Aretha Franklin
A singer who carried a voice learned in church to the top of the pop charts and turned the word respect into the demand of an era.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those beside her ⏳🌊
- FamilyC. L. Franklin
A Baptist minister who won fame for his recorded sermons and a father who took his daughter on tour, leading her into the worlds of music and the civil rights movement.
- MentorJames Cleveland
He taught the young Aretha gospel piano and harmony, and stood by her side at the 1972 recording of 『Amazing Grace』.
- ColleagueJerry Wexler
As Atlantic's producer, he sat her down at the piano and had her sing just as she did in church, and so gave birth to the Queen of Soul.
- ColleagueClive Davis
As head of Arista Records, he steered her second golden age in the 1980s and stayed with her through the albums of her final years in 2014.
- InfluenceWhitney Houston
The daughter of backing vocalist Cissy Houston, she grew up calling her Aunt Ree and carried her singing style into the next generation.
- FriendshipGeorge Michael
With their 1987 duet 「I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)」, he shared with her a Hot 100 number one, her first in twenty years.
I. Daughter of New Bethel · 1942–1959
(Birth) She was born in March 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, C. L. Franklin, was a Baptist minister; her mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was a gospel singer who played piano and sang. Above her were her brother Vaughn, her sister Erma and her brother Cecil, and below her a younger sister, Carolyn. The family followed her father's pastorates, passing through Buffalo, New York, before settling in Detroit, Michigan, around 1946. (Loss) In 1948 her mother left home and returned to Buffalo, and in 1952 she died of a heart attack. Aretha was ten years old. Her grandmother Rachel took over the running of the household. In her later autobiography Aretha said little about her mother, yet that childhood absence was often mentioned alongside the shy, guarded temperament she carried all her life. (Church) New Bethel Baptist Church, which her father led, and the family home were a music school in themselves. Her father had won national fame through his recorded sermons, and figures such as Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington came and went from his house. She learned piano by ear, and from the gospel singer and arranger James Cleveland she picked up the craft of harmony and accompaniment. She recalled that it was hearing Clara Ward sing that made her decide to become a singer. (Touring) From her early teens she followed her father on his gospel tours. In 1956, at fourteen, songs she had recorded at New Bethel were released as the album 『Songs of Faith』. During these years she gave birth to two sons, at twelve and at fifteen, and the children were raised by her grandmother and family. She never finished high school. The path of Sam Cooke, who had crossed from gospel to pop and succeeded, showed her where to go next.
II. The long apprenticeship in New York · 1960–1966
(New York) In 1960, eighteen-year-old Aretha went to New York with her father's blessing. Berry Gordy, who had founded Motown in Detroit, showed interest as well, but she signed with Columbia Records. It is widely known that John Hammond, the producer who had discovered Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan, called hers the finest voice since Holiday. (Standards) Columbia set out to shape her into a polished singer of jazz and Broadway standards. Her first single, 「Today I Sing the Blues」, climbed high on the R&B chart, and in 1961 「Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody」 entered the pop chart. Yet on recordings swaddled in big bands and strings, the fire of a voice forged in church was often held down. Producer after producer took the helm, the direction wavered, and sales fell short of expectations. (Marriage) In 1961 she married Ted White, who became her manager. Around this time she worked through a grueling schedule of clubs and theaters, building up her stage experience. Colleagues recall that she was so shy she spoke little offstage, but that at the piano she became someone else. (Turning point) As her Columbia contract neared its end in 1966, she was already a veteran with more than ten albums released over six years. In this period, closer to a long apprenticeship than a failure, she absorbed the phrasing of jazz singers, the instinct for choosing where to break a lyric and where to press ahead. In the next chapter that instinct would meet the power of gospel.
An old song sung by Al Jolson in the 1910s, refashioned by Columbia in a big-band arrangement. Columbia's plan to groom her as a standards singer and the church voice pushing its way out of that mold live together in a single song.
- A typical early-1960s pop arrangement, lavishly propped up by strings and brass. Heard beside the raw sound of her Atlantic years, it makes plain where she started from.
- A voice that begins decorously spreads, toward the end of the song, into a technique of stretching a single syllable so it winds across many notes (melisma). Here the habits of gospel seep into a standard.
- You can hear jazz-style phrasing that lags slightly behind the beat or pulls ahead of it. It is an instinct she learned from jazz singers in her Columbia years, and it carries straight into her later soul recordings.
