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correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
1
| 9 |
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin’s childhood home could become a Memphis landmark
|
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[] |
[] |
[
"bedroom",
"faces",
"foundation",
"jennifer lopez",
"lighting",
"london",
"madonna",
"memphis",
"michael jackson",
"pool"
] | null |
[
"Corynne Cirilli",
"Aishwarya Khurana",
"Rashmi Haralalka",
"Alisha Lad",
"Devyani Jayakar",
"Harsh Thakkar",
"Nuriyah Johar",
"AD Staff",
"Condé Nast"
] |
2017-05-29T21:54:26+05:30
|
Plus, 8 other celebrity childhood homes that should also be given the official status
|
en
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/verso/static/architectural-digest/assets/favicon-ad-int.ico
|
Architectural Digest India
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
|
Aretha Franklin may have left her humble Memphis, Tennessee roots when she was barely two years old, but the city is nevertheless desperate to save its small connection to the “Queen of Soul.". In 1942, Franklin was born in this tiny wooden home, but her family left Memphis about two years later. Now, the Memphis mayor's office is trying to save the dilapidated structure, left vacant for years, to preserve it as a landmark. A group from the mayor's office is seeking funding sources to assist in the preservation and future use of the historic home.
[#instagram: A post shared by Kon (@konradstagram) on May 28, 2017 at 8:20am PDT]
Franklin isn't the only star whose childhood home has been deemed unworthy of being landmarks. Plenty of stars homes, living and deceased, have not received official landmark status. Below, we visit the places where some of the most famous faces in Hollywood grew up—and the hometowns that should consider following in Memphis's footsteps.
[#instagram: A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on May 3, 2017 at 4:58pm PDT]
MADONNA
These days, Madonna's permanent residences are in London and New York—but the pop star grew up in flyover country. Madonna Louise Ciccone lived in a two-storey brick Colonial in Rochester Hills, Michigan (about 30 minutes outside Detroit) with her parents and seven siblings until she was 18. Her father and stepmother moved out in July 2001, selling the home for $270,000, but in 2008 the home burned down, reportedly due to arson. It later sold partial state for $91,700 in 2012. The property still attracts hordes of tourists to this day, despite the home not being in its original condition.
[#instagram: A post shared by Farrah Fawcett Foundation (@farrahfawcettfn) on May 4, 2017 at 11:18am PDT]
FARRAH FAWCETT
Famous for her feathered blond hair and a starring role on “Charlie's Angels,” Farrah Fawcett got her start in Texas. Before heading to Hollywood, Fawcett lived with her parents (her father was an oil man) in this 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom house in Corpus Christi, Texas. After her 2009 death, the actress's childhood home was remodeled with new paint, tile, carpeting, lighting, and bathroom fixtures before being listed for $215,000.
MARLON BRANDO
This five-bedroom, four-bathroom frame house in Omaha, Nebraska is where legendary actor Marlon Brando grew up with his father (a pesticide and chemical feed manufacturer) mother, and two older sisters. (Fun fact: After winning an Oscar in 1973, Brando returned to the house and shocked the new owners by asking for a tour.) Public records show the 4,119-square-foot home was built in 1900 and while it has been updated, and though it now includes a pool, it's yet to be landmarked.
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Jackson family's Gary, Indiana residence was The King of Pop's first home. And while the house has long been part of the history of Michael and the Jackson Five's rise from poverty to international fame, the tiny 672-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 1-bath house (which housed 11 people) has never been made a historic landmark. The property is reportedly still owned by the family.
[#instagram: A post shared by Janis Joplin (@janisjoplin) on May 10, 2017 at 5:49pm PDT]
JANIS JOPLIN
Oh lord won't you buy me … a music legend's childhood home? In the 1940s and 1950s, Janis Joplin grew up in this Port Arthur, Texas, house. She even carved her first name into the floor of the garage in the 1,450-square-foot, 5-bedroom residence. Though the homeowners did contact the Museum of the Gulf Coast about acquiring the house, the museum declined. It went on the market last year for $500,000.
KURT COBAIN
In one of the rare cases of preserved childhood homes, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain's Aberdeen, Washington home is pretty much in the same condition as when he lived there. From the flowered wallpaper and shag carpeting to the linoleum floors and yellow Formica kitchen counters, the grunge icon's mother Wendy O'Connor didn't remodel after the musician died in 1994. Many hope the home does eventually become a tribute museum as thousands visit the nearby Kurt Cobain Memorial Park annually.
[#instagram: A post shared by Barack Obama (@barackobama) on Oct 7, 2016 at 1:09pm PDT]
BARACK OBAMA
Other than the four years he spent living in Indonesia between 1967 and 1971, President Barack Obama was raised primarily in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though he and his family lived in multiple houses there, Obama's first boyhood home was a pale yellow bungalow on Kalaniana'ole Highway in Makiki. The current owners bought the house without ever knowing the 44th president of the United States lived there, and, though it's not a historical site, they say many people come by to photograph the residence.
[#instagram: A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Oct 30, 2016 at 12:33am PDT]
JENNIFER LOPEZ
She started out as "Jenny From the Block", but musician and actress Jennifer Lopez went on to be one of the most famous names in Hollywood. The block where she started out was Blackrock Avenue in the Bronx, New York in a 5-bedroom, 3-bathroom townhouse in the Castlerock neighbourhood. Her family sold the house in 1999—the year “If You Had My Love” was released and hit the Billboard Hot 100. Though fireworks set the home ablaze in 2003, it was eventually fixed and resold.
This story originally appeared on Architectural Digest.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 49 |
https://www.sfgmc.org/national-black-history-month/aretha-franklin
|
en
|
National Black History Month
|
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|
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|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] | null |
Aretha Franklin fused gospel and African American music with the blues, pop, & R&B. Learn more about the impact of her music and the legacy she left behind.
|
en
|
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5755e7c801dbae2c96b40f52/1469846174954-T6OVC33CKPP22JFHKK7J/favicon.ico?format=100w
|
San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus
|
https://www.sfgmc.org/national-black-history-month/aretha-franklin
|
Franklin also had an amazing touch at the piano. She was a meticulous arranger and composer and wrote several of her successful songs including Daydreaming, Rock Steady, and Call Me
Aretha Franklin was a powerful force in the civil rights movements as well. Reflecting on her career in a 2008 Washington Post Interview she said, “Being the Queen is not all about singing and being a diva is not all about singing. It has much to do with your service to people. And your social contributions to your community and your civic contributions as well.”
Aretha’s perspectives on civic responsibility and activism were formed early in her life. Her father, well known preacher and activist Clarence L. Franklin, was actively involved in politics and the civil rights moment. Her home was frequently visited by politicians and activists and many of the gospel superstars of the day including her mentors, Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel”, and Dinah Washington, the “Queen of the Blues”. By blending politics and art, the activism that surrounded her in her youth remained an important part of her work and legacy, and Aretha Franklin took her place in the long line of Black women performers like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Odetta Holmes and Nina Simone who used their talents and the public platforms they had to challenge social injustice and advocate for civil rights for Black people. Arguably her most famous song, “Respect”, became an anthem of the civil rights movement as well as a strong statement on Black female empowerment.
There are no words that can fully convey the impact Aretha Franklin had on American music, Black female musicians, the Black community, and her fans. The first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Aretha Franklin was the voice and sound of an important era in American history and the cultural history of Black Americans. She defied convention, expectations, and norms by combining feminism with Black pride in her music and delivered it with a voice and passion that was impossible to ignore. Her ability to move among genres allowed her to connect with a range of audiences and is a testament to the breadth of her talent. The impact of her music on the civil rights movement and American culture is a testament to the power of her presence and artistic truth. An unparalleled singer, accomplished arranger and composer, a powerful and effective activist, the voice of a people, a time and a movement, and an inspiration to countless musicians and fans. Undoubtedly, Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul” (and so much more), is one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
|
||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 50 |
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/aretha-franklin-birthplace.html
|
en
|
res stock photography and images
|
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Alamy Limited"
] | null |
Find the perfect aretha franklin birthplace stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Available for both RF and RM licensing.
|
en
|
Alamy
|
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/aretha-franklin-birthplace.html
|
Alamy and its logo are trademarks of Alamy Ltd. and are registered in certain countries. Copyright © 25/07/2024 Alamy Ltd. All rights reserved.
|
|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
1
| 30 |
https://www.magic925.com/rip-aretha-franklin/
|
en
|
RIP Aretha Franklin
|
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Magic 92.5"
] |
2018-08-16T14:21:22+00:00
|
TMZ is sadly reporting that the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, has passed away at the age of 76 surrounded by family & friends. RIP
|
en
|
https://www.magic925.com/favicon.ico
|
Magic 92.5
|
https://www.magic925.com/rip-aretha-franklin/
|
In all of music history there was never a voice like the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin.
Born in Memphis Tennessee in 1942, the daughter of pastor and civil rights activist C.L. Franklin, Aretha grew up singing in her father’s Baptist church in Detroit. She learned piano by ear, and toured with her father’s gospel caravan as a teen. She signed with Columbia Records in 1960, but the label had her singing pop standards, unsure how to use her incredible voice.
It was with Atlantic Records in 1967 that Aretha established herself as a musical force with hits like “I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You,” “Chain Of Fools” and “Natural Woman.” But it was her gender changing cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” that took her from R&B singer to cultural icon.
In the decades that followed, Aretha’s career would have peaks and valleys, and a huge commercial resurgence in the 80’s, but her legendary voice was always strong.
Her 56 year career resulted in 20 #1 R&B singles, the third most Grammys in history for a female artist, induction into the Gospel and R&B Halls of Fame, and the first woman inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
She announced her retirement from the road last year, but most shows were cancelled for health reasons. Aretha died in her Detroit home, surrounded by family and friends, at age 76.
Magic 92.5 remembers the one and only Queen Of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 91 |
https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-168-i-say-a-little-prayer-by-aretha-franklin/
|
en
|
Episode 168: “I Say a Little Prayer” by Aretha Franklin
|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Andrew Hickey"
] |
2023-09-28T03:34:04+00:00
|
Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also…
|
en
|
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
|
https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-168-i-say-a-little-prayer-by-aretha-franklin/
|
Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin’s life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Abraham, Martin, and John” by Dion.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Errata
I say the Gospelaires sang backing vocals on Doris Troy’s “Just One Look”. That’s what the sources I used said, but other sources I’ve since been pointed to say that the vocals are all Troy, multi-tracked, and listening to the record that sounds more plausible. Also, I talk about ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears” just after talking about white rock hits, but don’t actually say they were white themselves. To be clear, ? and the Mysterians were Latino.
Resources
No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes.
My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from.
Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore.
Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading.
Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey.
I also referred to Burt Bacharach’s autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King’s autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover.
For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen’s 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching.
And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it’s actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There’s barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs.
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?
Transcript
A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode.
Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin’s career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself.
This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story — because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she’s dead, it’s not right to disrespect someone’s wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don’t think we have an absolute right to invade someone else’s privacy for entertainment.
When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. “Respect”, in Franklin’s interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening.
For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was “the summer of love”. For many Black people, it was rather different. There’s a quote that goes around (I’ve seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can’t say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of “‘retha, Rap, and revolt”, referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit:
[Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, “The Motor City is Burning”]
The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US — for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go — but of *hope* for Black rights.
The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before.
But those changes weren’t happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on “I Was Made to Love Her”, there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn’t be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle.
Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the “I Have a Dream” speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha’s family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King’s speech:
[Excerpt: Martin Luther King, “Original ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech”]
So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution.
Franklin’s second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha’s first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties — he’d got his start recording a cover version of “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor”, the Big Bopper’s B-side to “Chantilly Lace”:
[Excerpt: Joe South, “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor”]
He’d also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he’d mostly become a session player. He’d become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston’s, and so he’d played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums:
[Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, “I am a Rock”]
and bass on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on “Visions of Johanna”:
[Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”]
South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin’s next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with “Games People Play”:
[Excerpt: Joe South, “Games People Play”] At this point, he had already written the other song he’s best known for, “Hush”, which later became a hit for Deep Purple:
[Excerpt: Deep Purple, “Hush”]
But he wasn’t very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it “I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles”
But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn’t care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard “Going Down Slow”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Going Down Slow”]
That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren’t going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn’t play as much piano as she would have previously — on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand.
But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn’t continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible.”
In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it’s a record that was being thought of as “product” rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It’s a fine album — in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there’s not a bad album and barely a bad track — but there’s a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like “You Are My Sunshine”, or her version of “That’s Life”, which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “That’s Life”]
But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we’ve discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits — and indeed they’d had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic’s hand is visible in the choices of songs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “96 Tears”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “96 Tears’]
Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single “Baby I Love You” was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Baby I Love You”]
As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha’s sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, “Ain’t Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)”, didn’t, even though it was written by Carolyn:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Ain’t Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)”]
To explain why, let’s take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we’re not going to get to that for a little while yet.
We’ve not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he’s one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on — they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn’t interested in finger exercises and Debussy.
What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet — he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too.
In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager:
[Excerpt: Count Basie, “Kid From Red Bank”]
He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance “they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way.”
Of course, there’s a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn’t open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn’t join Basie’s band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953.
But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days.
He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time — among others he’d taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach “Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle”.
He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we’ve heard about quite a bit in previous episodes:
[Excerpt: Henry Cowell, “Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance”]
He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone:
[Excerpt: Vic Damone. “Ebb Tide”]
He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn’t have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with “Keep Me In Mind” for Patti Page:
[Excerpt: Patti Page, “Keep Me In Mind”]
From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, “Magic Moments” for Perry Como:
[Excerpt: Perry Como, “Magic Moments”]
and “The Story of My Life” for Marty Robbins:
[Excerpt: “The Story of My Life”]
But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David’s brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs:
[Excerpt: The Five Blobs, “The Blob”]
But Bacharach’s songwriting career wasn’t taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich — a job he kept even after it did start to take off.
Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn’t quite fit into standard structures — there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities — but then he’d take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later “The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong.”
He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, “I’ll Cherish You”, had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single — but the single was otherwise just Bacharach’s demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning:
[Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Baby, It’s You”]
But he’d also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He’d iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse — he thought Gene McDaniels’ version of “Tower of Strength”, for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he’d heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called “Please Stay”, which they’d given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he’d originally thought up:
[Excerpt: The Drifters, “Please Stay”]
He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called “Mexican Divorce” for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it “they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office.”
[Excerpt: The Drifters, “Mexican Divorce”]
The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers:
[Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, “Singing in My Soul”]
The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston — her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick’s adopted daughter Judy Clay.
That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick’s two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don’t know, the Warwick sisters’ birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters’ cousin Doris Troy, and Clay’s sister Sylvia Shemwell.
The real change in the group’s fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on “The Loco-Motion”, the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles’ Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires.
“Mexican Divorce” was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists — though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it’s only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them.
Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit “Just One Look”, on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals:
[Excerpt: Doris Troy, “Just One Look”]
But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she’d started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she’d get to release them on her own. One early one was “Make it Easy On Yourself”, which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision:
[Excerpt: Jerry Butler, “Make it Easy On Yourself”]
Warwick was very jealous that a song she’d sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story — Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we’ve already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life — she got so angry she complained to them, and said “Don’t make me over, man!”
And so Bacharach and David wrote her this:
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over”]
Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans:
[Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, “Don’t Make Me Over”]
who also had a huge hit with “You’re No Good”:
[Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, “You’re No Good”]
And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick:
[Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, “You’re No Good”]
Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne’s was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”:
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “Anyone Who Had a Heart”]
And “Walk On By”:
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “Walk On By”]
With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group’s membership was naturally in flux — though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members’ records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters’ cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown.
