She was the Queen of Soul who hit the secular sweet spot, yet her voice spoke of a life's suffering, writes Barry Egan
Aretha. She was so good that one word was enough. "When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch Aretha," Mary J Blige said. "She is the reason why women want to sing."
"She just bared her soul, she exposed herself, she did everything but get on the floor and scream and cry," Natalie Cole said.
As J Freedom du Lac put it in The Washington Post, Aretha secured lasting fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s "by exploring the secular sweet spot between sultry rhythm and blues and the explosive gospel music she'd grown up singing in her pastor father's Baptist church".
"The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's," said Marianne Faithfull.
Born on March 25, 1942, the voice of God died last Thursday at the age of 76 at her at her home in Detroit, after suffering from pancreatic cancer.
When Aretha sang her 1967 hit (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC in 2015, the performance caused then-president Barack Obama to shed a tear.
"You can hear Aretha's influence across the landscape of American music, no matter the genre," Obama wrote. "What other artist had that kind of impact? Dylan. Maybe Stevie, Ray Charles. The Beatles and the Stones - but, of course, they're imports. The jazz giants like Armstrong. But it's a short list. And if I'm stranded on a desert island, and have 10 records to take, I know she's in the collection. For she'll remind me of my humanity."
"What's essential in all of us," said the tearful President.
The Queen of Soul's life was full of tears.
Her childhood was unstable, unhappy and difficult. Her father, the Reverend C L Franklin, was an unconventional preacher in Detroit variously dubbed "the Man with the Million-Dollar Voice" and "the king of the young whoopers". He was also the king of much immoral and decidedly creepy behaviour that Aretha was witness to - and some say party to - growing up.
In his unauthorised 2014 biography Respect: The Life Of Aretha Franklin, David Ritz writes that the Reverend's church services were a cover for a "sex circus".
"It was the point where Saturday night merged into Sunday morning and sin met salvation at the crossroads of African-American musical culture. High on the Holy Ghost, dancing in the aisles of New Bethel, the saints celebrated the love of Christ," Ritz wrote. "High on wine and weed, the party people celebrated the love of the flesh."
Ray Charles, who visited the church, told Ritz: "When it came to pure sex, they were wilder than me - and that's saying something. In those days I had a thing for orgies, but I had to be the only cat in the room with two or three chicks.
"The gospel people didn't think that way. The cats liked it with the cats and the chicks liked it with the chicks and no one minded mixing it up this way or that… I got a kick outta seeing how God's people were going for it hard and heavy every which way. I was just surprised to see how loose they were."
Accounts vary that Reverend Franklin fathered two children by two different women in 1939 and that in 1940, he fathered another child with a 12-year-old child and was "unrepentant". All of this could not have been easy for his wife, Barbara.
In 1948, when Aretha was barely six, Barbara deserted her children in Detroit and moved to Buffalo, New York.
"Reverend was gone so much," Willie Todd, a New Bethel deacon, remembered. "He was a playboy. I mean, truth is the light. That wasn't their first separation... Aretha was a little bitty something."
The spiritual singer Mahalia Jackson changed Aretha's nappies and sometimes rowed in with her grandmother, who mostly raised Aretha and her siblings, Carolyn, Erma, Cecil.
Mahalia said: "After their mama left, the whole family wanted for love."
In 1972, Aretha was to sing at Mahalia's funeral.
Aretha said of the grandmother who brought her up: "She didn't spare the rod with any of us. You had to be doing it right with Big Mama or she would meet you at the nerve endings you would understand the most."
Another friend of the Franklin family, singer Mavis Staples, recalled once how young Aretha kept a brush and a case.
"I asked her, 'That's your mother's brush?' And she said, 'Yeah, that's my mother's brush. It's still got a little hair in it.' I think that was the worst thing that could've happened for her, not to know her mother."
Aretha's mother died of a heart attack in March, 1952. She was 34. Aretha, then 11, dropped out of school and went on the road with her father's preaching show. She stayed on the road for "more or less, the rest of her life", wrote David Remnick.
Aretha fell pregnant at the age of 12, giving birth to son Clarence, in 1955. Her second child, Edward, was born in 1957, two months before Aretha's 15th birthday. (The father - or fathers - was never identified, leading to heinous, false rumour that her own father had fathered the children.)