III. Soul from Muscle Shoals · 1967–1968
(Wexler) In November 1966, Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler signed her. Wexler's approach was simple: sit Aretha at the piano and let her sing the way she did in church. In January 1967, Wexler took her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to meet the local session players. (One day) 「I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)」, recorded on the first day, was finished in a matter of hours. But that night a drunken quarrel among the staff halted the session, and the remaining songs were completed after the players were summoned to New York. The album that resulted made her a star overnight. Engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin, together with Wexler, went on to refine the sound of her Atlantic years. (Respect) That same year 「Respect」, her remake of an Otis Redding song, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Her sister Erma and younger sister Carolyn sang the backing vocals, and touches absent from the original, such as the passage that spells out the title letter by letter, were worked out by the sisters together. A song in which a husband demanded his due from his wife became a song embraced at once by the civil rights movement and the women's movement. 「Chain of Fools」 and 「Think」 followed, and she earned the name Queen of Soul. (Civil rights) In February 1968 Detroit held a day in her honor, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presented her with an award in person. King, a close friend of her father's, was assassinated that April, and at his funeral Aretha sang 「Precious Lord, Take My Hand」, a hymn he had loved. That June she appeared on the cover of 『Time』.
The one song to survive the single session on the first day at Muscle Shoals. It captures the moment when everything six years at Columbia had built up met a Southern rhythm section and burst out all at once.
- The sticky electric piano (Wurlitzer) sound that opens the song is said to have been found on the spot by session keyboardist Spooner Oldham. These few bars set the mood of the entire song.
- Over a slow triple meter, the drums slow the pace by leaning hard on the second and fourth beats (backbeat). The unhurried rhythm leaves the voice room to breathe.
- Aretha played the piano herself as she sang. Because accompaniment and voice come from one body, the piano gathers force right where the voice soars.
- It sings of resignation and confession in a love there is no escaping, and a voice that held back grows rougher and higher, cracking as the song goes on, as the emotion rises.
A song that turned an Otis Redding number around into a woman's voice, transforming the demand of one household into the demand of an era. The arrangement she worked out with her sisters made the original into an entirely different song.
- Two devices absent from the original, the passage spelling out the title letter by letter and the chorus's brief answering interjections, were devised by Aretha and her younger sister Carolyn together. It is striking that the song's most remembered moments are parts the original never had.
- Throughout the song runs an exchange (call and response) in which the lead vocal throws out a line and the chorus of her sister Erma and younger sister Carolyn answers it at once. It is exactly the way preacher and congregation trade lines in a church service.
- The tenor saxophone solo in the middle was played by King Curtis. Jerry Wexler recalled that the chord progression of this solo section was borrowed from a Sam & Dave song.
- The voice almost never eases off from start to finish. Its manner is not that of asking but of demanding what is rightfully owed, so although the song runs barely two and a half minutes, it sounds overwhelming.
IV. Back to church · 1969–1979
(Divorce) In 1969 she separated from Ted White. Her brother Cecil then took over her management, and he stayed by her side until his death in 1989. Her 1970 album 『Spirit in the Dark』, built around songs she wrote herself, carried the heat of a church service over into secular love songs. (Expansion) In 1971 she captivated a rock audience on the stage of the Fillmore West, San Francisco's hippie concert hall, and during the show Ray Charles came up on stage to sing with her. In 1972 『Young, Gifted and Black』, its title taken from a Nina Simone song, sang of pride in being Black. In this period Donny Hathaway joined some of the sessions on keyboards. (Grace) In January 1972, at a Baptist church in Los Angeles, she recorded two nights of gospel performances with her mentor James Cleveland and a choir. Her father, too, sat in the audience and then rose to the pulpit to speak about his daughter. The resulting 『Amazing Grace』 became the best-selling album of her career and one of the best-selling gospel albums in history. It was a record in which she herself declared, even after stardom, where her roots lay. (Slump) From the mid-1970s on, sales dwindled amid the disco wave. In 1976 the film soundtrack 『Sparkle』, written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, brought a brief revival. In 1978 she remarried, to the actor Glynn Turman, and lived in Los Angeles, but they separated in 1984. In June 1979 her father was shot by a burglar in his Detroit home and fell into a coma. In 1982 she left Los Angeles and returned to Detroit to be at his side, and she never left it again.
The title song of the live album she recorded after becoming a star, when she returned to church with her mentor James Cleveland. This one song stands at the heart of the best-selling record of her career.
- She stretches a hymn everyone knows to more than ten minutes. Melisma, piling countless notes onto a single syllable, is pushed to its extreme, so that it sounds closer to prayer than to melody.
- Cleveland leads the choir from the piano. While Aretha ventures far afield, the accompaniment holds its ground and waits, and the moment she returns, the choir swells up with her.
- The shouts, applause and sobs of the congregation are captured on the recording just as they happened. The heart of this recording is the immediacy of a Black church service, where stage and congregation become one.
- The record also preserves the moment when Cleveland, overcome with emotion, cannot carry on singing. It is often cited as proof that this was a real service, not a staged performance.