The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It’s them doing the gospel wails on “Cry Baby” by Garnet Mimms:
[Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, “Cry Baby”]
And they sang backing vocals on both versions of “If You Need Me” — Wilson Pickett’s original and Solomon Burke’s more successful cover version, produced by Berns:
[Excerpt: Solomon Burke, “If You Need Me”]
They’re on such Berns records as “Show Me Your Monkey”, by Kenny Hamber:
[Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, “Show Me Your Monkey”]
And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin’s backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said “it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group”. He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.
Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name:
[Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, “Sweet Inspiration”]
But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples’ civil rights song “Why (Am I treated So Bad)”:
[Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)”]
That hadn’t charted, and meanwhile, they’d all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”]
Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma’s single “Piece of My Heart”, co-written and produced by Berns:
[Excerpt: Erma Franklin, “Piece of My Heart”]
That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her — she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her — but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She’d spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends.
And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he’d gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic.
Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this — it simply wasn’t true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison’s first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he’d show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.”
There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha’s part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being “Mr. Wexler” and “Miss Franklin” to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren’t on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Ain’t Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)”]
The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on “I Was Made to Love Her”, that was the day that the Detroit riots started.
To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black.
Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said “The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents”
But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 — the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley’s support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope — which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer’s door. The MC5 would later cover “The Motor City is Burning”, John Lee Hooker’s song about the events:
[Excerpt: The MC5, “The Motor City is Burning”]
It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we’ll talk about in a few future episodes. And it was a political turning point too — Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he’d entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he’d started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists’ fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level. That wasn’t the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity.
Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway — he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement — and according to Cecil “Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn’t budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda.”
To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways — as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn’t last.
Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting “product” from Franklin, had now changed his tune — partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she’d call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she’d tell me that she wasn’t sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I’d tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,’ she’d say. ‘I can’t stop recording. I’ve written some new songs, Carolyn’s written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut ’em.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I’d ask. ‘Positive,’ she’d say. I’d set up the dates and typically she wouldn’t show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree’s under the weather.’ That was tough because we’d have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I’d reschedule in the hopes she’d show.”
That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement.
The opening track, and second single, “Chain of Fools”, released in November, was written by Don Covay — or at least it’s credited as having been written by Covay. There’s a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston — “Pains of Life” by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio:
[Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, “Pains of Life”]
I’ve seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* “Chain of Fools”, but I can’t find any definitive evidence one way or the other — it was on such a small label that release dates aren’t available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven’t been able to track down online, is called “Wait Until the Midnight Hour”, my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he’d have had little chance to hear, it’s the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning.
The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Chain of Fools”]
Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,’ but I can’t take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha’s.”
According to Wexler, that’s not *quite* true — according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed.
But the core of the record’s sound is definitely pure Aretha — and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn’t write ‘Chain,’ but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she’ll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin’ her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point.”
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Chain of Fools”]
That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by “Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)” by John Fred and his Playboy Band — a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well.
The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 — “Goin’ Back” for Dusty Springfield and “Don’t Bring Me Down” for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they’d only had one — “Pleasant Valley Sunday” for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren’t going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector’s temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn’t the opportunity for them to place material that there had been.
They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn’t want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres.
As it happened, though, they didn’t have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He’d come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called “Natural Woman”?
They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning:
[Excerpt: Carole King, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)”]
They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.
King later wrote in her autobiography “Hearing Aretha’s performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can’t convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin.”
She went on to say “But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It’s about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them.”
And that’s correct — unlike “Chain of Fools”, this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work — though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song’s hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said “She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That’s when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn’ for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind’ for Ray Charles. He’d worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet’ was all Ralph said. ‘She’s just here visiting.’”
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”]
By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin’s records — while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha’s sisters.
That didn’t mean that occasional guests couldn’t get involved — as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on “Good to Me as I am to You”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Good to Me as I am to You”]
Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio.
At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on “That’s Life”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, “That’s Life”]
But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn’t think she could do both, and I didn’t blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. “
Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time “Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she’s an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn’t listen to me.”
The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism — the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that.
And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha’s father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle — a strike in Memphis:
[Excerpt, Martin Luther King, “Mountaintop Speech” — “And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.”]
The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike which had started a few days before.
The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it’s not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that’s made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice — King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People’s Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income — King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax — the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King’s main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers’ strike as a major part of this campaign.
Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes — safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union.
The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn’t. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read “I am a Man”:
[Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, “Blowing in the Wind”]
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren’t completely convinced by King’s nonviolent approach — they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi’s writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary — asking the young men “how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?”, and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can’t win against an armed majority.
Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled — the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne.
The day after Payne’s funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the “Mountaintop Speech”, in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life:
[Excerpt: Martin Luther King, “Mountaintop Speech”: “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”]
The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I’ve read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman.
Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: “In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn’t that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I’ve ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down.”
Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King’s funeral. In fact she didn’t, but there’s a simple reason for the confusion. King’s favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described.
Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at that service, in front of King’s weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people’s memories with Jackson’s unfilmed earlier performance:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)”]
Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral.
Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding — the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding’s funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding’s death.
The lead single on the album, “Think”, was written by Franklin and — according to the credits anyway — her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as “Respect”, and became another of her most-loved hits:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Think”]
But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, “I Say a Little Prayer” was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.
Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics — though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with “What the World Needs Now is Love”, a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965:
[Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “What the “World Needs Now is Love”]
But he’d become much more overtly political for “The Windows of the World”, a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it’s her favourite of her singles, but it wasn’t a big hit — Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying “Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it’s a good song.”
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “The Windows of the World”]
For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, “I Say a Little Prayer”, which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like “Last Train to Clarksville”. David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it’s never stated, “I Say a Little Prayer” was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts:
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “I Say a Little Prayer”]
The recording of Dionne Warwick’s version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part — he’d write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session.
Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded — an eternity in 1960s musical timescales — and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach’s objections, but as he later said “One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne.”
[Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, “I Say a Little Prayer”]
Oddly, the B-side for Warwick’s single, “Theme From the Valley of the Dolls” did even better, reaching number two.
Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King’s death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick’s version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That’s standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach’s melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick’s—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David’s lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required.
“Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne’s cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha’s side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha’s side. So I had no choice but to cave.”
It’s quite possible that Wexler’s objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart.
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “I Say a Little Prayer”]
Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin’s version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin’s biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there’s no doubt that Aretha’s is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” — which is surprising because Franklin’s version simplifies some of Bacharach’s more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting.
Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it’s understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn’t normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures — 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 — but this is a Bacharach song so it’s staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I’m usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what’s going on.
I’m going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “I Say a Little Prayer” with me counting bars over verse]
While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it’s in two if you’re paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it’s in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it’s in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you’re counting):
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “I Say a Little Prayer” with me counting bars over verse]
I don’t expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear — this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it’s six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it.
And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time — this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, and Franklin’s gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious.
But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive “The House That Jack Built”. It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while “I Say a Little Prayer” made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, “I Say a Little Prayer” made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It’s now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “I Say a Little Prayer”]
For much of the rest of 1968, Franklin split her time between recording her next album and live performance. The album was a big band jazz project mistitled Soul ’69 which was probably the least successful of her records from this period both artistically and commercially. It went to number one on the R&B albums chart, but Franklin was for most of her career, with one exception we’ll talk about later, a singles artist more than an albums one, and the singles from the record sank without trace.
She was also going through a lot of personal stress. An article in Time magazine appeared which, while overall complimentary and a puff piece by most standards, revealed more of her personal troubles than she was comfortable having made public, and became the main reason she became extremely guarded about giving interviews in the future.
Her live performances were also a source of stress at this point. Franklin had been thrilled with the opportunity to go on tour in Europe, and arranged to record a live album in Paris, a city she would come to love. When they travelled over, in May, White was still her husband and manager, and he put together the live band she would use for the tour. Nobody was happy with the band. Carolyn Franklin said of the tour “The only problem was the band. Wexler didn’t put it together. Ted did. The band lacked the fire that we’d been used to in the studio. And then the band became another point of contention between Aretha and Ted. She accused him of hiring the wrong musicians. He accused her of slacking on her singing. It got bad, even as the crowds kept getting bigger.”
Wexler said of the resulting live album “She and the band aren’t on the same page. They’re out of tune, they miss their cues, and they’re struggling to find the right groove. Naturally she was excited to be performing in Europe for the first time, and naturally it had to be thrilling for her to see the international scope of her success, but when the music’s not right Aretha’s not right. Like Ray Charles, she hears every note being played by every band member. And when a note is wrong—and, believe me, there were scores of bad notes—for Aretha, it’s like squeaky chalk on a blackboard. It hurts. When she came home, she was hurting. Here you had the premier singer of our time touring the Continent with a ragtag band suitable for backing up a third-rate blues singer in some bucket of blood in Loserville, Louisiana. It was outrageous.”
In truth, to most ears, the recordings, which were presumably sweetened in the studio afterwards as most live albums were, sound… fine. But they’re definitely not a patch on the studio versions, and Wexler refused to take a production credit, insisting instead on being credited as “supervisor”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Chain of Fools (live in Paris)”]
Luckily, her marriage finally ended — though even after they separated and she handed her management over to Cecil, Ted White insisted he had a management contract with her. With White’s waning influence, Jerry Wexler had the perfect solution, and it was also someone he owed a favour to. We’ve mentioned King Curtis many times before in different episodes, because he was *the* premier tenor sax session player on the East Coast of America at the time. He’d started out with Lionel Hampton’s band, but from the late fifties he played almost every important sax part on a hit record to come out of the East Coast, like Buddy Holly’s “Reminiscing”:
[Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Reminiscing”]
The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”:
[Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yaklety Yak”]
And all the other Coasters hits. He’d played on records by Ruth Brown, the Drifters, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, and Wilson Pickett. He’d played with Sam Cooke’s band on the legendary Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963:
[Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Twisting the Night Away (live)”]
He’d played on “Boys” by the Shirelles:
[Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Boys”]
And he’d also had encounters with future stars — he’d played sax on the single Lou Reed had recorded as The Jades:
[Excerpt: The Jades, “Leave Her For Me”]
More importantly, he was a bandleader in his own right. He’d had hits with “Soul Twist”, “Memphis Soul Stew”, and his signature song “Soul Serenade”:
[Excerpt: King Curtis, “Soul Serenade”]
And he’d had Jimi Hendrix in his band the Kingpins, for a while — Hendrix had played on several of his records, like “Instant Groove”:
[Excerpt: King Curtis, “Instant Groove”]
Curtis had also supported the Beatles on their 1965 US tour, including the legendary Shea Stadium gig.
He was also, obviously, the sax player on most of Franklin’s records since she’d started working at Atlantic, and had been the one who had suggested the key change and sax solo on “Respect”.
Wexler knew he was a great musician and a great bandleader, but he also literally owed Curtis his life. In July 1968 there was a DJ convention in Miami, a promotional junket for record labels in the R&B market, which will come up a lot in future episodes. Various gangs — what the great record man Henry Stone referred to as the “Black New York Mafia” chose that moment to try to take over many of the soul record labels. Stone himself had connections with a rival set of gangsters, led by Joe Robinson, the husband of Sylvia from Mickey and Sylvia. Stone got Robinson to organise protection for various people he considered under threat, and because of that protection he later agreed to go into a business partnership with Robinson which would revolutionise music a decade or so later. The convention also played a pivotal role in a change of direction for Stax Records. So you can be sure this will come up again.
But the person who was most threatened at the convention was Jerry Wexler, who was at one point during the event actually hanged in effigy. It was King Curtis who warned Wexler in the middle of the convention banquet that his life was in danger, and he and the singer Titus Turner, who were both armed with pistols, acted as Wexler’s bodyguards to get him out of the event alive. Nobody would mess with Curtis, who as well as being armed was also six foot two, two hundred pounds, and one of the most respected figures in the business.
Wexler owed Curtis his life, and also knew that he led one of the best bands around — and the Kingpins were already used to touring with the Sweet Inspirations as vocalists (though the Sweet Inspirations would only rarely perform live with Franklin, because they soon had one of the few artists bigger than her using their services regularly in a live situation).
For the moment though, Franklin’s records would still use the Muscle Shoals rhythm section — and on several tracks a new friend of Curtis’, a session musician whose contract Wexler had bought from Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals after hearing his playing on Wilson Pickett’s version of “Hey Jude”, Duane Allman.
Allman can be heard on two tracks on Franklin’s next album, This Girl’s In Love With You — named after another Bacharach and David song, previously a hit for Herb Alpert. One of those tracks is one we heard in the most recent episode, her version of “The Weight”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “The Weight”]
That was one of several songs on the album where Franklin was trying Wexler’s strategy of recording songs by successful white acts in the hope of a crossover — she also recorded versions of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Let It Be”, the latter of which was the first version of the song to be released, Paul McCartney having sent her a demo a while before the Beatles got around to releasing their version.
Another song on the album originally recorded by a white person was another example of Aretha working out feelings of jealousy towards a potential rival. “Son of a Preacher Man” had originally been written for her, but she’d turned the song down — something that would happen with increasing frequency. In this case her reasoning was that the song might seem disrespectful to her father, who was himself a “preacher man”. So Jerry Wexler had brought the track to the British singer Dusty Springfield, for whom he was producing a new album, Dusty in Memphis:
[Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man”]
According to Wexler “There was also a little tension in that January session because I was coming off a hit album I’d done with Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis. It was being called a soul classic and compared to Aretha. Aretha didn’t like me producing other chick singers. I told her that she was Dusty’s idol and Dusty was making no claims to her throne. Aretha smiled that little passive smile she’s famous for—the smile that told me she wasn’t happy.”
So of course, Franklin recorded her own version of the song:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Son of a Preacher Man”]
Of course, what Franklin didn’t know was that Springfield was far more insecure even than Franklin, and hated the idea of being compared to someone she realised was a much better singer. For the rest of her life she would always talk about how much better Franklin’s performance was, and draw particular attention to the way Franklin phrased the words “reach me”, and copy that phrasing in her own live performances. Still though I think in this case, for once, Franklin’s version didn’t quite beat Springfield’s original.
The sessions for that album lasted quite a while, and in the middle King Curtis recorded another album of his own, which also featured Duane Allman on guitar on several songs, including Curtis’ own version of “The Weight”, and a version of “Games People Play” that won him a Grammy:
[Excerpt: King Curtis, “Games People Play”]
Around this time, King Curtis also discovered a new soul musician who would go on to become one of the most influential in the genre in the seventies, Donny Hathaway, and he produced several tracks on Hathaway’s first album, and guested on guitar, rather than his normal saxophone, on Hathaway’s version of Ray Charles’ “I Believe to My Soul”:
[Excerpt: Donny Hathaway, “I Believe to My Soul”]
According to the biography of King Curtis that I used for this episode, Curtis got Aretha Franklin to sit in on piano on that album, but Franklin’s not credited on it. I suspect that biography is misremembering a different occasion when Franklin acted purely as piano player on a session produced by Curtis, an album by Sam Moore that went unreleased until 2002 due to Moore’s heroin addiction, and on which Franklin agreed to play piano partly so she could work with Hathaway, who was playing the other keyboard on the album:
[Excerpt: Sam Moore, “Get Out My Life Woman”]
The other musicians on that, other than Franklin and Hathaway, were the members of the Kingpins — Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums.
Aretha’s next album, Spirit in the Dark, was her first not to make the top twenty since she’d signed to Atlantic, though it had two more big hits — “Don’t Play That Song” and the title track. But it was a patchwork affair, recorded in sessions in different studios with three different sets of musicians — the Muscle Shoals players she normally worked with, her own touring band, and a set of musicians Wexler had found in Florida, where he now lived. Increasingly Wexler was producing sessions in Florida and not wanting to travel, while Mardin and Dowd were producing sessions in New York.
