Queen of R’n’B
Born: March 25 1942;
Died: August 16, 2018
ARETHA Franklin, who has died aged 76, was the Queen of R’n’B who sold a million records for every year of her life, making her the most successful female star of all time. In a career that lasted six decades she sang for presidents (and made Barack Obama cry), she appeared in The Blues Brothers (not “as Herself”, but playing the career-reviving role of “Mrs Murphy”), and she was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A fear of flying meant that for the last decades of her life, she never performed outside the continental United States, creating an Elvis-like aura that only increased her reputation.
It is interesting, but hardly a surprise, that none of the diva classics included in her last album in 2014 were associated with jazz. Franklin laid no claim to that branch of African-American music, and yet her range and rhythmic facility was almost the equal of Ella Fitzgerald’s and her life-story so interlaced with pain, tragedy and loss that she made Billie Holiday’s infamously ghosted Lady Sings The Blues seem almost sentimental.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee. That she later became more completely associated with Detroit is almost equally significant. The family moved to Michigan when she was two, having spent an interim year or two in Buffalo, New York. There were rumours that her piano playing mother Barbara Siggers Franklin had deserted the family, but this turns out not to have been the case.
The move to Detroit was occasioned by her father Clarence LaVaughn (“C.L.”) Franklin being appointed pastor at the New Bethel Baptist Church. If singing in church has become something of a cliché in black musical biography, that is largely because Aretha Franklin established it. She sang in church as a child, and her very first recording, Songs of Faith, was made when she was 14. Her father’s background as an itinerant preacher meant she joined him on his “gospel caravan” and became used to the rigours of touring.
She was already a mother. Her first child, named after her father, was born when she was 12 or 13. A second son, Edward, was born to a different father a year later. After a first disastrous marriage, a third child, Ted White Jr, was born in 1964 and for a time toured with his mother as a guitarist, known professionally as Teddy Richards. Her fourth son, Kecalf Cunningham, born 1970, was the result of a liaison with her then road manager Ken Cunningham.
At 18, she announced she wanted to make a career in secular music. She signed to Columbia (narrowly missing a chance to become an early Tamla Motown star) and released a first single, Today I Sing The Blues, in 1960. Her first album for Columbia teamed her with the eclectic Ray Bryant group and saw her dabble in a range of African-American styles, including jazz. She had a minor hit with Rock A Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody and began to receive critical attention.
Columbia didn’t have to dig too deep for epithets: successive albums described her as Electrifying, Tender, Moving, Swinging, all of them words that had started to turn up in reviews.
With the beginning of the pop era, she started to pursue mainstream success. A move to Atlantic Records and to a shinier style of production led her to create an over-the-top but proudly defiant cover of Otis Redding’s Respect. It’s a measure of how thoroughly it became her theme song and mission statement that hardly anyone remembers Redding’s version any more. Franklin followed it up with Baby, I Love You and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, whose matter of fact eroticism moved her a long way from her Baptist roots.
She did, however, continue to sing gospel. The live 1972 Amazing Grace is a reminder that in childhood Aretha was sometimes babysat by Mahalia Jackson. Black and white musical categories, having been fluid for a time, began to ossify again later in the decade and Franklin’s wider demographic began to contract.
She was, though, a global superstar, chosen to give a command performance to the Queen in 1980, dutifully delivering generic – and often contract-fulfilling – projects like a Christmas album, and later singing at the Superbowl and White House.
Respect confirmed her as a beacon not just of black pride, but also of feminism, long before Girl Power became a thing, but her private life was torrid. She had a second, four-year marriage to actor Glynn Turman. A third marriage, to a long-standing companion Willie Wilkerson, never happened, despite regular rumours and apparent steady public appearances. Her sisters (and occasional backing singers) Erma and Carolyn died long before her, both of cancer, as did her half-brother Vaughn. In 1979, while she was performing in Las Vegas, her father was shot in his Detroit home. He lingered for six months, nursed by Aretha.
Like Oprah Winfrey, and Ella Fitzgerald, Franklin’s weight was a constant topic of debate. She battled with alcohol, chainsmoked and dieted. In 2010, she cancelled appearances due to medical treatment, and it was rumoured she was suffering from pancreatic cancer. Buying a ticket for an Aretha Franklin concert became an act of faith as continuing medical treatment led to further pull-outs.
In 2013, she sounded evangelical about her recovery, but the return to public singing was temporary and last year she was obliged to cancel shows again.
The announcement that Jennifer Hudson is to play her in a forthcoming biopic prompted the thought that while everyone knows Aretha Franklin's songs, nobody knows much about the woman herself. She remained, throughout her life, guarded and defensive about her private life, defined only by her recordings and concerts.
She is survived by her four sons.
BRIAN MORTON
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