Aretha Franklin

Aretha Louise Franklin was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1942 at Memphis, Tennessee, the fourth of five children of the Reverend C. L. Franklin — pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church and one of the most celebrated Black Baptist preachers of the post-war period — and Barbara Vernice Siggers Franklin, an exceptional concert pianist and contralto. The Franklin family moved to Detroit in 1946. Her mother left the household when she was six and died of a heart attack when she was ten. She was raised thereafter by her father, by visits from Mahalia Jackson (placed in this archive) who was her father's closest friend, and by the rotating company of the Detroit gospel circuit at the New Bethel parsonage.

She sang gospel from her seventh year. She recorded her first commercial single — at fourteen — for the Battle label at the New Bethel sanctuary on a portable two-track recorder. She signed with Columbia Records in 1960 on the recommendation of the producer John Hammond and recorded across the following six years the body of jazz-and-pop sides that were her commercial apprenticeship but did not, in Columbia's view, produce her commercial breakthrough.

Her decisive transition came with the move to Atlantic Records in November 1966. The producer Jerry Wexler placed her in February 1967 at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The two-day session produced the single "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" of February 1967 — the recording that established the Atlantic Aretha sound and that began her run of seventeen consecutive Billboard Top Ten R&B singles across the following five years. The April 1967 single "Respect" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1967 and became the principal vocal anthem of the Civil Rights and women's liberation movements of the late 1960s.

She produced across the following six decades thirty-eight studio albums, eighteen Grammy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1994, the National Medal of Arts in 1999, and the first inclusion of a woman in the founding 1987 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Carter (1977), Clinton (1993) and Obama (2009).

The 1972 gospel album Amazing Grace — recorded across two evenings at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in January 1972 — is the highest-selling live gospel record in the history of the genre. The accompanying concert film was released by Warner Brothers Pictures in 2018 after a forty-six-year legal hold.

She died of pancreatic cancer at her Detroit home on the sixteenth of August 2018, at seventy-six.

She is honored here as the Queen of Soul.