But Franklin was dealing with things that were more important than music. Her family was going through serious problems. As well as her divorce from White, she was seriously concerned about her father. Rev. Franklin had become more radical since the death of Martin Luther King, and had started giving support to more radical elements of the Black Power movement. He was still a staunch believer in non-violence, but he would allow his church to be used by those who weren’t, including the Republic of New Africa. This was a Black separatist movement whose vice president was Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malik el-Shabazz, the activist known for most of his life as Malcolm X. The organisation was founded to call for the secession of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and for those states to become a Black ethnostate with no white people.
Rev. Franklin didn’t agree with this view, but he thought solidarity with other supporters of Black liberation now more important than disagreements over strategy, so he let them use his church as a meeting place. On the twenty-ninth of March, 1969, they held a meeting to which some members of their paramilitary faction came armed with rifles. A police car drove past towards the end of the meeting and saw some of the armed men outside. The police approached, and while reports differ as to what actually happened, shots were fired and one of the police officers was killed. This led to the police storming the church, spraying bullets into the windows, and arresting the hundred and fifty people inside (many of whom were then held illegally without access to counsel) and confiscating large numbers of guns found on the premises.
Rev. Franklin was defiant when interviewed about this, saying “I do not denounce these people. Their goals are the same as ours, only they approach them from different directions.” He said he’d happily let them use the church again, so long as they promised not to bring guns in future.
This caused Rev. Franklin to become even more of a target for law enforcement himself. On one flight shortly afterwards, his baggage got misplaced by the airline, and when it turned up it contained small amounts of cannabis, for which he was arrested, though the charges were later dropped — he always claimed it had been planted. And he also found himself once again under investigation by tax officials.
According to Cecil Franklin “My father was sought out and victimized by government officials, both national and local, who resented his political positions and were determined to humiliate him. He fought back, he answered every charge, he eventually paid his tax bill, and, as far as his congregation was concerned, he cleared his name. But I have to say that after what happened to him in that particular season of 1969, he was never quite the same.”
Another family strain in 1969 came when Aretha’s sister Carolyn, who had written several songs for her and who Aretha was hoping would continue to just be a songwriter and backing vocalist rather than pursue stardom herself, got a record contract, leading to a flare-up of tensions between the sisters:
[Excerpt: Carolyn Franklin, “Boxer”]
Carolyn begged Aretha to write liner notes for the album, in the hopes that her famous sister’s approval would lead to sales, but Aretha kept saying she would and then not doing it, jealous of her sister. Eventually Carolyn turned to their father, who also tried and failed to get Aretha to write notes. When she wouldn’t, he wrote them himself, concluding with a claimed endorsement from Aretha that didn’t sound convincing.
There was also some tension between the sisters because Carolyn, who was lesbian, had expressed support for the Stonewall riots and considered queer rights to be the logical next step in the progression that included Black civil rights and women’s rights. Aretha would later become a vocal queer ally, but in 1969 this was a step too far for her.
Aretha did soften on Carolyn when her second solo album, Chain Reaction, came out, and she praised it privately:
[Excerpt: Carolyn Franklin, “Chain Reaction”]
But she refused to talk to the press about her sister’s new record. This time it was because of more scandal in her private life, which by this time had made the press. Charles Cooke, Sam Cooke’s brother, had come round to visit her at her home when her ex-husband had turned up, acting aggressive. Cooke had tried to protect Aretha, who was seven months pregnant at the time, and White shot him. Thankfully, Cooke survived, but Franklin was horrified by the publicity.
All of this happened in a short period from spring 1969 through early 1970, during which time she was also recording the albums Spirit in the Dark and Young, Gifted, and Black, the latter of which is often considered her greatest studio album by people who don’t think it’s Lady Soul. Both albums, like everything Aretha recorded in these first few years at Atlantic, are great, but they’re not coherent artistic statements.
As Jerry Wexler said “When you look back and see what are now considered the great Aretha Franklin albums of the late sixties and early seventies, they really aren’t albums at all. They’re compilations of singles. There was never any organizational principle. We just threw ’em together… For example, you could interchange the tunes on Spirit in the Dark with those on Young, Gifted, and Black. Mix and match as you please.”
It was in her live shows that she was making artistic statements, shows that were structured with peaks and troughs, and that had a throughline. And so it makes sense that her two greatest albums of the early seventies are two very different live albums.
The first of these came about almost by accident. Ruth Bowen was organising a tour for Franklin and Curtis, and realised there was an uncomfortable gap in California that needed filling. She persuaded Bill Graham to book them into the Fillmore West for three nights, as both a way to plug the hole and possibly a way to bring Aretha to greater prominence with the hippie market. But Graham would only pay five thousand dollars in total for the three nights, and the normal fee for Franklin and Curtis would be five thousand dollars a night.
Franklin wouldn’t budge on her fee — she didn’t want to play the Fillmore at all, seeing it as not her audience — but Bowen thought this was important. She eventually got Ahmet Ertegun to agree to pay an extra five thousand dollars in tour support from the label, because Ertegun was well aware of the importance of the hippie market. But that still wasn’t enough.
But then Jerry Wexler had an idea. They could put up the full ten thousand dollars difference, and use the shows to record a live album by Aretha. And why not record a King Curtis live album while they were at it? Almost as soon as he had the idea he regretted it — in his words he “considered the musical tastes of the flower children infantile” and had no time for people who liked Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, thinking such people could never appreciate Franklin’s music, but by that point the agreement had already been made.
Curtis put together the best possible live band he could for the tour. He used his regular Kingpins guitarist Cornell Dupree and drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, but rather than Chuck Rainey, who was his second-call bass player, he got in Jerry Jemmott, his first-call player, who normally only did studio work but made an exception for this special tour. They brought in vocal group The Sweethearts of Soul, as the Sweet Inspirations were no longer available for Aretha’s live shows; the Memphis Horns who had played on so many great Stax records; and on keyboards was Billy Preston, who had recently become a minor star in his own right after performing with the Beatles, but who had originally trained with James Cleveland, the gospel musician who had also been Aretha’s mentor.
And at the shows, Ray Charles also turned up, just to listen to the music, but Aretha dragged him out on stage for a surprise duet on her “Spirit in the Dark”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, “Spirit in the Dark”]
King Curtis’ set was a mixture of soul classics, both his own like “Memphis Soul Stew” and others like “Knock on Wood”, and songs that were designed to appeal to the hippie crowd. The set was largely instrumental, but he had Preston sing vocals on “My Sweet Lord”, the George Harrison song that Preston had played on and just released as his own single:
[Excerpt: King Curtis and Billy Preston, “My Sweet Lord”]
They also did instrumental versions of “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, and a song that had just come out by a band of former session players that Atlantic Records had signed after Dusty Springfield had recommended them:
[Excerpt: King Curtis and the Kingpins, “Whole Lotta Love”]
Franklin’s set was similarly geared towards the white rock audience, with many of her biggest hits missing in favour of funked-up or gospel versions of “Eleanor Rigby”, “The Long and Winding Road”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, Bread’s “Make it With You”, and Stephen Stills’ “Love the One You’re With”:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and King Curtis, “Love the One You’re With”]
That song, incidentally, took its title from something Billy Preston had said to Stills.
Both Curtis and Franklin’s live albums are regularly ranked among the greatest live albums in soul music history, only matched perhaps by James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Otis Redding’s Live in Europe and Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club. There’s a four-CD box set of the complete recordings which is *well* worth tracking down (and from which I took the recordings I just excerpted, rather than the original releases).
On the last night, the last song was one she hadn’t done in the previous shows, a version of Diana Ross’ first solo hit “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)”, presumably chosen once again in a spirit of rivalry. That song was also used for band intros, and she said this when talking about Curtis:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and King Curtis, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)”]
Sadly, that was not to be. Rather than performing with Franklin for “many years to come”, only a week after the release of the second album from the shows, King Curtis’ one, Curtis was dead.
He’d spent the time between the shows and the albums’ release a few months later productively and as in-demand as ever, playing on everything from the theme to Soul Train to John Lennon’s forthcoming album, Imagine, on which he played on two tracks, produced by Phil Spector, with whom Curtis had worked before Spector became famous:
[Excerpt: John Lennon, “It’s So Hard”]
Aretha had toured Europe again, this time with the Kingpins backing her, and while they were there Curtis had cut another live album, this time backing Champion Jack Dupree, who was playing on the same bill on some shows and got the Kingpins to back him. He played a one-off gig with his close friends Delaney Bramlett and Duane Allman, and started recording his next solo album, Everybody’s Talkin’, engineered by his friend Gene Paul, Les Paul’s son, and he’d just bought a new mansion just off Central Park, he was earning so much money.
But the air conditioning was causing problems with the electrics in the house, causing the circuit breaker to go off. On August the thirteenth 1971, King Curtis went out onto the street — his house had two doors, and the easiest way to get to the circuit breaker to sort the problem out was to exit one door and enter the other. He was carrying a torch. A man named Juan Montanez was stood in the other doorway, arguing with a woman. Curtis asked him to move. Montanez pretended not to speak English and smirked. Curtis tried to intimidate him, using his size to try to get the man to move. Montanez continued smirking and pretending not to understand English. Curtis got so irate he ended up smashing the torch over Montanez’s head, at which point Montanez pulled out a knife and stabbed Curtis. The wound proved fatal — though before he collapsed Curtis managed to pull the knife from his assailant’s hand and stab him back. It didn’t kill Montanez, but it did mean that the police found him when he turned up wounded in the hospital.
Aretha was distraught. Bernard Purdie, who became her bandleader after that, said “It was a sad, sad time. And the strange part is that Aretha didn’t even want his name mentioned; it was like she couldn’t take the sadness. If someone happened to say anything about King, she went into her shell. I understood. She couldn’t handle it. When Aretha was around, it was better to act like it had never happened.”
Franklin immediately went round to Curtis’ house to look after his girlfriend, and stayed with her for several days, helping out and buying her dress for the funeral.
Curtis’ funeral was a mixture of the secular and the sacred, mourning and Black liberation. It was officiated by CL Franklin and eulogies were given by Cecil Franklin, himself now a Baptist minister at his father’s church, and Jesse Jackson. Almost every star of Black music who could make it was in attendance, including the Isley Brothers, Brook Benton, and Dizzy Gillespie. The Kingpins played an hour long version of “Soul Serenade” while people entered and took their seats, Stevie Wonder moved everyone to tears by singing a version of “Abraham, Martin, and John” which included a new extra verse starting “Has anybody here seen my old friend King Curtis?”, and Aretha closed the service by singing the gospel song “Never Grow Old”, which had been the first single she had ever released, when she was fourteen.
And it would be to gospel she would turn for what would be her own greatest artistic statement a few months later:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”]
It was the perfect time for Aretha to go back to her gospel roots, because in the years since she had turned to secular music, secular music had turned towards gospel, largely thanks to her old mentor James Cleveland.
After Cleveland had stopped working for Rev Franklin, he had gone on to become one of the most important people in gospel music, both as a musician himself and as a talent scout for Savoy Records, who by this time were the biggest label in Black gospel. He had recorded a string of successful records, had mentored many musicians, and had become the single most important figure in the music since Thomas Dorsey, changing the style of the music completely by introducing massed choirs.
These days the standard image of a gospel performance in the popular imaginary is a group of twenty to forty people, in robes, singing together, but up until the mid-sixties that was almost unknown in gospel music. We always say there’s no first anything here, and I’m sure there are earlier examples, but it’s generally considered that the first truly important gospel choir was Cleveland’s “Angelic Choir”:
[Excerpt: James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir, “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan”]
Before Cleveland, Black gospel music in America was small vocal groups like the Swan Silvertones or the Soul Stirrers, or solo performers like Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. Cleveland, a rigorous taskmaster, taught his vocalists to enunciate clearly and stay on pitch perfectly, so they could sing in unison in huge groups without the music turning into a mushy mess. The results revolutionised gospel music, especially after he had formed an organisation called the Gospel Music Workshop of America to promote that choir sound and encourage other similar choirs to form.
And then in 1967, Edwin Hawkins formed a fifty-piece choir in the Cleveland style, and recorded an album in his local church to use as a fundraiser to get the choir to a national competition. That album got picked up by the San Francisco underground radio station KSAN, and was reissued by Buddah records, a label that was mostly best known for putting out records like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by Ohio Express and “Simon Says” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The single from it became a worldwide smash, becoming one of the few gospel singles to make the pop top ten:
[Excerpt: The Edwin Hawkins Singers, “Oh Happy Day”]
That song opened the floodgates for a whole lot of secular musicians to start using gospel styles in their work — though mostly the older gospel styles of those earlier groups. The Beatles’ “Let It Be” had a gospel influence, as did Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. George Harrison always said his “My Sweet Lord” was influenced by “Oh Happy Day” (though of course it’s actually closer to “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons).
And there were many more attempts to meld rock music and gospel. There was Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”:
[Excerpt: Norman Greenbaum, “Spirit in the Sky”]
There was Billy Preston’s “That’s The Way God Planned It”, backed by a supergroup of George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Ginger Baker, with Doris Troy and Madeleine Bell on backing vocals
[Excerpt: Billy Preston, “That’s The Way God Planned It”]
There were the rock musicals Jesus Christ, Superstar and Godspell, and there were all sorts of weird attempts to jump on the bandwagon, like the Motown compilation Rock Gospel: The Key to the Kingdom, which as well as tracks by the Jackson Five, The Supremes, and Marvin Gaye, also contained this:
[Excerpt: Stoney and Meatloaf, “I’d Love to be as Heavy as Jesus”]
Yes, that is Meat Loaf, several years before his career took off, singing a Motown song about how he’d love to be as heavy as Jesus.
This meant that by early 1972, the idea of a secular artist recording religious music was, rather than a novelty, completely in the zeitgeist, to the point that around the same time Franklin recorded her album, the song she chose as a title track, “Amazing Grace” was a worldwide hit single for the Pipes and Drums of the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard:
[Excerpt: the Pipes and Drums of the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, “Amazing Grace”]
The song “Amazing Grace” has a disturbing history. The words were written by John Newton, a man who had been pressganged into working on ships, serving in involuntary servitude, but had then himself voluntarily gone on to work on ships transporting enslaved people from Africa for many years. After a life-threatening storm, he had a deep religious experience and immediately became an ardent Christian — but carried on for years more taking part in the most evil activity imaginable. He did give up swearing though.
When he was thirty he became too ill to sail, though he continued to invest his money in slave ships, but slowly his conscience nagged at him, and by the time he was sixty he became an ardent abolitionist, and was one of the people whose campaigning eventually led to the end of the slave trade.
“Amazing Grace” was written between those two points, and so there’s an ambiguity to its intended meaning. The song was picked up by many marginalised groups though, including enslaved people, and usually sung set to an American folk tune (Newton didn’t publish any music with it, and the words are in common metre which meant it could be sung to many folk tunes — it fits “House of the Rising Sun” perfectly, for example).
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”]
There’s some confusion as to whose idea it was to do the album — Franklin always said it was hers, while Wexler also always claimed the credit, and both are listed as coproducers with Mardin, the first time Franklin got an official co-production credit on one of her records. The album was recorded during two actual church services — she insisted that it be recorded as part of a proper religious service — and featured Franklin’s normal rhythm section, plus James Cleveland’s choir, with Cleveland on piano for most of it.
