Meredith Ochs - Aretha: The Queen of Soul—A Life in Photographs

As an artist, Aretha Franklin is loved and revered, though many fans dont grasp the full scope of her musical genius. Her voice is evident, an octave-leaping mezzo soprano capable of dizzying, melismatic runs. Mostly self-taught, Aretha played by ear with the kind of perfect pitch that allowed her to re-create anything she heard, note for note, before she reached grade school. She didnt really read music and didnt need it to record songs; the breadth of her musical knowledge was astonishing. So brilliant were her piano skills that pianists like Elton John proclaimed her to be a favorite. She was a master of phrasing and improvisation, toying with rhythm, vamping with spontaneous lyrics and scatting, taking songs where no one else could, her vocal pyrotechnics never obscuring her soulful delivery. Everything she sangand she pretty much sang everything, including gospel, blues, R&B, jazz, pop, hip-hop, opera, country, folkresonated with that elusive quality. Its like electricitywe dont really know what it is. But its a force that can light a room, Ray Charles said, attempting to define the word soul. Theres a reason she was called the Queen of Soul and will never be dethroned.

For music royalty, however, Aretha was distinctly down-home, as Smokey Robinson and many others who knew her observed. She rarely gave interviews, and sometimes didnt appear at all. When she did, she was often covered in sequins, jewels, and furs, yet she was of the people. She loved to cook and did so for friends, family, collaborators, and writers visiting her at home; on television shows like Live with Kelly and Michael and Oprah; and with the domestic diva herself, Martha Stewart. Though a reserved conversationalist, she spoke in vernacular that made it clear she had an ear to the street. The album title Whos Zoomin Who? was something she casually said while talking on the phone with producer Narada Michael Walden about checking out guys (and vice versa) in a nightclub. She was hip. She had a sense of what the public wanted to hear that enabled her nearly six decades of artistic reinvention and influence.

And she was funny, a trait she rarely exhibited but that was evident at sporadic moments, when shed joke with her band onstage, or during informal chats, or in her film and television cameos. The Queen had a wry, skeptical eye on the world, but once you got her laughing you were in, Dan Aykroyd, her costar in the Blues Brothers movies, said. A skilled impressionist, she reserved her best for close friends and family offstage but occasionally included a diva medley in her act, nailing the vocal styles and facial expressions of her contemporaries like Mavis Staples and Gladys Knight, even donning an electric pink marabou coat to mimic the frequently feathered Diana Ross.

Aretha was also habitually and quietly generous. From her 1960s tour with Harry Belafonte to help fund Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to the numerous benefit concerts she played and donations she made throughout the decades, to offering hotel rooms and food to Flint families during their water crisis, she retained the notion of charity from her religious upbringing.

The church shaped her life early on, and it remained a fundamental part of who she was. Her family followed the preaching career of its patriarch, Reverend C. L. Franklin, moving from Memphis, Tennessee, where Aretha was born in 1942, to Buffalo, New York, and then to Detroit, Michigan. Her fathers philandering led her mother, Barbara Siggers (herself a gifted singer), back to Buffalo when Aretha was six, leaving C. L. Franklin a single dad. Siggerss 1952 death had a devastating effect on the four kids, especially Aretha. After her mama died, the whole family wanted for love, Mahalia Jackson said.

Music, however, was Arethas salvation and doctrine, and it put her on the road from the time she was twelve, singing in churches and arenas around the country to warm up the crowd for her famous fathers impassioned sermons. Throughout the 1950s, she experienced the impact of segregation and Jim Crowthe restaurants and hotels that wouldnt accept black patrons or allow them restroom access, and the information network by which they found places where theyd be welcomed, such as Gulf service stations (We didnt buy gas where we could not use the restrooms, she explained). She perceived the power of her fathers magnetism, along with the freewheeling lifestyle of touring musicians, its paradoxical relationship to religion, and how to inhabit both worlds. In every way, there was only one outcome for Arethagifted with preternatural talent, scarred by loss, deeply moved by a sense of social justice, growing up around her countrys most active civil rights leaders and some of its greatest musiciansshe was going to be a legend.

Aretha Franklin in a promotional still, c. 1967.