Editorial: Aretha Franklin truly among all-time music greats

Editorial

In 2010, when Rolling Stone magazine placed the incomparable Aretha Franklin at the top of its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, another black artist, the singer Mary J Blige remarked: "Aretha is a gift from God. When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing."

Franklin, who died yesterday at 76 from advanced pancreatic cancer, had such a phenomenal voice that was also the reason why, when you heard her sing, it was easy to become transfixed.

Her musical influence is immeasurable. Besides her priceless voice, she was an instinctive arranger and pianist, even though she did not read music. She made the soundtrack to soul, to gospel, to rhythm and blues and to American civil rights. Her earliest albums, released in the 60s, were sold in segregated sections of US music shops. She still had the power to thrill as recently as four years ago when she performed the hits of female stars such as Adele, Barbra Streisand and Sinead O'Connor. The album went to the top of the R&B charts.

Franklin was present at some of the transformative moments of American history. At the start of the 70s, when America was in tumult, Franklin offered to post a large monetary bond to free Angela Davis, the demonised black activist being held on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping and murder.

Franklin made her position crystal clear: "Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free." Davis was acquitted.

She sang My Country, Tis of Thee before a crowd of 1.8 million at Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009. A few years earlier she sang at the funeral for Rosa Parks and, in 2011, at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.

Franklin was a woman of courage and strength. Her mother, who left the family after a troubled marriage when Aretha was a young girl, died of a heart attack before her daughter turned 10.

By the time she turned 15, Franklin, by then a teenage gospel star, had given birth to two of her four children. As her career took off, she suffered abuse at the hands of her husband and manager. She held the pain close. A long time producer Jerry Wexler remarked: "She was a woman who suffered silently."

Thankfully though her music and most of all her voice was filled with such an astonishing range of power, emotion and fervour that silence is the last state that springs to mind when Aretha comes belting through the speakers. When she burst on to the American musical landscape half a century ago, her presence - young, black and female - created a new and fresh musical presence that was at once strong and sensuous, long-suffering but unyielding and never one to suffer fools. She demanded, in the song she took from Otis Redding and made her own, Respect.

The last two years have seen the departure of many great names in modern music. Since the beginning of 2016, George Michael, David Bowie, Prince, Merle Haggard, Leonard Cohen, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Glen Campbell have all gone. Now Aretha Franklin joins the list, and can claim to belong with the best of the best.