The material was largely the gospel of Franklin’s youth — songs like the title track, “Mary Don’t You Weep”, “How I Got Over”, written by Franklin’s de facto stepmother the great gospel singer Clara Ward, who sat in the front row, and “Precious Memories”, which she sang as a duet with Cleveland:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and James Cleveland, “Precious Memories”]
But she also included moments of the new gospel-influenced popular music, like Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy”, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”, and, interpolated into “Take My Hand Precious Lord”, “You’ve Got a Friend”, by Carole King who had earlier written “Natural Woman” for her:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and the James Cleveland Choir, “Take My Hand Precious Lord/You’ve Got a Friend”]
Two weeks after the performances that made up the Amazing Grace album, Mahalia Jackson died, and Aretha sang “Take My Hand Precious Lord” at her funeral.
The Amazing Grace performances were also filmed, and you can see Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in the crowd, which is otherwise made up of regular congregants and friends of the Franklins. Sadly, technical issues meant that the film went unreleased at the time, and when those were solved forty years later, Franklin sued to keep the film unreleased. It only got a release after her death, but it’s a stunning piece of work which everyone should watch.
The album, which the label thought they were taking a chance on as a possible commercial failure, made the top ten on the album charts, and eventually went double platinum, becoming both the best-selling album of Franklin’s career and the best selling live gospel album by anyone ever. It’s often considered the greatest gospel album of all time, and Franklin’s crowning artistic achievement.
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Climbing Higher Mountains”]
That was the peak of Franklin’s artistic and commercial success. Two months after the Amazing Grace recordings, she had her thirtieth birthday party, hosting activists like Betty Shabazz and musicians like Cannonball Adderley and Quincy Jones.
Jones was going to be the producer of her next album. Counting the live albums, the team of Wexler, Mardin, and Dowd had, together or separately, produced ten albums for her in five years, and she wanted to try something different. In particular, she was sick of those three getting all the credit for productions she felt — with some justification — she had contributed as much to as them.
But she was also at least half-aware of a truism in music which is that great singers rarely make great producers. A record producer has to be able to be dispassionate, to step back and listen to every element objectively, whereas a great singer has to put all their passion into the performance. So she looked around for other collaborators — with Atlantic’s blessing — and chose Jones.
On paper, the combination made a lot of sense. Quincy Jones, as it turned out, was yet to have the career for which he is now best known, and had not yet rocketed to the superstar level at which he remains. But he had already produced and arranged classic records for Ray Charles, Betty Carter, Peggy Lee, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Little Richard and Billy Preston, and a string of early-sixties hits for Lesley Gore.
He should have been a perfect collaborator for Franklin — someone who knew great
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https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/memoriam-aretha-franklin-event-exhib-6368
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In Memoriam: Aretha Franklin
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Smithsonian Institution
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https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/memoriam-aretha-franklin-event-exhib-6368
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The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery recognizes the life of acclaimed singer and musician Aretha Franklin.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha Franklin influenced the course of American soul and pop music. With her signature voice—unmistakably familiar for its depth, range and emotional power—Franklin rose to prominence on the American music scene after her first commercial success in the late 1960s. Merging her childhood interests in gospel singing—both of her parents were gospel singers and her father was a renowned preacher—with jazz, rhythm and blues, and pop music, Franklin came to be known as the “Queen of Soul,” belting out a string of early number-one hits, including “Respect” (1967) and “Since You’ve Been Gone” (1968).
Considered to be one of the greatest singers of her generation, Franklin is the winner of 18 Grammy Awards and was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987). In 2015, the National Portrait Gallery honored Franklin with the Portrait of a Nation Prize, timed with her celebrated performance at the inaugural American Portrait Gala for which she performed several of her hits, including “Respect,” “Freedom” and “Chain of Fools.”
In this poster, legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser uses his characteristic kaleidoscope palette and innovative geometric forms to conveys the creative energy of Franklin’s performances. This color lithographic poster was created in 1968, the same year the National Portrait Gallery opened its doors to the public.
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https://www.memphistravel.com/trip-ideas/best-music-attractions
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Must-See Memphis Music Attractions
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Sun Studio, Elvis Presley's Graceland and Elvis Presley's Memphis, the Rock 'n' Soul Museum and Memphis Music Hall of Fame, the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music are a sampling of the best music attractions in Memphis.
|
en
|
/themes/custom/mmg8_cog/favicon.ico
|
MemphisTravel.com
|
https://www.memphistravel.com/trip-ideas/best-music-attractions
|
Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll
No visit to the Birthplace of Rock ‘n’ Roll would be complete without a tour of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s sprawling 14-acre estate. Marvel at the quirky wonders of the King’s mansion and enjoy self-guided tours of special exhibitions. Then cross Elvis Presley Boulevard to the new Elvis Presley's Memphis entertainment complex, where you can check out the King's vintage collection of automobiles and airplanes, an all-new career museum and two restaurants named after Elvis' parents, Glady's and Vernon (either one is just right for lunch onsite).
Tour Sun Studio, where rock ‘n’ roll was born when pioneering music producer Sam Phillips took a risk by blending musical styles. Blues artists B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf recorded here in the early 1950s, setting the stage for rockers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Still an active recording studio, Sun has attracted the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Ringo Starr and Tom Petty. This National Historic Landmark – which has appeared in a number of films, including “Great Balls of Fire” and “Walk the Line” – is an unforgettable experience for music lovers and history buffs alike.
Discover Memphis Soul
A must for fans of soul music, the 17,000-square-foot Stax Museum of American Soul Music, located a short drive from downtown in the neighborhood known as Soulsville USA, is the site of the original Stax Records. It houses more than 2,000 cultural artifacts celebrating the musical contributions of artists including Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Al Green and Aretha Franklin.
Beale Street and the Memphis Blues
A visit to Beale Street, the official Home of the Blues, is a rite of passage for any serious music fan. By day, tour the restored home-turned-museum of Father of the Blues W.C. Handy. When evening falls, catch world-class music acts at clubs such as B.B. King’s Blues Club, Rum Boogie Café and Blues City Café. Then head to The Pig on Beale to indulge in some slow-smoked ribs or over to King’s Palace Café for down-home Southern cuisine.
Whether you’re a foodie, a music fan or a history buff, a romp on Beale is sure to satisfy all your cravings. Beale Street is also home to two museums focused on Memphis' incredible music history. Take an incredible musical journey through Memphis from the 1930s to today in the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. This Smithsonian Institution affiliate in the heart of downtown includes the stories of Sun, Stax, Hi and Ardent Records. An interactive digital audio tour includes more than 100 songs and guides you through seven galleries featuring more than 30 instruments, 40 costumes and a variety of other musical treasures. The Memphis Music Hall of Fame honors individuals and groups whose talents have honed the Memphis sound, from Sun Records’ Million-Dollar Quartet to Memphis Soul icons Isaac Hayes and Al Green to Ardent Studios’ Big Star. The hall even tips visitors off to who’s making music in Memphis today, so you’ll know whom to listen for when you’re venue-hopping or record-shopping in the city.
Live Music and Tours
Visit the Overton Park Shell, the outdoor amphitheater where young Elvis Presley took the stage on July 30, 1954, in what historians have called the first-ever rock ‘n’ roll show. Built during the Depression, the Shell served as an orchestral performance venue in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, the venue hosts 50 free concerts a year of all genres from this landmark stage.
If you really want to cozy up to Memphis, take a 90-minute Backbeat Tours guided tour led by professional musicians who use songs, comedy and anecdotes to tell the story of our city. You’re sure to be entertained by these local storytellers, who periodically belt out tunes with a fair amount of guitar-strumming and tambourine-shaking.
Want more? Read off-the-beaten-path trip ideas to Memphis music.
|
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
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https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/aretha-franklin/2018/08/19/jesse-jackson-aretha-franklin-church-service/1036824002/
|
en
|
Rev. Jesse Jackson recalls Aretha Franklin's civil rights work at service
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"David Jesse, Detroit Free Press",
"David Jesse"
] |
2018-08-19T00:00:00
|
The Sunday service led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson focused on Franklin's work in the civil rights struggle.
|
en
|
Detroit Free Press
|
https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/aretha-franklin/2018/08/19/jesse-jackson-aretha-franklin-church-service/1036824002/
|
Standing on the stage where nearly 35 years ago he stood to help eulogize her father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson on Sunday lionized Aretha Franklin not for her music, but for her service to the civil rights cause.
In a voice so soft at the beginning that people in the packed auditorium at New Bethel Baptist Church were shouting for his microphone to be turned up, Jackson painted a picture of the world Franklin was born into — one where being black meant a life of struggle.
"Aretha was born in a shack in Memphis," Jackson told the crowd Sunday morning, adding there were 225 blacks lynched that year in Tennessee. "She was born in the midst of oppression. No one was saying Black Lives Matter then."
He told of how when Franklin toured as she was starting out as a singer, she often stayed in private homes, because there weren't hotels that let blacks stay.
More: Jesse Jackson on Aretha Franklin's quiet but profound civil rights legacy
More: Aretha Franklin's message to black women was a powerful gift
But Franklin was committed to overturning that, Jackson said. He noted her father, C.L. Franklin, the superstar pastor of New Bethel, was a leader in the civil rights movement, something Aretha Franklin did as well, even working behind the scenes.
Jackson recalled once when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was facing bankruptcy.
"She went on a 11-city tour with Harry Belafonte and gave all the money to Dr. King," Jackson told the church.
"She has a crown of jewels (now in heaven). Jewels for singing. Jewels for serving."
The crowd filled New Bethel, located at Linwood and W. Philadelphia, to honor Franklin at her home church just days after her death from cancer. The cornerstone on the outside of the church building notes that when the congregation moved to that site in 1963, Rev. C.L. Franklin was the pastor. Aretha is listed as a patron on the large stone.
A memorial covered the walls and sidewalks on either side of the main entrance. Balloons stirred in the breeze as parishioners walked by and flowers, some still in their plastic bouquet wrappings were propped against the wall. All morning, people driving —
or in one case riding their bike — stopped to take pictures or add their own tribute to the walls.
Inside, New Bethel pastor Robert Smith Jr. opened the service.
"It’s a sad day ... Aretha is gone from our eyesight and the reach of our hand” but it's a happy day because she is in heaven.
Carissa Wells, 45, of Detroit, came to New Bethel Sunday morning, even though she didn't know Franklin personally, or attend church there.
"My mom played (Franklin's) music all the time when I was growing up," she said. "Anytime I hear something of hers, I feel like I'm 8 years old again. My mom died a few years ago, but I know she would have wanted me to come today. It's way to honor them both.
Franklin's drive for civil rights didn't fade away with the passage of time, a point Ralph Godbee, the former Detroit police chief and current police chief for Detroit Public Schools Community District, made. Godbee had been scheduled to speak Sunday in honor of New Bethel's Homecoming day and picnic and was asked to keep that schedule. He spoke before Jackson did.
"I remember one time when I was police chief, my assistant coming in and giving me a note that said Aretha Franklin was on the phone. I went into my office and straightened my uniform, like she could see me. There wasn't any Facetime then. There's something about when a Queen calls.
"I picked up the phone and she cursed me out. I've never been more honored to be cursed out."
Turns out a Detroit officer had done something to one of Franklin's family members that Franklin felt was over the line. Once the officer learned the person was connected to Franklin, the officer stopped and apologized.
Franklin told Godbee that was wrong — what if the person hadn't been connected to Franklin? Why weren't his officers treating Detroiters better?
That was an example of Franklin's commitment to standing up to people and her love for Detroit, Godbee said.
"There's a revival in this city and it will be on the back of the spirit of the Queen," he said.
Franklin’s funeral will be on Aug. 31 at Greater Grace Temple. It's by invitation only.
The funeral will follow a public viewing Aug. 28-29 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Midtown Detroit, where Franklin will lie in state. The viewing will run 9 a.m.-9 p.m. each day.
Greater Grace, which seats about 4,000, has been the site of funerals for many notable Detroit figures, including Rosa Parks, Marcus Belgrave and the Four Tops' Levi Stubbs.
|
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|
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| 68 |
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/08/16/queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin-has-died/11032623007/
|
en
|
'Queen of Soul' Aretha Franklin has died
|
[] |
[] |
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[
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[
"Mesfin Fekadu and Hillel Italie, Associated Press, The Florida Times-Union"
] |
2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
DETROIT — Aretha Franklin, the undisputed \
|
en
|
Florida Times-Union
|
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/08/16/queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin-has-died/11032623007/
|
DETROIT — Aretha Franklin, the undisputed "Queen of Soul" who sang with matchless style on such classics as "Think," ''I Say a Little Prayer" and her signature song, "Respect," and stood as a cultural icon around the globe, has died at age 76 from advanced pancreatic cancer.
Publicist Gwendolyn Quinn tells The Associated Press through a family statement that Franklin died Thursday at 9:50 a.m. at her home in Detroit. The statement said "Franklin's official cause of death was due to advance pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin's oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute" in Detroit.
The family added: "In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins knew no bounds."
The statement continued:
"We have been deeply touched by the incredible outpouring of love and support we have received from close friends, supporters and fans all around the world. Thank you for your compassion and prayers. We have felt your love for Aretha and it brings us comfort to know that her legacy will live on. As we grieve, we ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time."
Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days.
Franklin, who had battled undisclosed health issues in recent years, had in 2017 announced her retirement from touring.
A professional singer and accomplished pianist by her late teens, a superstar by her mid-20s, Franklin had long ago settled any arguments over who was the greatest popular vocalist of her time. Her gifts, natural and acquired, were a multi-octave mezzo-soprano, gospel passion and training worthy of a preacher's daughter, taste sophisticated and eccentric, and the courage to channel private pain into liberating song.
She recorded hundreds of tracks and had dozens of hits over the span of a half century, including 20 that reached No. 1 on the R&B charts. But her reputation was defined by an extraordinary run of top 10 smashes in the late 1960s, from the morning-after bliss of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," to the wised-up "Chain of Fools" to her unstoppable call for "Respect."
Her records sold millions of copies and the music industry couldn't honor her enough. Franklin won 18 Grammy awards. In 1987, she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Fellow singers bowed to her eminence and political and civic leaders treated her as a peer. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a longtime friend, and she sang at the dedication of King's memorial, in 2011. She performed at the inaugurations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and at the funeral for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Clinton gave Franklin the National Medal of Arts. President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2005.
Franklin's best-known appearance with a president was in January 2009, when she sang "My Country 'tis of Thee" at Barack Obama's inauguration. She wore a gray felt hat with a huge, Swarovski rhinestone-bordered bow that became an Internet sensation and even had its own website. In 2015, she brought Obama and others to tears with a triumphant performance of "Natural Woman" at a Kennedy Center tribute to the song's co-writer, Carole King.
Franklin endured the exhausting grind of celebrity and personal troubles dating back to childhood. She was married from 1961 to 1969 to her manager, Ted White, and their battles are widely believed to have inspired her performances on several songs, including "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone," ''Think" and her heartbreaking ballad of despair, "Ain't No Way." The mother of two sons by age 16 (she later had two more), she was often in turmoil as she struggled with her weight, family problems and financial predicaments. Her best known producer, Jerry Wexler, nicknamed her "Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows."
Franklin married actor Glynn Turman in 1978 in Los Angeles but returned to her hometown of Detroit the following year after her father was shot by burglars and left semi-comatose until his death in 1984. She and Turman divorced that year.
Despite growing up in Detroit, and having Smokey Robinson as a childhood friend, Franklin never recorded for Motown Records; stints with Columbia and Arista were sandwiched around her prime years with Atlantic Records. But it was at Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father was pastor, that Franklin learned the gospel fundamentals that would make her a soul institution.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee. The Rev. C.L. Franklin soon moved his family to Buffalo, New York, then to Detroit, where the Franklins settled after the marriage of Aretha's parents collapsed and her mother (and reputed sound-alike) Barbara returned to Buffalo.
