Aretha Franklin Obituary
Aretha Franklin Obituary
Peerless if sometimes ‘difficult’ diva known as the Queen of Soul whose voice tingled spines and made presidents cry
“American history wells up when Aretha sings,” Barack Obama observed after witnessing Aretha Franklin’s performance at The Kennedy Center in Washington in 2015.
Her voice certainly had the power to make the presidential tear ducts well up; during the concert Obama wept openly as she sang her soulful 1967 hit (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.
A long-time fan, Obama also booked Franklin to sing at his first inauguration, but he was far from the only incumbent of the White House to be moved by the emotional heft of Franklin’s spine-tingling voice.
Jimmy Carter boogied in the balcony while she sang; Bill Clinton made a personal request for her to perform at his inauguration concert; and although Franklin was a lifelong Democrat, in 2005 George W Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour.
“Aretha is still the best singer in the world, bar none. She finds meanings in lyrics that even the composers didn’t know they had,” Bush declared.
Yet it was America’s first black president who most eloquently encapsulated Franklin’s significance, not merely as the world’s sassiest female singer, but as an indomitable icon of black womanhood. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R’n’B, rock and roll — the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” Obama wrote.
“When she sits down at a piano and sings A Natural Woman, she can move me to tears because it captures the fullness of the American experience and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”
Franklin’s peerless voice combined the fervour of gospel, a jazz-like sophistication and an unparalleled emotion that seemed to emanate from deep within her being. It was often said that if extraterrestrials landed a spaceship on Earth and wanted to know the meaning of soul, the best definition would be to play them one of Franklin’s recordings.
Her finest work came in the 1960s and early 1970s when she embarked on a red-hot streak with unforgettable hits such as Respect, I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), Chain of Fools, I Say a Little Prayer, Rock Steady, Think and A Natural Woman, a body of work that represents one of the towering pinnacles of 20th-century popular music and which came to define the art of soul singing.
She remained the benchmark by which subsequent female singers were judged, from Whitney Houston to Beyoncé. For all their undoubted qualities, none was ever found to be quite as regal as the original “Queen of Soul”.
The quality of Franklin’s later work was patchy and she developed a reputation for being difficult and demanding. David Ritz — initially hired to ghost a sanitised autobiography — later described a life racked by insecurities and characterised by tantrums, rages and jealousies.
“She was afraid she wasn’t good enough as a singer, pretty enough as a woman or devoted enough as a mother,” her younger sister and backing singer Carolyn Franklin told Ritz. “I don’t know what to call it but deep, deep insecurity. Her style was to either drink away the anxiety or, when that stopped working, disappear for a while, find her bearings and go right back onstage and wear the crown of the impervious diva.”
In interviews, which she gave rarely and reluctantly, she developed the disconcerting superstar tick of referring to herself in the third person. “Aretha is a woman like any other woman,” she told The Sunday Times in 2014.
The magnitude of her talent was rivalled only by the size of her ego. When she worked with the singer Luther Vandross she treated him like an employee rather than a collaborator. She called him “Vandross” and insisted that he addressed her as “Miss Franklin”. Yet such petty foibles could not detract from the fact that her landmark recordings made her status unassailable as one of the great divas of the age. Like her fellow African-American singers Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, she left behind the limitations of musical genre to become a legend in her own lifetime.
As a popular entertainer she could sing anything — literally. At the 1998 Grammy awards, Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat. Given 20 minutes’ notice, Franklin stepped in and delivered a deathless version of Nessun dorma in his stead.
Several of her songs became feminist and civil rights anthems, although, more than that, they transcended gender and race to become celebrations of a shared humanity. Perhaps the most potent of all was her rearrangement of Otis Redding’s Respect, which she recorded at the age of 25 and which — after several years of unfulfilled promise — became her signature tune and gave Franklin her first No 1 hit.
Redding had recorded the song as a plea. Franklin transformed it into a demand and added her own brilliant, semi-improvised tropes to the lyric, such as the chorus in which she spelt out letter-by-letter “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me” and the thrilling “Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” refrain.
Her delivery — “as precise an artefact as a Ming vase” as one critic put it — was so monumental that when she had finished recording the vocal her gobsmacked backing musicians stood as one and applauded. It was an unprecedented show of appreciation on the part of seen-it-all-done-it-all session players whose habit was to work to the clock on union rates.
When Redding sang his version during the most famous performance of his career at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer he acknowledged that Franklin’s genius meant that the song was no longer his property. He introduced Respect as a composition “that a girl took away from me, a friend of mine, this girl she just took this song”.
Respect made Franklin an overnight star. She went on to have 112 singles in the American charts, including 17 in the Top Ten, making her the most charted female artist in history. She won 18 Grammys, sold more than 80 million records and was the first female performer to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
She had famously larger than life appetites for sex, shopping and food, bordering on addictions. Never as svelte as, say, Diana Ross, she fought a losing battle with her weight, which ballooned after she stopped smoking in the early 1990s.
At home in Detroit — which she left with decreasing regularity in later years — she enjoyed cooking. “I do a great chicken and dressing and I like banana puddings and peach cobbler,” she said. “But if you mess up, you can gain a lot of weight. The most difficult thing for me to give up was ham hocks and greens.”
When she recorded a version of Nothing Compares 2 U, the Prince song turned into a hit by Sinead O’Connor, she even added a line about how not even “a strawberry sundae or ham hocks and greens” could compare.
Her weight issues took a toll and her health was not helped by a bizarre view of what constituted exercise. “I have my fitness regime where I walk the big superstores — Kmart and Walmart,” she said. “I walk the whole store. Sometimes twice if it’s not a superstore. I don’t do it with the cart. Security people mind the cart and I do the walking.”
