is, that’s what soul music does—it illuminates the path to our mutual interdependence. Aretha’s feelingful back catalog remains a prescription for how we might find ways to move away from the depressing atomization and fragmentation of modern life into soulful cooperation, getting togetherness, toward a funky “Soul Train” style dance with each other.
Mother, sister, lover of Jesus, the Queen of R&B by anyone’s standards, Aretha has gone back home, to creation, back to the universe, back into dust, and spirit. Maybe because of the fact that she was beset by her own personal troubled waters, her spiritually rich music helped a lot of people get through. Sometimes, when my own soul looks back in wonder, I wonder how I got over, and I remember the magnanimous, therapeutic example of Aretha Franklin’s music and how it sometimes served as a soundtrack to my own most powerful personal experiences. A lot of us who grew up on her music, or discovered her along the way, feel that way. For that alone, much respect to the Queen. Amen, and peace go with her.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the location of Aretha Franklin’s birthplace. She was born in Memphis, not Detroit.