C.L. Franklin was among the most prominent Baptist ministers of his time. He recorded dozens of albums of sermons and music and knew such gospel stars as Marion Williams and Clara Ward, who mentored Aretha and her sisters Carolyn and Erma. (Both sisters sang on Aretha's records, and Carolyn also wrote "Ain't No Way" and other songs for Aretha). Music was the family business and performers from Sam Cooke to Lou Rawls were guests at the Franklin house. In the living room, the shy young Aretha awed friends with her playing on the grand piano.
Franklin occasionally performed at New Bethel Baptist throughout her career; her 1987 gospel album "One Lord One Faith One Baptism" was recorded live at the church.
Her most acclaimed gospel recording came in 1972 with the Grammy-winning album "Amazing Grace," which was recorded live at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles and featured gospel legend James Cleveland, along with her own father (Mick Jagger was one of the celebrities in the audience). It became one of of the best-selling gospel albums ever.
The piano she began learning at age 8 became a jazzy component of much of her work, including arranging as well as songwriting. "If I'm writing and I'm producing and singing, too, you get more of me that way, rather than having four or five different people working on one song," Franklin told The Detroit News in 2003.
Franklin was in her early teens when she began touring with her father, and she released a gospel album in 1956 through J-V-B Records. Four years later, she signed with Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who called Franklin the most exciting singer he had heard since a vocalist he promoted decades earlier, Billie Holiday. Franklin knew Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. and considered joining his label, but decided it was just a local company at the time.
Franklin recorded several albums for Columbia Records over the next six years. She had a handful of minor hits, including "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" and "Runnin' Out of Fools," but never quite caught on as the label tried to fit into her a variety of styles, from jazz and show songs to such pop numbers as "Mockingbird." Franklin jumped to Atlantic Records when her contract ran out, in 1966.
"But the years at Columbia also taught her several important things," critic Russell Gersten later wrote. "She worked hard at controlling and modulating her phrasing, giving her a discipline that most other soul singers lacked. She also developed a versatility with mainstream music that gave her later albums a breadth that was lacking on Motown LPs from the same period.
"Most important, she learned what she didn't like: to do what she was told to do."
At Atlantic, Wexler teamed her with veteran R&B musicians from Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and the result was a tougher, soulful sound, with call-and-response vocals and Franklin's gospel-style piano, which anchored "I Say a Little Prayer," ''Natural Woman" and others.
Of Franklin's dozens of hits, none was linked more firmly to her than the funky, horn-led march "Respect" and its spelled out demand for "R-E-S-P-E-C-T."
Writing in Rolling Stone magazine in 2004, Wexler said: "It was an appeal for dignity combined with a blatant lubricity. There are songs that are a call to action. There are love songs. There are sex songs. But it's hard to think of another song where all those elements are combined."
Franklin had decided she wanted to "embellish" the R&B song written by Otis Redding, whose version had been a modest hit in 1965, Wexler said.
"When she walked into the studio, it was already worked out in her head," the producer wrote. "Otis came up to my office right before 'Respect' was released, and I played him the tape. He said, 'She done took my song.' He said it benignly and ruefully. He knew the identity of the song was slipping away from him to her."
In a 2004 interview with the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, Franklin was asked whether she sensed in the '60s that she was helping change popular music.
"Somewhat, certainly with 'Respect,' that was a battle cry for freedom and many people of many ethnicities took pride in that word," she answered. "It was meaningful to all of us."
In 1968, Franklin was pictured on the cover of Time magazine and had more than 10 Top 20 hits in 1967 and 1968. At a time of rebellion and division, Franklin's records were a musical union of the church and the secular, man and woman, black and white, North and South, East and West. They were produced and engineered by New Yorkers Wexler and Tom Dowd, arranged by Turkish-born Arif Mardin and backed by an interracial assembly of top session musicians based mostly in Alabama.
Her popularity faded during the 1970s despite such hits as the funky "Rock Steady" and such acclaimed albums as the intimate "Spirit in the Dark." But her career was revived in 1980 with a cameo appearance in the smash movie "The Blues Brothers" and her switch to Arista Records. Franklin collaborated with such pop and soul artists as Luther Vandross, Elton John, Whitney Houston and George Michael, with whom she recorded a No. 1 single, "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)." Her 1985 album "Who's Zoomin' Who" received some of her best reviews and included such hits as the title track and "Freeway of Love."
Critics consistently praised Franklin's singing but sometimes questioned her material; she covered songs by Stephen Sondheim, Bread, the Doobie Brothers. For Aretha, anything she performed was "soul."
From her earliest recording sessions at Columbia, when she asked to sing "Over the Rainbow," she defied category. The 1998 Grammys gave her a chance to demonstrate her range. Franklin performed "Respect," then, with only a few minutes' notice, filled in for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti and drew rave reviews for her rendition of "Nessun Dorma," a stirring aria for tenors from Puccini's "Turandot."
"I'm sure many people were surprised, but I'm not there to prove anything," Franklin told The Associated Press. "Not necessary."
Fame never eclipsed Franklin's charitable works, or her loyalty to Detroit.
Franklin sang the national anthem at Super Bowl in her hometown in 2006, after grousing that Detroit's rich musical legacy was being snubbed when the Rolling Stones were chosen as halftime performers.
"I didn't think there was enough (Detroit representation) by any means," she said. "And it was my feeling, 'How dare you come to Detroit, a city of legends — musical legends, plural — and not ask one or two of them to participate?' That's not the way it should be."
Franklin did most of her extensive touring by bus after Redding's death in a 1967 plane crash, and a rough flight to Detroit in 1982 left her with a fear of flying that anti-anxiety tapes and classes couldn't help. She told Time in 1998 that the custom bus was a comfortable alternative: "You can pull over, go to Red Lobster. You can't pull over at 35,000 feet."
She only released a few albums over the past two decades, including "A Rose is Still a Rose," which featured songs by Sean "Diddy" Combs, Lauryn Hill and other contemporary artists, and "So Damn Happy," for which Franklin wrote the gratified title ballad. Franklin's autobiography, "Aretha: From These Roots," came out in 1999, when she was in her 50s. But she always made it clear that her story would continue.
"Music is my thing, it's who I am. I'm in it for the long run," she told The Associated Press in 2008. "I'll be around, singing, 'What you want, baby I got it.' Having fun all the way."
AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
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https://aaep1600.osu.edu/book/08_Franklin.php
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Aretha Franklin
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Here is a free, open textbook website of Artist and Musician Biographies, designed for the course AAEP 1600, Art and Music since 1945 and available for anyone to use. This resource is sponsored by the Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) and by the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University.
|
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| null |
Aretha Franklin, the "Queen of Soul", was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. Her father, C.L. Franklin, was a well-known Baptist preacher who attracted many famous followers including gospel stars Mahalia Jackson and Aretha's aunt, Clara Ward. In 1944, the family moved to Detroit, where Aretha grew up.
C.L. Franklin was also good friends with the gospel singer turned pop star, Sam Cooke. With an environment filled with musical talent, it was inevitable that Aretha would develop an interest in music. It was actually her aunt, Clara Ward, who inspired Aretha to pursue her interest in singing. Aretha joined the church choir and earned her position as a featured soloist by the age of twelve. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Aretha explored only her interest in gospel music. This allowed time for Aretha to reach deep into herself and explore her inner soul. At the same time, her life was difficult and she had two children while still a teenager.
Inspired by Sam Cooke, and helped by her grandmother, who took care of the kids, Aretha started her career and moved to New York City. After turning down a contract with Motown in Detroit, she signed with Columbia in New York at the age of 18. During the next six years at Columbia Records, Aretha recorded 10 albums without ever hitting it big. Many critics blame her delay in delivering a hit on Columbia Record's lack of direction in developing the young singer.
Disillusioned, Aretha signed with Atlantic Records under the guidance of Jerry Wexler in 1966. Wexler, aware of Aretha's emotional intensity and her gospel-inspired sound, allowed her to develop into the sensation she was destined to become. Aretha delivered her first hit single, "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You)" which reached a top 10 spot in this new, more comfortable setting. Aretha, now at ease, was able to reach further into her heart and release her soul through her belting cries. The result was a string of hits including "Respect" (Otis Redding's 1965 hit), "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman", "Chain of Fools", and "Since You've Been Gone."
As with the song, "Respect", Aretha has always been a strong proponent of women's equality and respect. She became a role model for women and African Americans during the civil rights era, commanding them to demand equality. Aretha continued to enjoy a prosperous career in the early 1970's with the single, "Day Dreaming" and the albums, "Live at Fillmore West" and "Amazing Grace."
However, as the disco rage began to cross America in the mid-1970's, Aretha's career started to falter as well as her marriage. Her innate strength, however, brought her back into the limelight with her cameo role in the film "The Blues Brothers" in 1980. Aretha also moved to Arista Records at this time and recorded two albums, "Aretha" and "Love All The Hurt Away" which were both commercially successful. Later, she recorded duets with artists such as Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, George Micheal, Elton John, and Whitney Houston. Aretha Franklin's career has spanned more than 40 years and continues to inspire younger artists such as Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill.
Aretha set the standard of delivering the experiences and sentiments common to women in a convincing manner. She enlightens the mind as well as heals the heart. Aretha has accomplished quite an extensive list of awards in her lifetime including 15 Grammy awards, the Grammy Legend Award, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, in addition to her position as the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. She has also had 12 million selling singles and 20 No.1 R&B hits.
Her 1998 album, "A Rose is Still a Rose" was critically acclaimed and continues her output of quality music, giving her a deserving reason to wear her crown as the "Queen of Soul" proudly. On that album, she collaborated with hip-hop musicians Lauryn Hill and Puff Daddy Combs.
One of her last major appearences was on the Kennedy Center Honors, in 2015, singing "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”" in tribute to Carole King, who was honored that year. Franklin Passed away in 2018 after a struggle with Pancreatic Cancer.
Page authors: L.C. and C.F.
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Did You Know Soul Singer Aretha Franklin was Born on This Day?
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2024-03-25T14:00:00+00:00
|
This Day In History: March 25th Whether singing for her R-E-S-P-E-C-T or performing for a president, Aretha Franklin has amassed a worldwide reputation for her musical talents. The singer was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942. Here are five things to know about the great Aretha Franklin! The award-winning singer achieved many milestones
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en
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TheHub.news
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https://thehub.news/did-you-know-soul-singer-aretha-franklin-was-born-on-this-day-3/
|
This Day In History: March 25th
Whether singing for her R-E-S-P-E-C-T or performing for a president, Aretha Franklin has amassed a worldwide reputation for her musical talents. The singer was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942.
Here are five things to know about the great Aretha Franklin!
Possessed Musical Talent From An Early Age. Born to a Baptist preacher and a gospel singer, it is no surprise that Franklin’s musical abilities were first noticed in the church. She was reviewed as a child prodigy and much of what she learned was self-taught. Not only was she a gifted pianist, but she also had a powerful voice which led to her releasing the album Songs of Faith in 1956.
A Strong Supporter Of Civil Rights And Activism. Although Aretha Franklin is known for her singing, she also used her platform to help fund civil rights campaigns. She worked behind the scenes to contribute to the movement and established relationships with figures such as Reverend Jesse Jackson. Franklin was even in support of Angela Davis after she was arrested in the 1970s.
Her Voice Was Declared A Natural Resource. In 1985, Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources declared Franklin’s voice a natural resource of the state. The declaration came as part of a celebration to honor the Queen of Soul for more than 20 years in the industry. Not only was her voice named a natural resource, but NASA also named an asteroid after her in 2014. The U.S. space agency named asteroid 249516 “Aretha” in her honor.
A Charitable Giver. Over the course of her career, Aretha Franklin became known for her charitable contributions. Her generous donations to Detroit earned her a Lifetime Achievement Award and she was named Michiganian of the Year in 2003. In 2008, the Grammy’s awarded Franklin the MusiCares Person of the Year award for her contributions to Save the Children and Easterseals as well as her support of local churches and food banks.
An All-Around Winner And Hall Of Famer. In addition to her astounding three inauguration performances (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), Aretha Franklin has also been nominated for more than 40 Grammys. She won 18 of those nominations and 10 of her victories were for Best R&B Vocal Performance. She made history in 1987 when she became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Franklin also has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and has been inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame, and the Apollo Theater Legends Hall of Fame.
The award-winning singer achieved many milestones in music history. Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018, and fans from all over attended the public viewing held at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History to pay their respects to the famed singer.
Shayla Farrow
Shayla Farrow is a multimedia journalist with a Media, Journalism and Film Communications degree from Howard University and a master’s degree in management from Wake Forest University. Shayla discovered her passion for journalism while working as a reporter with Spotlight Network at Howard University. She worked with other campus media, including NewsVision, WHBC 96.3 HD3, WHUR-FM, 101 Magazine, and the HU News Service. Her reporting abilities earned her opportunities to interview industry professionals including Cathy Hughes, movie director Malcolm D. Lee and creator of “David Makes Man,” Tarell Alvin McCraney. Shayla intends to leave her mark in journalism by broadcasting radio and television shows that cover a wide array of topics ranging from politics and social justice issues to entertainment and pop culture. She has worked on a variety of shows, including the Wendy Williams Show, The Joe Madison Show, and The Karen Hunter Show as well as worked as a producer for the NBC News Channel. However, her ultimate career goal is to own a television and audio entertainment platform that provides quality content to viewing and listening audiences.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
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https://fighting-words.net/2022/10/02/aretha-franklin-and-the-counterintelligence-program/
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Aretha Franklin and the Counterintelligence Program
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2022-10-02T00:00:00
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By Abayomi Azikiwe On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76. Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25…
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en
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Fighting Words
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https://fighting-words.net/2022/10/02/aretha-franklin-and-the-counterintelligence-program/
|
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
By Abayomi Azikiwe
On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942, Aretha came to Detroit in 1946 with her parents, vocalist Mrs. Barbara Siggers Franklin and Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a well-known minister who originated in the Delta region of Mississippi. Franklin became a minister while he was a teenager in Mississippi.
Rev. Franklin was recruited to come to Detroit from Buffalo, New York in late 1945 and in subsequent years built the New Bethel Baptist Church into an internationally recognized religious institution located on Hasting Street on the eastside of Detroit. The community surrounding the church was later targeted in the late 1950s and early 1960s for demolition in a so-called “urban renewal” project fostered by the then City of Detroit government and the Federal Highway Administration based in Washington, D.C.
By the early 1960s, Detroit was seething with discontent over the massive displacement of more than 100,000 people from the lower east side communities known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Many small businesses, social clubs, churches and as well as thousands of homes were destroyed by the racist white city administration.
New Bethel relocated to Linwood Avenue in the Virginia Park District on the west side in the Spring of 1963. This was the same year of the massive “Walk to Freedom” down Woodward Avenue on June 23. The demonstration was the largest civil rights manifestation in the United States and would set the stage for the “March on Washington” just two months later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was led by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Albert Cleage of the Central Congregational Church, also located in the Virginia Park District on Linwood Avenue, among other community and labor leaders.
Rev. Franklin was heavily involved with the SCLC as a board member and fundraiser. Dr. King and his organization, in which he served as president, were subjected to intense spying and disruption efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with segregationist southern state governments bolstered by law-enforcement agencies and business interests.
Aretha Franklin often traveled with her father during the 1950s in his highly popular gospel tours throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. By 1960, Aretha had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. Later in 1967, she switched to Atlantic Records where her first album catapulted the soul artist to the top of the charts.
FBI Sought to Document “Communist Infiltration of the SCLC”
Of the 270 pages of FBI files which were the topic of several newspaper articles in early September, a substantial portion of the documents focus on the SCLC and its activities during 1967-1969. Dr. King, in early 1967, had come out solidly in opposition to the U.S. occupation of Vietnam and described the war as an “enemy of the poor.”