She is survived by four sons, several of whom followed her into the music industry. After becoming pregnant at the age of 12 by Donald Burk, a boy she knew at school, she gave birth to her first child — named Clarence after her father — in 1955. By the time she was 14 she had a second child, named Edward after his father, Edward Jordan. Both children took her family name and were brought up by Franklin’s grandmother Rachel and by her elder sister, Erma.
There were also stories that at about the same time Franklin had a liaison in an Atlanta motel room with the soul singer Sam Cooke, almost twice her age, after he had crooned his way into her heart singing You Send Me. Her third child, Ted White Jr, was born in 1964 and is a guitarist who sometimes played in his mother’s backing band. He is known professionally as Teddy Richards. Her fourth son, Kecalf Cunningham, the child of her road manager Ken Cunningham, was born in 1970 and is a Christian rap artist.
Her first husband, Ted White, whom she married in 1961, was described by Franklin’s fellow singer Bettye LaVette as “a gentleman pimp”. Using the earnings of his prostitutes to invest in Franklin’s career, White became not only Franklin’s husband, but also her manager — and her abuser. She went to great lengths to hide the bruises. “She wanted the world to think she had a storybook marriage,” said her brother Cecil, who succeeded White as Franklin’s manager. “She was having all those hits and making all that money. She was scared of rocking the boat, until one day the boat capsized and she nearly drowned.”
They separated in 1968, by which time Franklin was drinking heavily, “using booze to numb the pain of her lousy marriage”, according to Ruth Bowen, her long-time booking agent. During a concert in Columbus, Georgia in 1967, she fell off the stage and broke her arm. It was officially reported that she had been blinded by the stage lights, but Bowen knew it was caused by alcohol.
She married her second husband, the actor Glynn Turman, in 1978 and briefly became stepmother to his three children from a previous marriage. They separated in 1982 and divorced two years later.
She also had a long-running and typically volatile affair with the Temptations singer Dennis Edwards (obituary, February 20, 2018). “She was the Queen of Soul and I think at times she saw her boyfriends like her servants,” he noted tartly.
In 2012 she announced that she was marrying Willie Wilkerson, a long-term friend and confidant with whom she had begun a relationship in 1988. She even revealed the designers of her bridal outfit (Donna Karan, Valentino and Vera Wang), but later called off the wedding without explanation.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born in 1942 in a shotgun shack in Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother, Barbara (née Siggers), sang and played the piano in church where her father Clarence LaVaughn — known as CL — Franklin was a preacher. The couple had four children together in addition to children born to both outside their marriage.
When Aretha was four the family moved to Detroit, Michigan, where her father became pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church, but within two years her mother had left due to her husband’s infidelities. She died shortly before her daughter’s tenth birthday.
Her father’s emotional sermons denouncing segregation and white supremacy earned him a name on the gospel circuit and in the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King was in Detroit he stayed at the Franklin family home. Aretha later sang at King’s funeral.
As an accomplished pianist, by the age of 12 she was singing and playing in the New Bethel church and accompanying her father on the road with his travelling “gospel caravan”.
Despite being a man of the cloth, it was a sexually liberated environment. “I got a kick outta seeing how God’s people were going for it hard and heavy every which way,” Ray Charles said of Franklin’s church. “I was just surprised to see how loose they were.” It was even rumoured — incorrectly — that the Rev Franklin was the father of Aretha’s first child.
Having dropped out of school, she made her first gospel recordings at the age of 14. In 1960 she informed her father that she wanted to sing secular pop material and signed to Columbia Records. Feeling obliged to explain herself to her churchgoing fans, she wrote: “I don’t think that in any manner I did the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind to switch over. After all, the blues is a music born out of the slavery day sufferings of my people.”
At Columbia she came under the influence of the veteran producer John Hammond, who three decades earlier had discovered Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Although her voice was already a gloriously soulful instrument, her career never really took off during the six years she spent on the label, as Hammond attempted to turn her into a Holiday-styled jazz singer.
Her breakthrough finally came in early 1967 after signing with Atlantic Records. Jerry Wexler, the label’s in-house producer, immediately took her to the Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where they recorded the funk-filled I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).
With a sensual vocal performance that to this day retains its capacity to send shivers down the spine, it was the pivotal moment in Franklin’s career and heralded the start of a golden run, the soulful intensity of her voice seemingly enhanced by her increasingly troubled personal life. Drinking heavily and with her abusive marriage collapsing, she was arrested in a Detroit parking lot for creating a disturbance, missed concerts and walked off stage in distress in the middle of a gig in St Louis. The promoter announced that she had suffered a nervous breakdown.
“I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” wrote Wexler, who produced most of her hits during the 1960s and 1970s. “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.”
In the 1970s she made a stunning return to her gospel roots with an album recorded in a Baptist church in the Watts district of Los Angeles, featuring the voices of her father and the noted gospel preacher the Rev James Cleveland.
Later she updated her sound via glossy duets with George Benson, Annie Lennox, George Michael, Elton John and Whitney Houston. There was even a hip-hop makeover via collaborations with Lauryn Hill and Puff Daddy, while she became first choice to sing the American national anthem at key sporting events.
A fear of flying meant that in later decades she did not perform outside North America and the next tantrum was never far away. That she exploded with jealous fury when Beyoncé described Tina Turner as “the Queen” at the 2008 Grammy awards suggested that, far from mellowing with age, the advancing years had made her more prickly than ever.
Yet throughout it all, the voice continued to sing out with unrivalled soulfulness. “I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” said Billy Preston, who often performed with her. “She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady gets her body and soul all over some righteous song . . . you’ll know that she’s still the best.”
Aretha Franklin, singer, was born on March 25, 1942. She died of pancreatic cancer on August 16, 2018, aged 76
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