V. A second golden age · 1980–1998
(Arista) In 1980 she left Atlantic for Arista Records, headed by Clive Davis. That same year she appeared as a diner owner in the film "The Blues Brothers," singing "Think" anew and meeting a new generation of listeners. In 1982 "Jump to It," produced by Luther Vandross, reached number 1 on the R&B chart and announced her comeback. Vandross said many times that he had idolized her since childhood. (Farewell) In July 1984 her father, who had lain in a coma for nearly five years, died. After severe turbulence on a small plane in the early 1980s she became afraid of flying, and for the rest of her life she made most of her tours by bus. Her sister Carolyn died in 1988, and her brother Cecil the following year. In this season of losing family, she returned in 1987 to her father's church, New Bethel, to record the live gospel album "One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism." (The charts) "Who's Zoomin' Who?," made in 1985 with producer Narada Michael Walden, put her back on the pop charts in the age of synthesizers and music videos. In 1987 "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)," her duet with George Michael, went to number 1 in both the United States and Britain, and that same year she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1989 she sang "Through the Storm" with Elton John. (Godmother) Whitney Houston, daughter of her backup singer Cissy Houston, grew up calling her auntie. At the 1998 Grammy Awards she stepped in for an ailing Pavarotti just before the performance and sang the opera aria "Nessun dorma." That same year she joined hands with the hip-hop generation on "A Rose Is Still a Rose," written and produced by Lauryn Hill, and shared the stage of VH1's "Divas Live" with Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and Carole King.
Made with Narada Michael Walden in her Arista years, this song brought her back, at forty-three, to the pop charts of the MTV era. It is a song that jauntily embraces Detroit's car culture.
- Her voice rides atop the glittering sound peculiar to the mid-1980s, built from synthesizers and electronic drums. Even inside a sound utterly unlike that of her Atlantic years, her way of singing is unchanged.
- The saxophone solo in the middle is played by Clarence Clemons, a mainstay of Bruce Springsteen's band. It is a moment when rock and soul shake hands within a single song.
- The music video, featuring a pink Cadillac, was in heavy rotation on MTV and introduced her anew to young viewers.
- Its mood is light and joyful, singing of the freedom of the open road. It sounds as though a singer who had come through the heavy late 1970s were laughing, unburdened, for the first time.
A duet with George Michael, it gave her first Hot 100 number 1 in 20 years. It is a song in which the Queen of Soul and a younger singer who grew up listening to her meet as equals.
- The two trade lines one at a time, then gradually sing over each other. The opening sounds like a conversation, the second half like a head-to-head contest.
- Late in the song, at the moment the key rises a step (modulation), both voices soar at once. It is the classic device by which the 1980s pop ballad builds its climax.
- George Michael sings with a relatively clear, even tone, Aretha with a rough, thick one. The contrast in timbre creates the duet's tension.
- Its mood is the affirmation of a love found at last after long waiting. With this song the two won a Grammy in the duo category.
VI. The queen's final stage · 1999–2018
(The medal) In 2005 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In January 2009 she sang "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" at President Barack Obama's inauguration; her gray hat with its enormous bow became a sensation, and the hat was later displayed at the Smithsonian. The sight of a singer who had sung on the front lines of the civil rights movement standing at the inauguration of the first Black president was, in itself, the summation of an era. (Illness) In late 2010 she underwent major surgery and returned to the stage without disclosing her diagnosis. Though she had lost a great deal of weight, the performances went on. On "Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics," released in 2014 after she reunited with Clive Davis, she sang Adele's "Rolling in the Deep," turning back to interpret the songs of the younger singers for whom she had cleared the way. (Tribute) At the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2015 she sang "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" for honoree Carole King. King rose from her seat and cheered, and the broadcast caught President Obama wiping away tears. In early 2017 she announced her retirement from touring, and an Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit held in New York that November became her last public performance. (Eternal rest) On August 16, 2018, she died of pancreatic cancer at her home in Detroit. She was 76. Her funeral, at a large Detroit church, went on for nearly eight hours, as fellow musicians and politicians sent her off with songs and eulogies. The following year the Pulitzer Prize board awarded her a special citation honoring her contributions to American music and culture. "Respect," the biopic starring Jennifer Hudson, the actress she had personally chosen in her lifetime, was released in 2021.
Jerry Wexler suggested the title, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote the song. 48 years later, on the Kennedy Center stage, she gave this song back to its composer, Carole King.
- It begins with quiet piano and a low voice, then swells gradually as strings and brass join in turn. It shows clearly how Wexler and Arif Mardin made records in the Atlantic years.
- It sings of the gratitude and relief of having at last become oneself through love. Each time the chorus arrives, the voice opens up one step further.