King’s position on Vietnam coincided with a radicalization of the SCLC and other organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the emergence of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Republic of New Africa (RNA), to name some of the most well-known groupings. In late July 1967, the city of Detroit erupted in a Black rebellion, the largest of such occurrences among all other municipalities during the period. New Bethel Church was located in the heart of the hardest hit areas of the rebellion, yet the building was unscathed by the violence.
A declassified FBI document from Atlanta, Georgia, dated August 1, 1967, noted that the SCLC was holding its annual convention in the city between the 14-17th of that month. This document reported that a weekly African American newspaper announced that
“Carol Hoover (Special Fund-raising Officer, SCLC) is serving as coordinator of the convention. Sidney Poitier, popular actor, will be the featured speaker at the opening banquet August 14, 1967, and Aretha Franklin, popular entertainer, will also appear at the banquet.”
Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 after intervening in a citywide sanitation workers strike which had gone on for two months. Although the FBI and then Attorney General Ramsey Clark immediately claimed that King’s murder was not the result of a conspiracy, there is ample documented evidence that the SCLC co-founder and president was the subject an incessant surveillance and destabilization campaign by the federal government.
The SCLC convention was held in Memphis just four months after the assassination of King. On August 16, FBI sources in a document from the Special Agent-in-Charge to the Director of the FBI, under the topic “Communist Infiltration of the SCLC”, cited Rev. James Bevel, a SCLC staff member stating that:
“’The United States Government is involved in acts of genocide against the Vietnamese people in a systematic murder of non-whites.’ He stated that the United States is in Vietnam for the reason that it wants to gain physical control of Vietnam because the United States wants Vietnam’s rice and Tungsten. He described Vietnam as ‘the rice bowl of Asia’ and stated that the United States wanted to use Vietnam as a military base from which to dominate all Asia.”
In the first and second paragraphs of the confidential document dated August 21 on the 1968 SCLC convention in Memphis, it states:
“Enclosed herewith for the Bureau are 11 copies, Atlanta 4 copies, and for all listed offices 2 copies, an LHM (letterhead memorandum) and captioned as above. Copies are being furnished to the United States Attorney and United States Secret Service, Memphis, and to regional offices of Military Intelligence.”
This same report from an FBI source noted a performance by Aretha Franklin at the convention along with comments made by her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin. The document quoted Rev. Franklin as saying:
“England has degenerated from a first to a third-rate power. He stated that Communist China has evolved from a second-rate to a first-rate power and now has atomic energy.”
The Angela Davis Defense Campaign
On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, 17, the younger brother of Black Panther Party Field Marshal and prison writer, George L. Jackson, died in an ambush by Marin County Sheriff Deputies. Jackson had attempted to take a judge and several jurors hostage in an effort to free George from San Quentin prison. George Jackson was killed one year later on August 21, 1971 in another effort to win freedom.
Arms utilized in the operation on August 7, 1970 in California were connected to Angela Davis, a then-member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) who had been fired in 1969 from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) at the aegis of Governor Ronald Reagan due to her political affiliations. Davis had been a leader in the Soledad Brothers defense campaign and was immediately put on the FBI’s most wanted list. She was later captured in October 1970 spawning an international campaign demanding her release.
In a December 1970 article in Jet magazine Aretha offered to post bail for Angela Davis. She was quoted as saying:
“Angela Davis must go free. I’ve been locked up… and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people.”
Other documents released by the FBI point to Aretha being mentioned in meetings hosted by the Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL), a youth group connected to the CPUSA during the early 1970s. The meeting merely suggested her as a performer for fundraising activities aimed at building the Angela Davis defense campaign.
An August 26, 1971 document from the FBI office in Los Angeles suggests that Aretha Franklin was being solicited to perform at a function hosted by the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale, the then Chairman of the BPP, was scheduled to oversee a free food distribution event where 5,000 needy families would be served. There is no evidence that Aretha appeared at the program.
An FBI memorandum dated May 29, 1973 from the Special Agent-in-Charge of New York to the Acting Director of the FBI said:
“Document C-173 is a letter from Harold R. Washington, requesting that she donate funds to the Women’s Bail Fund. This fund was used for bail of inmates at the Women’s House of Detention in NYC.”
However, the memorandum went on to say that:
“On 5/2/73 [redacted name] advised that to the best of his knowledge, Aretha Franklin has never been associated with the Black radical movement. In view of the fact there is no evidence of involvement by Miss Franklin in BLA [probably Black Liberation Army] activities and in view of her fame as a singer, it is felt that it would not be in the best interests of the Bureau to attempt to interview her.”
In the final document related to the counterintelligence program of the FBI which are present in the declassified files on Aretha Franklin, dated September 22, 1976, it reports:
“Captioned individual, not further identified may be identical with one female entertainer by the same name, who has not been the subject of an investigation conducted by this Bureau. Our files, however, reveal that ‘The Daily People’s World’, a West Coast communist newspaper, carried a story under March 6, 1972, dateline, citing star performers raised $38,000 at Los Angeles for the Committee to Free Angela Davis…. In September 1972, a confidential source abroad advised that Coordinating Council for the Liberation of Dominica (CCLD) was a Black extremist group bent on disturbing the tranquility of the island of Dominica and the CCLD may have established a base of operation in the New York City area. The same source identified persons associated or known to Roosevelt Bernard Douglas, a Black extremist of international note, and the CCLD. One of the persons named was ‘Aretha Franklin, publicly known entertainer.’”
This same document from 1976 also reports:
“In April 1973, during a review of documents obtained concerning the Black Liberation Army (BLA), one document bore the address of ‘Mrs. Aretha Franklin’ in care of Queens Booking Agency, 1650 Broadway, Room 1410, New York, New York. The BLA was a quasi-military group composed of small guerrilla units employing the tactics of urban guerrilla warfare against the established order with a view toward achieving revolutionary change in America. The significance of association of Franklin into the BLA is not known to this Bureau.”
In reviewing these documents one comes away with the feeling that there are additional entries which may have remained classified by the FBI. Other documents deal with suspicious letters sent to Aretha Franklin between 1968 and 1979 which came to the attention of the FBI through her managers and attorneys.
The last section of the declassified documents dwelled extensively on a copyright infringement investigation which led to an FBI raid on a private individual in Ohio. This investigation was initiated by a Detroit-based law firm which was handling Aretha Franklin’s affairs between 2005-2007. However, the FBI did not pursue the prosecution of the individual who admitted to unlawfully reproducing Franklin’s music and videos.
These documents do shed light on the extensive level of surveillance and destabilization launched by the U.S. government against the Civil Rights, Black Power and Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With the FBI being the chief law-enforcement agency in the country, this reveals that the state has never fully accepted the right of African American people to full emancipation and self-determination.
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https://www.highgroundnews.com/features/SouthMemphis_WalkingTour_History.aspx
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Walking in Memphis: Put on your tennis shoes and discover South Memphis history
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South Memphis is packed with Memphis history, especially its music history. Here's a look at some of the most interested and iconic.
|
en
|
/images/favicon.ico
|
High Ground
|
https://www.highgroundnews.com/features/SouthMemphis_WalkingTour_History.aspx
|
[Author Ramona Springfield is a resident of South Memphis. She covers her community's news and events as a High Ground News Community Correspondent.]
As one of the oldest communities in the city, South Memphis boasts far more history than many Memphians realize.
A tour through South Memphis' 38126 and 38106 ZIP codes will lead you to a total of 29 historical markers. Most were erected by the Tennessee Historical Commission, the Shelby County Historical Commission, the Catholic Diocese of Memphis, or the Center City Commission.
Together they capture a complex, history that runs deep through historic music, churches, schools, businesses, events, and individuals. These are stories where triumphs are often merged with sadness, and innovation and resilience are a common thread.
Many are clustered, which makes for an ideal walking tour. A car, bike, or bus can move you between clusters or get you to the outliers. You can also check out tour services like A Tour of Possibilities, which focuses on Black and African American contributions to Memphis.
For those familiar with this side of town and even those who aren’t quite acquainted, a walking tour is a fun and safe activity to soak up some local history during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's also a great way to supplement kids' history lessons and adults' Memphis knowledge.
Need a starting point for your tour? Here are some of the community's favorites. They're all within a three mile radius.
The Birthplace of Aretha Franklin and American Soul
South Memphis is the birthplace of American soul music and was an important location for the development of funk, blues, and rock. You can learn its history at its Stax Museum of American Soul Music or you can hit the streets to see it firsthand.
On Lucy Avenue, a small shotgun house surrounded by chain link fence and makeshift memorial is the birthplace of famous songstress Aretha Franklin. A few blocks away is the famous Willie Mitchell Royal Studio where Al Green, Bruno Mars, Rod Stewart, and a host of others recorded chart-topping songs.
Aretha Franklin's birthplace at 406 Lucy Avenue in South Memphis. The house is now surrounded by a chain link fence, which visitors have decorated with memorial messages and gifts. (Wikimedia Commons)
People’s Grocery
1026 Mississippi Boulevard
The People’s Grocery was a grocery store opened in 1889 by three African American men: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. They chose a location at the southeast corner of Mississippi and Walker Avenue known as The Curve. At the time it was economically and racially mixed. Across from People’s Grocery was another grocer store owned by W. R. Barrett, who was white. Barrett was in business first and tensions began to rise as People’s Grocery gained success and support from the black community.
On March 2, 1892 Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested and put in jail in connection with a disturbance near their store. On March 9, 1892 while sitting in jail waiting on a judge to decide whether they should be brought to trial, the three men were dragged from their jail cells by an angry mob of white Memphians and lynched. The marker for this tragic event was erected by the Tennessee Historical Commission on June 5, 1991.
South Memphis' Other Historically Black College
Intersection of McLemore Avenue and Krayer Street
The University of West Tennessee was a school for Black medical students established in 1900 by African American physician, journalist, and educator Miles Vandarhurt Lynk. Lynk also lived in the same South Memphis community.
At the time, there were less than 15 Black medical schools in the country. It UWT closed in 1923 after graduating just over 150 doctors, nurses, and dentists.
The historical marker is nestled between overgrown shrubbery and a beaten path. It was erected in 1996 by The Tennessee Historical Commission.
“This really makes you think,” says John Knox when asked about a historic Black college in his old South Memphis neighborhood. Knox spent most of his childhood just a block away from the University of West Tennessee marker but had no clue it existed. He was only familiar with Lemoyne Owen College, which is the area's historically Black college founded in 1870 and still in operation. It's located on Walker Avenue and also has a historic marker.
A historic marker tells the story of LeMoyne-Owen College, one of two historically Black colleges that had been located in South Memphis. The University of West Tennessee also has a historic marker but is no longer in operation. (Lauren Turner)
Chew C. Sawyer
South Parkway East at Pillow Street, on median strip
Chew C. Sawyer was an African American entrepreneur who founded Sawyer Realty Company. Later company names included Cornette Realty, Arnette Construction Company, Future Insurance Agency, and Sawyer Rental Agency. Sawyer was an accomplished businessman who become the the first president of Mutual Federal Savings and Loan, the first African American savings and loan company in Memphis. The marker is located in an area of South Memphis where Sawyer built and financed many homes, including his own.
Zion Cemetery
South Parkway East between Dunnavant and Willett streets
Zion Cemetery is the oldest African American cemetery in Memphis, TN. The 15 acre property was purchased by the The United Sons and Daughters of Zion Association, an African American burial association, in 1873. Rev. Morris Henderson started the cemetery in 1876.
The lives of its eternal residents spanned from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era. Among them are Moss, McDowell and Stewart, the victims of the 1892 People’s Grocery Lynchings. It also includes Georgia Patton Washington, the first African American female medical doctor in the state of Tennessee and lawyer Thomas F. Cassels, who served in the Tennessee General Assembly.
The Zion Cemetery registry lists around over 22,000 burials but estimates run as high as 25,000.Because the original Zion Cemetery burial registry was lost or destroyed, there is no accurate number of how many people are actually buried there.
In February of 1990 Zion Cemetery was entered on the National Register of Historic Places.
Zion National Cemetery is the oldest Black cemetery in Memphis. It was designated as a historic site in 1990. (Wikimedia Commons)
Boss Ugly Bob Records
726 East McLemore Avenue
Robert Karriem, better known as Boss Ugly Bob, opened his first Boss Ugly Bob record outlet in April 1971. Boss Ugly Bob was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The shop carried albums, LPs, cassettes, and 8-track tapes and was known to be a place where you could find the hardest to find hits. Patrons could also purchase concert tickets at the record store, which was ideal for many in the community since the store was walking distance of their homes. The shop was an asset to the community, but Karriem himself was also known to be a major supporter of local artists.
The record shop was dedicated to customer satisfaction until the day its doors closed in 2006. Karriem passed away in 2004 and remained a legend and pillar of his South Memphis community until his death.
Many that grew up in the neighborhood aren't aware that Karriem has a historic marker, which was erected in 2013. They knew him simply as Boss, the millionaire that continued to serve the community even as it began to face decline.
Strolling through the neighborhood you quickly see that there are still plenty of friendly faces outside the Friendly Market, which sits next to the now vacant building once inhabited by Boss Ugly Bob Records.
South Memphis Pride
For those who lived through the limelight days of this community and have also seen the lows, they are proud to know that their neighborhood once had physicians, professors, and at least one millionaire living within the community.
For a community that was once vibrant and bustling with businesses and shops of all kinds, history means a lot to those who call it home.
The neighborhood has seen deterioration and decline but is now on the verge of rebirth due to reinvestment in areas like Soulsville and the city’s revitalization plans for the South City. For those that live there, this will allow opportunity for more history to be made.
Read more articles by Ramona Springfield.
Ramona Springfield is freelance writer, blogger, and avid reader. She is a resident of South Memphis and graduate of the first High Ground News Community Correspondents program.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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2
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https://www.thembj.org/2018/11/remembering-aretha-franklin/
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en
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Remembering Aretha Franklin
|
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2018-11-15T18:44:38+00:00
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On August 16th, 2018, the world lost one of the most celebrated and most influential vocalists ever to grace the music industry: The Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. She...
|
en
|
http://www.thembj.org/favicon.ico
|
Music Business Journal
|
https://www.thembj.org/2018/11/remembering-aretha-franklin/
|
On August 16th, 2018, the world lost one of the most celebrated and most influential vocalists ever to grace the music industry: The Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. She was 76 when she passed away at home in Detroit, her publicist revealing that she was in the advanced stage of pancreatic cancer. [1] As we mourn her passing, let’s take a look back at her life and appreciate her impact on music and in the industry, as well as the remarkable legacy she left behind.
Biography
Born 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, Franklin grew up during the prelude to Soul music. Her father, Reverend Clarence La Vaughan Franklin, began working at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where he became a nationally renowned preacher and gave his daughter her first start in her singing career.[2] Due to her father’s fame, many of the greats came through her childhood home, such as Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, and one of her greatest gospel influences, Clara Ward. [3] She was a gifted child, showing tremendous intuition and aptitude in her singing as well as her piano playing. Smokey Robinson, front man of The Miracles, grew up with Aretha in Detroit and recalls that “when Aretha sat down at the piano as a little girl, she played these fully voiced gospel chords that were almost orchestral — heavy, weighty, magnificent, full-blown gospel stuff.” [4] Her father’s church is also where she began to record, releasing her first album, Song of Faith, in 1956 at only fourteen, and shortly after began touring with her father’s “Revival Tour.” [2] In 1960, after honing her talents on the stage, she moved to New York and was signed to Columbia Records, who released her album Aretha a year later.