The teenage mother of two moved to New York City to further her career and it was here in 1961 that she married Ted White. It was not by any description a happy marriage. Nor was her second marriage to actor Glynn Turman, whom she wed in 1978 and divorced six years later.
Rolling Stone magazine took the view that Aretha's 1967 feminist and civil rights anthem Respect was directed at her abusive, controlling husband Ted - "All I'm askin'/Is for a little respect when you get home (just a little bit)": "There is no mistaking the passion inside the discipline of Franklin's delivery; she was surely drawing on her own tumultuous marriage at the time for inspiration."
In 1970, after their marriage broke down, there was a report in Jet magazine that Ted was investigated for, as the story goes, shooting Sam Cooke's brother who had attempted to protect Franklin when her husband turned up at her house. Stories like these were familiar in Aretha's turbulent, often unhappy life.
In 1979, during an attempted robbery at his home in Detroit, Aretha's father was shot twice. He was in a coma until his death in 1984. There was a report that Aretha nearly came to blows with her sister-in-law who tried to walk close to his coffin.
Despite all the private suffering Aretha endured, her voice was an instrument many felt - including herself - to be in the hands of God.
Despite the tough childhood, Aretha's talent was apparent from an early age. When she recorded her first gospel album, Songs of Faith, in 1956, aged 14, Dinah Washington said prophetically: "That one - CL's girl - that's the one to watch."
Taylor Branch, in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, his study of the civil-rights movement, wrote about a 1963 concert held at Chicago's McCormick Place to honour those murdered - including school children - when white supremacists bombed a service at the African American Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday, September 15, 1963. Martin Luther King spoke, Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington sang.
"The three of them," writes Branch, "held the overflow crowd until two o'clock in the morning, when young Aretha Franklin topped them all with her closing hymn. Only 21, already a battered wife and the mother of two children aged eight and six... Aretha Franklin still remained four years away from crossover stardom as Lady Soul, but she gave the whites in her audience a glimpse of the future. She wrung them all inside out with the Thomas Dorsey classic Precious Lord, Take My Hand, and by the time she finished few doubted that for one night they had held the most favoured spot on earth."
In the mid 1960s, when her music entered the secular world with the help of Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records - bringing with it huge success - Aretha felt the need to announce: "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."
Aretha saw this suffering first hand when she travelled with her father's gospel circus throughout the racist segregated South in her mid-teens where she would sing in churches.
Her late brother, the Reverend Cecil Franklin, once said of Aretha's early life: "Driving 8 or 10 hours trying to make a gig, and being hungry and passing restaurants all along the road, and having to go off the highway into some little city to find a place to eat because you're black - that had its effect."
It was not for nothing that Ray Charles said that Aretha sang "the way black folk sing when they leave themselves alone".
"Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit," she said, years later. "A lot of it is based on suffering and sorrow, and I don't know anyone in this country who has had more of those two devils than the negro."
As well as she might considering her childhood, Aretha had her troubles with depression and alcohol in later life. She seemed to fall out with everyone along the way: Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Natalie Cole, her own sisters, anyone basically. Her anger at the world seemed to come from darker place within.
"I call her the Lady of Mysterious Sorrow because that sadness seems to be her underlying condition," Jerry Wexler told the 60 Minutes show in 1989. "I say it's mysterious because you can't identify what may be causing it on any given day. It's probably an accumulation of a lifetime of bad breaks, disappointments and just plain unpleasant experiences."
She was a mercurial diva and sometimes her own worst enemy as her career's ups and downs showed. That said, Aretha was - and remains - one of the greatest singers who ever lived.
The review in The New York Times by black journalist C Gerald Fraser of Aretha's June, 1971, show at the Apollo in Harlem was almost as memorable as the gig.
"Inside, the thousands of black people who saw and heard Miss Franklin were more than an audience. They were part of a black interaction - they came not only to see and hear Lady Soul, Soul Sister No. 1, The Queen of Soul and all those other labels she bears, but also to participate with her in an exultation of their blackness."
All these years later, all of the world, of all colours , can participate in Aretha's greatness. One last thought: the billboard outside the Apollo Theatre in 1971 famously read, simply: "She's home. Aretha Franklin."
Aretha's home now, at peace.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. R.I.P.