- On the Kennedy Center stage in 2015 she sat at the piano in a fur coat and sang, then let the coat fall to the floor at the climax. Together with the image of Carole King rising to cheer in the audience, it is remembered as the defining performance of her late years.
- Hear the 1967 original recording beside the 2015 live performance and you catch a ripeness that raises the same feeling not with the sharp high notes of youth but with a low register grown deep and thick.
Lesser-known stories
She was an outstanding pianist. Jerry Wexler recalled that she played the piano herself on many Atlantic recordings and often worked out the chorus harmonies and the structure of a song on her own. In the public memory her voice was so overwhelming that her role as arranger and instrumentalist was largely credited to her producers. The Columbia years were long treated as a failed overture. But the jazz and standards she recorded in that period were later reassessed by critics, and as box sets collecting those recordings appeared, more voices said she could have made her mark as a jazz singer as well. The name Queen of Soul was so strong that it eclipsed the six years before it. The live "Amazing Grace" was filmed by director Sydney Pollack, but because no sync marker (a clapperboard) was used, picture and sound could not be matched, and the film lay buried in storage for decades. Even after it was restored through advances in technology, Aretha legally blocked screenings in 2011 and 2015. The film was finally released in late 2018, after her death, with her family's consent. According to documents obtained by "Rolling Stone" magazine through a public records request in 2020, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) monitored her civil rights activities for decades, leaving a file of some 270 pages. Whether she knew of this during her lifetime has not been confirmed.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Soul
(Word meaning) The English word soul means the spirit. The name carries the idea of taking the power of songs that stirred the soul in church and carrying it over into secular love songs. (In pop) Music born in the United States of the 1960s from the merging of Black church gospel with rhythm and blues. It is marked by fervent vocals, answering choruses and weighty rhythms. Aretha Franklin, its defining singer, was called the Queen of Soul. Just as reciting the words of a cheer differs from shouting them with your whole body, soul is singing that hides no feeling and pours it out with the whole body. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, as in soul food, it also refers to the traditions and spirit of the Black community.
Gospel
(Word meaning) The English word gospel comes from the Old English for 'good news,' and originally referred to the gospel containing the teachings of Jesus. (In pop) The sacred music sung in Black churches in America. Choir and soloist trade phrases, joined by handclaps and shouts. Many soul and R&B singers first learned to sing through gospel in church as children. Think of the goosebump moment when a whole class sings with one heart at a school choir competition: gospel is music that creates that moment at worship every week. (Elsewhere) In everyday use it means something believed absolutely, as in "Their word is gospel."
Melisma
(Word meaning) The Greek melisma comes from a word meaning 'song.' (In pop) A vocal technique of stretching a single syllable of a lyric across many notes in a winding line. It is often heard in the singing of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. It is like the playful way of calling a friend's name not briefly but drawing out its last syllable, up and down. Used well it deepens the emotion, but overdone it draws criticism that the lyrics can no longer be heard.
Call and response
(Word meaning) The English call and response means a calling and an answering. (In pop) A practice in which one person sings a line and others answer it back. Born in African music and Black church worship, it carried on into gospel, blues and soul. In "Respect," the passage where Aretha sings and her sisters answer in the chorus is a fine example. It works on the same principle as the drill in gym class, when the teacher shouts "one, two" and the students answer "three, four."
Session musician
(Word meaning) A session is a gathering where people work together for a set time; here it means a single recording booking. (In pop) A professional player who is not a full member of any particular band but is called in to play whenever there is a recording. Their names rarely appear on album covers, yet many, like the Muscle Shoals players, actually created the sound of countless classics. They are like the friends in a school play who aren't the leads but run the sets and sound and bring the whole show to life. (Elsewhere) At conferences and events, a session is one part of a program divided by time slot.
Crossover
(Word meaning) The English crossover means going over a boundary. (In pop) Music made for the audience of one genre or group that wins popularity in another genre or with a wider audience. In the United States of the 1960s, the classic crossover was a song on the R&B chart, centered on Black listeners, climbing onto the pop chart, centered on white listeners. It is like a player famous on the school soccer team becoming known to students at other schools and to people all over the neighborhood. (Elsewhere) In cars, a crossover is a type of vehicle that blends the features of a sedan and an SUV.
Modulation
(Meaning of the word) Jeonjo (轉調) means 'changing (轉) the key (調).' The key is the note at the center of a song, in other words its basic pitch. (In pop) A key change, or modulation, is the technique of raising or lowering a song's basic pitch by a step partway through. Pop ballads often use it just before the final chorus, lifting the pitch to build a climax. It has the same effect as bumping the key up a notch at karaoke for the last chorus so you can belt it out with more force. You can hear this device in the latter half of “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me).”