She quickly became a success, making a name for herself in the R&B Charts with “Today I Sing The Blues,” which landed Franklin her first Top 10 spot only two months after the song was released. Over the course of her career, she achieved an impressive fifty-two Top 10 hits on the R&B charts, twenty of which went all the way to No. 1 matched only by Stevie Wonder. [5] She released an incredible forty-two studio albums in her time, winning eighteen of her forty-four Grammy Nominations, and so it is no surprise that the award for Best R&B Female Performance is dubbed “The Aretha Franklin Award.” [3] Rolling Stone named her as the greatest singer of all time in a poll that came out in 2010, captioned with a touching tribute from singer-songwriter, Mary J. Blige: “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.” [6] After her passing on August 16th, her combined album and digital song sales increased by 1,568 percent compared to the previous day, according to an initial sales report from Nielsen Music, [7] which goes to show how much people were affected by the news of her death, and it is surely a testament to her legacy.
Social Impact
Aretha Franklin was a role model for young black female artists, being the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and more importantly, appealing for racial tolerance and equality through her music. One of her most famous works is her rendition of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” which has sold millions of copies and was embraced as an anthem of black liberation and female equality. [3] Redding’s original lyrics talked about a man asking his wife for respect when he came home, a fairly traditional dynamic of couples in the 1960s, but Franklin made her version resonant by changing the perspective to that of a woman asking for respect when her man got home. The song was also embraced by the civil rights movement, Reiland Rabaka saying it had “a particular meaning for the black freedom movement, for the civil rights movement, for the black power movement, and for black women involved in the women’s liberation movement at that time.” [8] During a time of social injustice, the song kept the faith of civil rights activists in their cause and helped to strengthen it, according to Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon, [9] and Aretha herself recognized that it was “one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement.” [8] These are facts that can easily be overlooked when measuring the impact of songs just based on Grammy Nominations or chart position, and so it is important to mention, especially when talking about the legacy of the Queen.
Business
The song “Respect” also represents long-standing issues in copyright law and artist rights. In a way that some might call ironic, “Respect” racked up roughly seven million plays on national radio stations, but Aretha Franklin saw no monies generated from that. In the US, radio stations only used to pay royalties to the songwriters, not the performer of the song or the owner of the sound recording. In this case, Otis Redding’s Estate was paid every time Franklin’s version was aired on the radio, but she never was. [10] Efforts to change this law have seen pushback from broadcasters in the past, who argue that performers gain a benefit from the promotion they receive; however, Title II of the Music Modernization Act (called “The Classics Protection and Access Act”) protects pre-1972 works for 95 years after first publication. [11] Tragically, this comes too late for the Queen of Soul, although her role in getting this unfair practice brought in front of Congress will not go unnoticed, and it should be recognized by all who seek to follow in her footsteps. Franklin was also notorious for taking care of her own business, demanding to be paid in cash when she used to perform because African-American artists were routinely ripped off by white promoters. [12] She would always have her purse with her on stage and after the show, she would pay her 20-30-person entourage in cash. Coupled with her fear of flying, she was not the highest-paid celebrity even at the height of her fame, but she had the respect in the industry. Michael Levitt, a television producer who worked with her, says that it was her way or no way, and they didn’t care because she was worth it. [12]
Surprisingly, Franklin did not leave a will when she died and consequently, her four sons will equally divide her assets as per Michigan law. [13] There seems to be no internal family conflict, reports The Guardian, but the value of her estate is sure to be a point of contention as attorneys will try to downplay its value for tax purposes, while the IRS will be doing the opposite. [13]
Conclusion
In conclusion, Aretha Franklin was without a doubt the Queen of Soul and one of the greatest musical influences of the modern era. She was not only a flawless vocalist and musician, but also her music spread beyond the boundaries of the stage and to the cause of civil rights, social activism, and artist rights. She is an excellent role model for musicians and social activists alike, and her legacy will never be forgotten.
Endnotes:
[1] Pareles, Jon. 2018. Aretha Franklin, Indomitable ‘Queen of Soul,’ Dies at 76. August 16. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/obituaries/aretha-franklin-dead.html.
[2] Editors, Biography.com. 2018. Aretha Franklin Biography. August 30. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.biography.com/people/aretha-franklin-9301157.
[3] Maycock, James, and Phil Shaw. 2018. Aretha Franklin: Queen of Soul who won 18 Grammys, sold 75 million records – and drew a tear from Obama. August 16. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/aretha-franklin-dead-queen-soul-music-singer-atlantic-detroit-a8489536.html.
[4] Lindblad, Peter. 2010. Pride, pain and prodigy: Discover the real Aretha Franklin. April 21. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://www.goldminemag.com/articles/pride-pain-and-prodigy-discover-the-real-aretha-franklin.
[5] Anderson, Trevor. 2018. Aretha Franklin’s Record-Setting Achievements on Billboard’s R&B Charts. August 16. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8470637/aretha-franklin-billboard-rb-soul-charts-record-achievements.
[6] Rolling Stone. 2010. 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. December 3. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-singers-of-all-time-147019/aretha-franklin-6-227696/.
[7] Caulfield, Keith. 2018. Aretha Franklin’s Music Sales Surge in U.S. Following Her Death. August 17. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/aretha-franklin-dead-music-sales-up-1568-us-1135658.
[8] North, Anna. 2018. The political and cultural impact of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” explained. August 17. Accessed October 31, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17699170/aretha-franklin-2018-respect-song-otis-redding-feminism-civil-rights.
[9] Stracqualursi, Veronica. 2018. John Lewis: Aretha Franklin ‘inspired us all’ during civil rights movement. August 16. Accessed October 31, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/16/politics/john-lewis-aretha-franklin-cnntv/.
[10] Sisario, Ben. 2018. How Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ Became a Battle Cry for Musicians Seeking Royalties. August 17. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/arts/aretha-franklin-respect-copyright.html.
[11] U.S Copyright Office. 2018. Classics Protection and Access Act. October 31. Accessed October 31, 2018. https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundrecordings/index.html.
[12] Mitchell, Gail, and Melinda Newman. 2018. How Aretha Franklin Took Care of Business (And Where Her Estate Stands Now). August 23. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8471888/aretha-franklin-business-estate.
[13] Associated Press in Detroit. 2018. Aretha Franklin died without a will. Septmeber 2. Accessed October 2, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/02/aretha-franklin-died-without-a-will.
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FactBench
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https://wers.org/the-vault-of-soul-aretha-franklin/
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The Vault of Soul: Aretha Franklin
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2020-12-22T21:43:45+00:00
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Graphics by Kevin Shin By Megan Doherty, Staff Writer Biography Aretha Franklin, universally known as the “Queen of Soul,” was born in Memphis, Tennessee in... Read More
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WERS 88.9FM
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https://wers.org/the-vault-of-soul-aretha-franklin/
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Graphics by Kevin Shin
By Megan Doherty, Staff Writer
Biography
Aretha Franklin, universally known as the “Queen of Soul,” was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. Her mom was a gospel singer and pianist while her dad was a nationally-known minister based in Detroit who also sang. Franklin’s parents separated when she was six, and she stayed with her dad in Michigan. Right before her tenth birthday, Franklin’s mom died from a heart attack. As a teenager, she performed throughout the country with her father on his gospel programs. Despite having musical parents, Franklin was largely self-taught.
At 18 she moved to New York City where she signed a recording contract with Columbia Records. There, she shifted her musical style to highlight more elements of blues and jazz. On top of that, Columbia placed her with an array of producers who didn’t give her much direction. They never tailored her music to a specific genre or age demographic. She sang anything from theatrical ballads to R&B geared to growing teen audiences. Critics recognized her undeniable talent, but she didn’t earn her booming popularity until 1966, when she switched to Atlantic Records.
At Atlantic, producer Jerry Wexler encouraged her to shape her own musical identity. She returned to her gospel-blues roots to create her first million-seller, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. With this album, she refined and renewed the thrilling mixture of gospel, blues, and rhythm associated with Ray Charles.
Her 1972 album, Amazing Grace, is widely considered one of the greatest gospel albums of all time. It features her live performance with a choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. She even has a documentary, also called Amazing Grace, detailing the recording process of the 1972 album. Fifteen years later, she became the first woman inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And that’s not all. Over her career, she placed more than 100 singles in the Billboard charts, received 19 Grammy Awards, and sang at Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
In late summer of 2018, Franklin died from pancreatic cancer at her home in Detroit. She was 76.
Influences
Since Franklin’s dad was such a prominent preacher, many celebrities visited his home. As a result, he became friends with many gospel musicians, such as Clara Ward, James Cleveland, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Mahalia Jackson, and early Caravans members Inez Andrews and Albertina Walker. Growing up around so much music and musical talent, Franklin became increasingly interested in and influenced by the gospel music surrounding her.
After her mom’s passing, several women took turns helping take care of the Franklin kids. One of them being “The Queen of Gospel” herself, Mahalia Jackson. While under her care, Aretha learned to play piano by ear. Clara Ward, leader of The Famous Ward Singers, also spent a lot of time in Franklin’s home since her group extensively toured with Franklin’s dad. Because of this, she, along with Jackson, became mentors and role model figures for Franklin.
Who Aretha Franklin Influenced
As such a renowned singer, generations of R&B singers, and even country singers like Dolly Parton, credit Franklin and her music as deeply impactful. Natalie Cole, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and Whitney Houston have admitted to emulating the Queen of Soul’s style. Houston was especially connected to and influenced by Franklin. Her mom, Emily “Cissy” Houston, sang backup for Franklin. So as a kid, Houston would pretend to be in her mom’s place, singing alongside Franklin.
“I remember when I was about 12, I would go into our basement where my mother had her recording equipment, and I’d take the mic and put on Aretha and we’d go at it for hours,” Houston told Ebony. “I’d just close my eyes and sing all by myself and imagine I was on stage singing to a packed house.”
On top of that, when Rolling Stone placed Franklin at the top of their 2008 list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time,” Mary J. Blige wrote, “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. Aretha has everything – the power, the technique. She is honest with everything she says.”
Awards Won:
Best R&B Performance (Grammy, 1968)
Best Soul Gospel Performance (Grammy, 1973)
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987)
Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement (Rhythm and Blues Foundation, 1992)
Legend Award (Grammy, 1992)
Lifetime Achievement Award (Grammy, 1994)
Kennedy Center Honors (1994)
Vanguard Award (NAACP, 2008)
Honors Award for Musical Arts (BET, 2014)
Spotlight Tracks
“You Make Me Feel Like (A Natural Woman)” (Lady Soul – 1968)
Franklin’s exceptionally powerful, emotive vocals in “You Make Me Feel Like (A Natural Woman)” still moves us today – more than 50 years after its release. She sang an unforgettable rendition of “Natural Woman” in tribute to the song’s co-writer, Carole King, who was receiving the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in 2015. Even though King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote the quintessential track, Franklin’s vocals transformed it into the empowering song we know today. The strength in her voice assigned a deeper meaning to the lyrics. She’s not just singing about validation from a lover – she’s spreading self-love and confidence in an ethereal way.
“Think” (Aretha Now – 1968)
On top of singing her iconic track “Think,” Franklin also co-wrote it and plays the piano in the recording. With its defiant lyrics accompanied by fiery vocals, “Think” acts as an anthem for female empowerment. It’s for any woman who has felt mistreated. She penned it with her first husband, Ted White, and it tells the story of Franklin standing up to his domestic abuse. She left White when the song came out, and they divorced shortly after. Twelve years after its initial release, the tune saw a resurgence when she recorded a more upbeat version for the film “The Blues Brothers.” In the movie, Franklin appears as a waitress at a diner married to the cook. The brothers go into the diner to try to persuade Franklin’s on-screen husband to be their touring guitarist. So, Franklin lets her husband know that she thinks it’s a bad idea. When her husband asserts that he makes the decisions because he’s the man, she erupts into “Think.”
“Respect” (I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You – 1967)
Franklin’s classic tune “Respect” is actually a cover of Otis Redding’s song. She kept its original tempo and most of Redding’s lyrics, but she still inverted the track. Now, its largely known as a feminist statement, even though it didn’t start out that way. In Redding’s version, he calls for appreciation from his partner because he’s good to her. By flipping and adding some lyrics, Franklin asserts that women, especially women of color, are great and deserve respect. That’s why her vibrant cover became an anthem working on personal, racial, and gender-based levels. The Queen of Soul also added the infectious call-and-response bridge between her and the backup singers that served as a voice for female solidarity. Franklin’s proud that her songs are regarded as feminist anthems. “As women, we do have it. We have the power,” she told Elle in 2016. “We are very resourceful. Women absolutely deserve respect. Just to know I uplifted another person – I wouldn’t be doing anything else.”
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Efforts ramp up to protect Aretha Franklin’s Memphis birthplace
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2018-08-30T16:00:00-04:00
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Aretha Franklin was called the Queen of Soul, but long before she made her mark on the music industry, she spent her early years in Memphis.
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//static.foxnews.com/static/orion/styles/img/fox-news/favicons/favicon.ico
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Fox News
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https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/efforts-ramp-up-to-protect-aretha-franklins-memphis-birthplace
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Aretha Franklin was called the Queen of Soul, but long before she made her mark on the music industry, she was making her way in Memphis.
Located in south Memphis at 406 Lucy Ave., the 400-square-foot home where Franklin was born has become dilapidated, with boarded-up windows. After the legendary singer's death, there’s a renewed effort – and a fight – to preserve the home.
Vera Lee House, the current owner, says members of the community want the building restored. House says there has been talk of moving the building closer to Soulsville, which is a redeveloped neighborhood in south Memphis. The house has been unlivable for more than a decade, and discussions about what to do with the property have been ramping up.
Franklin was born in the house on March 25, 1942, but her family moved from the area about two years later.
“I turned it over to the receiver so I could keep it standing here, not [somewhere] else. When I found out they wanted to move it, I’ve really been against it because it’s not only just Aretha’s home, it’s my home,” House told Fox News.
“I raised my kids in this house. I live in this neighborhood. I don’t want everything that I’ve worked for to just leave.”
House said the taxes, which total just over $1,200, will be paid soon after a court hearing to determine the fate of the property is held this week. The court hearing was scheduled well before Franklin’s death.
Speaking of Franklin, House told Fox News about a meeting she had with the Queen of Soul when she visited the home in 1995.
“She stayed a pretty good while that day, and she talked and walked through the house and told me the things that [happened] with her family here,” House said. “She talked about the tree there, how her sisters and brothers used to climb the tree and play in it.”
A judge ordered the house to be demolished two years ago; an alternative plan to keep the building standing called for the home to be placed under the receivership of a local community corporation to develop plans to maintain it because of its historic significance.
Jeffrey Higgs, the executive director of South Memphis Renewal CDC, says there have been no decisions made as to how the preservation process will go. Higgs did note that he once took a call from Franklin herself, and she told him that she would have liked to see the home preserved.
“Everybody is looking at what’s going to happen to it,” Higgs said. “There are a variety of interests [and] people who want to see different things happen to the house. And so our efforts have and always been on restoring the house and making sure that her interests are protected as the owner of the house. … We don’t own the house, we’re just the court-appointed receiver.”
Higgs says it will cost about $200,000 to restore the property, and that it would take up to tens of millions of dollars to improve the surrounding neighborhood. He also mentioned that as the receiver of the property, his corporation would likely end up paying the outstanding taxes on the site.
“We will bring everybody together and do what’s best for the community, for Lucy [Avenue], for the city and globally because Ms. Franklin was loved by everybody,” Higgs added.
To help with the costs associated with the upkeep and restoration of Franklin’s former home, a GoFundMe campaign was started by local music industry executive Gebre Waddell, CEO of Soundways.
“A symbol as powerful as a house can be something that affects the neighborhood and affects the city at a very deep level,” Waddell said. “When you think about Memphis, you think about Graceland perhaps, the home of Elvis Presley. And with Aretha Franklin and the level of legend that we’re talking about here, the level of impact that she had, we also need to preserve her home.”
Whatever happens to the Queen of Soul’s first home, the community wants to make sure Franklin’s legacy lives on. Vera Lee House’s children have even floated the idea of renaming the street Aretha Franklin Place. House and her family hope the city of Memphis will also step in and help out with the restoration efforts.
“I’m sure that we could do something for this,” House said. “They may say nothing can be done, but I think we should come together.”
House, Higgs and the city have until Oct. 16 to come up with a plan to preserve the building, as per court orders. Higgs told Fox News any meeting for next steps would take place after Franklin’s memorial service, which is scheduled for Friday. A vigil honoring the singer will be held at her former south Memphis home on the same day.
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https://bittersoutherner.com/aretha-franklin-goes-home
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Aretha Franklin Goes Home — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
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To become the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin first had to travel through Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In her memory, we talk to Spooner Oldham and David Hood, who played on the 1967 landmark album that made her a superstar.
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THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
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https://bittersoutherner.com/aretha-franklin-goes-home
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In the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century, the murders started early.
From 1955 forward, Southern white supremacists trying to stop the movement in its tracks killed dozens of black people. From Emmett Till in 1955 to Medgar Evers and the four little girls of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, no-account Kluxers rained terror on Southern blacks.
Did Southern courts bring swift justice to the martyrs’ families? Hell, no. Did every Southern news organization stand against the terrorists? Sadly, just a few.
But something else was going on in those years. Even as countless heartless crimes were committed against African-Americans, small groups of Southern blacks and whites worked together in secret to build a monument of great beauty, a cultural achievement that will stand until the end of time.
Their workshops were recording studios. The monument they built was called soul music. Blacks and whites together built resplendent musical bridges over the old divide, and did it primarily in two places: Memphis, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Thus, in January of 1967, a 24-year-old Aretha Franklin came to magical Muscle Shoals, in search of her groove.
After Columbia Records head John Hammond signed Franklin in 1961, he seemed unable to find the right setting for Franklin’s remarkable voice. Her early albums on Columbia cast her, for the most part, as a jazz singer, and none of them climbed higher than 69 on the U.S. albums chart. After Columbia’s final attempt, 1966’s “Soul Sister,” stalled out, Aretha Franklin moved to Atlantic Records under the direction of Jerry Wexler, one of the label’s founders. Wexler brought Franklin to Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where she spent January and February of 1967 recording with Shoals masters like Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, and David Hood. The result was, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You.” The album was released in March, and it jumped to No. 1 on the U.S. R&B album charts and No. 2 on the Hot 200. It produced Franklin’s first two hit singles: her definitive version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” and the title cut, written by Ronnie Shannon.
That album made — and still makes — perfect, beautiful, Southern sense to me. When word Franklin was gravely ill came earlier this week, I put it back on the turntable. And it reminded me, as it always has, Aretha Franklin had to come home to find the music that could do justice to her inimitable voice and would rocket her to stardom.
I know the South, technically, was not her home: Aretha grew up in Detroit. But her roots in the South run as deeply as those of any African-American family that departed our region during Jim Crow and the Great Migration. She was born in Memphis, but was only 4 when her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, the son of Sunflower County, Mississippi, sharecroppers, settled in Detroit as pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church.
Aretha’s singing career bloomed in that church. She recorded her first album — a gospel record called “Songs of Faith” — at New Bethel in 1956, when she was only 14 years old. Listen to that record (if you can find it), and you’ll hear just how far the threads of Southern music had traveled by the mid-20th century. Black families carried the gospel sounds of their churches with them as they dispersed across the Midwest and Northeast to escape Jim Crow, and their music remained intact in those new locations.
The conclusion is inescapable: Aretha’s musical roots were as Southern as any of you are. And if you’re a student of Southern musical culture, it must always be noted she might have never become a superstar had she not come “home” to the South.
David Hood, known most widely as the bass player in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, played on “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” — but not the bass. He played trombone in the horn section. Hood would later add soulful bass lines to dozens of Aretha’s performances on record and on the stage, but he remains grateful the ’bone got him into the session.
“There was a problem in the booking of the horns,” Hood recalled earlier this week. “The ones they wanted, they couldn't get that day. And so, I got on the session that way.”
He remembers Aretha as a shy young woman who didn’t tell the musicians what she was going for, and instead just showed them.
“We'd been talking to Jerry Wexler. People were recording her wrong, and he wanted to bring her to Muscle Shoals,” Hood said. “It was to get her a little bit more funky style, but also to have her play the piano while she sang. There are some technical problems when doing something like that, but it was great. It helped the musicians find the style and get the feel that she wanted, and I think that's what made the difference. On nearly all the best cuts she ever did, she was playing the piano on as well as singing.”
In other words, she was doing the same things she’d done in church since she was a teenager: playing and singing the gospel.
“You could just pick up the feeling from her piano,” Hood said. “She grew up in a church and had that piano style and vocal style. And that's what Jerry wanted, and that's what everybody picked up on, I think.”
“I expect that was a style y’all would have felt pretty much at home in,” I replied.
“Yes,” Hood said. “Very much so.”
Aretha’s apple had not fallen too far from the tree.
Yesterday, after Aretha’s passing was confirmed, I spoke with another player on “I Never Loved a Man” — the legendary keyboardist and songwriter Spooner Oldham.
“Her dad had been a preacher — a Baptist preacher — and she sang at church as a child prodigy,” Oldham told me. “I guess he’d stack her up on the pulpit or whatever, lift her up where you could see her. So, coming to Muscle Shoals probably resonated the Southern experience in her brain, even though she had been gone forever. And then, when she was allowed to turn loose with all that Southern expression, we just played our hearts out, because we were used to that stuff. I mean, we weren't used to her — because she was top of the heap — but she brought it all out of us. I was curious because I knew she hadn't been around the South much, but she was belting that stuff out like she'd known it forever.”
And the truth was, she had known it forever. But Oldham didn’t know for sure they had recorded a hit album until Wexler called the Muscle Shoals crew to New York to put finishing touches on “I Never Loved a Man” a month after the Alabama sessions.
Between the sessions, Oldham said, “Aretha had been practicing at home with her sisters and family, singing those backup things. And then, when I first heard that re-re-re-respect, just-a-little-bit, sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me thing, all of that was brand new. It had never been done before. I knew something was going on then, you know. I knew it was going to turn the world around.”
Aretha Franklin did turn the world around, starting with that album’s release in March of 1967. On the first cut, she transformed Otis Redding’s pleas for a little respect from his woman into a monumental anthem for all women, who got precious little respect in those days.
For 20 more years, she consistently put singles at No. 1 on the charts, making us dance, sway, even cry: ”Baby I Love You,” “Chain of Fools,” “Sweet Sweet Baby Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Think,” “Share Your Love With Me,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Day Dreaming,” “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” “Something He Can Feel,” “Break It to Me Gently,” “Jump to It,” “Freeway of Love,” “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me.”
For those of us who grew up on soul music, these and many other of her songs are landmarks, caches in which we hide our own memories, touchstones we all go back to repeatedly because they inspire us, comfort us, make us dance as we did in our youth. No voice ever dominated a genre of music as completely as Aretha’s. The Queen of Soul title has no hyperbole in it.
Hood told me a story about the last time he played with Aretha, in 2011 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
“I was part of the stage band,” he said. “We were doing a tribute to Aretha show, and she was not supposed to play or sing or anything. And they had all these other artists to sing her songs — Jerry Butler, Cissy Houston, I can’t even remember all of them. But at the very end of the show, she decided she would sing. She did ‘A Song for You,’ and, my God, I just stood there behind her and tried to find what she was doing and play along with her. I didn’t have a chart or anything. That was a great moment.”
In the video from that night, you can see Hood struggle a bit as Aretha sits at the piano and renders a highly improvisational and profoundly church-like version of Leon Russell’s classic tune. You can also see a giant smile plastered on his face in that moment, as if he knew his own notes didn’t matter much because the Queen had the crowd in the palm of her hand, all on her own, even in this utterly unrehearsed moment.
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https://www.kanw.com/new-mexico-news/2024-03-25/today-in-entertainment-history-aretha-franklin-was-born
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en
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Today in Entertainment History: Aretha Franklin was born
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2024-03-25T00:00:00
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Today in Entertainment History: Aretha Franklin was born
|
en
|
KANW | New Mexico Public Radio
|
https://www.kanw.com/new-mexico-news/2024-03-25/today-in-entertainment-history-aretha-franklin-was-born
|
On March 25, 1942, singer Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee.
In 1954, "From Here To Eternity" won the best picture award at the Oscars. William Holden won best actor for "Stalag 17." Audrey Hepburn won best actress for "Roman Holiday." The best song award went to "Secret Love" from "Calamity Jane."
In 1960, Ray Charles recorded "Georgia On My Mind" in New York.
In 1961, Elvis Presley performed what would be his last live concert for eight years, at a show in Hawaii. Instead, he concentrated on his movie career.
In 1967, The Who made its U.S. concert debut in New York as part of a rock extravaganza promoted by DJ Murray "The K" Kaufman.
In 1985, the Academy Award for best picture went to "Amadeus." F. Murray Abraham was chosen over "Amadeus" co-star Tom Hulce for the best actor award. Prince won the original song score award for "Purple Rain." Stevie Wonder won best original song for "I Just Called To Say I Love You."
In 1990, drummer Tommy Lee of Motley Crue was arrested for allegedly mooning an audience at a concert in Augusta, Georgia.
In 1991, "Dances With Wolves" won seven Academy Awards, including best picture and a best director Oscar for Kevin Costner.
In 1995, singer Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam was rescued after a riptide carried him 250 feet offshore in New Zealand.
In 2001, "Gladiator" won five Oscars, including best picture.
In 2002, Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar and Denzel Washington won the best actor Oscar. Before that night, Sidney Poitier was the only African American actor to have won an Oscar in a lead role.
Also in 2002, Randy Newman won an Oscar for best original song for "If I Didn't Have You" from "Monsters, Inc." He had been nominated for an Oscar 16 times and had never won until that night.
In 2003, Celine Dion launched her Las Vegas show "A New Day."
In 2022, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was found dead in a hotel room in Bogota, Colombia. He was 50.
Today's Birthdays: Film critic Gene Shalit is 98. Singer Anita Bryant is 84. Actor Paul Michael Glaser ("Third Watch," "Starsky and Hutch") is 81. Musician Elton John is 77. Actor Bonnie Bedelia is 76. Actor-comedian Mary Gross is 71. Actor James McDaniel ("NYPD Blue") is 66. Saxophonist Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet is 64. Actor Brenda Strong ("Desperate Housewives") is 64. Actor Marcia Cross ("Desperate Housewives") is 62. Actor Lisa Gay Hamilton ("The Practice") is 60. Actor Sarah Jessica Parker is 59. Turner Classics Movies host Ben Mankiewicz is 57. Actor Laz Alonso ("Avatar," "Fast and Furious") is 53. Singer Melanie Blatt of All Saints is 49. Actor Domenick Lombardozzi ("Boardwalk Empire") is 48. Actor Lee Pace (film's "The Hobbit," TV's "Pushing Daisies") is 45. Comedian Alex Moffat ("Saturday Night Live") is 42. Singer-actor Katharine McPhee ("Smash," "American Idol") is 40. Comedian Chris Redd ("Saturday Night Live") is 39. Rapper Big Sean is 36. Music producer Ryan Lewis of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis is 36. Actor Matthew Beard ("The Imitation Game") is 35. Singer-actor Aly Michalka (mish-AL'-kah) of Aly and AJ ("Hellcats") is 35. Actor Kiowa (KY'-oh-wah) Gordon ("Twilight") is 34. Actor Seychelle Gabriel ("The Legend of Korra") is 33.
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correct_birth_00051
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3
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https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/detroit-residents-remember-aretha-franklin-impact-on-city/
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en
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Detroit Residents Remember Aretha Franklin, Impact On City
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2018-08-16T16:26:46-04:00
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To the rest of the world, she was the "Queen of Soul" — a woman whose strong and soulful voice could effortlessly jump multiple octaves whether belting out tear-jerking ballads or jump-and-shout gospel.
|
en
|
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/detroit-residents-remember-aretha-franklin-impact-on-city/
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DETROIT (AP) — To the rest of the world, she was the "Queen of Soul" — a woman whose strong and soulful voice could effortlessly jump multiple octaves whether belting out tear-jerking ballads or jump-and-shout gospel.
To residents in her hometown of Detroit who followed her more than 50-year career, she was simply "Aretha" or more personally "Ree-Ree" — the city's favorite daughter, often singing at the Baptist church her father once led or headlining charity functions for kids or the less fortunate.
"She was a pioneer woman for Detroit," said Myron Pullin, fighting back tears Thursday morning outside New Bethel Baptist Church after learning of Franklin's death from pancreatic cancer.
"It really hurt my heart. I wanted to cry," Pullin, 56, added beneath somber, gray and swollen clouds. "Her music touches you, but her voice. Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, they're beautiful singers, but to me, Aretha just stood out differently from all of them."
Franklin, who died at her home in Detroit, had moved to the city from Tennessee as a young child.
"She was just special and she always came home and she always gave back," Pullin said. "She really, really always loved Detroit."
The feeling was mutual. Franklin is so beloved in Detroit that not one, but two streets bear her name.
"Few people in the history of our city have been as universally loved or left as indelible a mark as Aretha," Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement. "From the time her father gave Aretha her start in the New Bethel choir, it was clear to everyone how special she was. She was a performer without peers. Throughout her extraordinary life and career, she earned the love — and yes, the respect — of millions of people, not just for herself and for women everywhere, but for the city she loved so dearly and called home."
In 2010, she and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice performed a duet at Philadelphia's Mann Music Center to raise money for urban children and awareness for music and the arts. "It is a joint effort for the inner-city youth of Philadelphia and Detroit," Franklin said at the time.
She also worked with the United Negro College Fund and in 2005 held a party in the Detroit area for dozens of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Franklin "was the queen of Detroit," said Karen Weary, 62, who also stopped by New Bethel on Thursday to pay her respects. "She touched my heart. I loved her music."
Abdul "Duke" Fakir, the lone surviving original member of the Four Tops, told the AP earlier in the week about a recent conversation they had about the city.
"She was telling me she rides around the city every now and then — she talks about how beautiful it is again," Fakir said.
Lisa McCall, whose quarter-century career working with Franklin started at age 12 as a dancer and continued for many years as her main choreographer, said Franklin was loyal to her "camp," many of whom were from Detroit. They had a two-hour conversation when McCall was diagnosed with breast cancer 15 years ago, and another heart-to-heart came more recently.
"She heard I was ill and she called me — she gave me hope and inspired me," McCall said Thursday, adding that she still has the card that came with a bouquet of flowers Franklin had sent. "Then, last year in the dressing room she said, 'Lisa, you've been through this — I hope I come out on top like you.' ... I knew what she meant."
McCall said Franklin was an inspiration both personally and professionally. The singer trusted the choreographer to assemble the team of dancers and make sure they were ready to perform at venues across the country.
"I think that's why I always hire Detroit artists — because of Aretha. She kept Detroit artists working," McCall said. "She always gave opportunities to Detroiters ... because she said we have great talent.
"She's Detroit's queen — she's our queen," McCall added. "She belongs to us."
© 2018 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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https://www.3newsnow.com/news/national/aretha-franklin
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Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, dies at 76
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2018-08-16T08:58:15-05:00
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Legendary R&B singer Aretha Franklin has died at the age of 76.
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KMTV 3 News Now Omaha
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Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title "the Queen of Soul," has died, a family statement said Thursday. She was 76.
Franklin died at 9:50 a.m. at her home in Detroit, surrounded by family and friends, according to a statement on behalf of Franklin's family from her longtime publicist Gwendolyn Quinn.
The "official cause of death was due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin's oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit," the family statement said.
PHOTOS: REMEMBERING ARETHA FRANKLIN
Tributes and tears flooded in Thursday after news of her death broke.
"Aretha helped define the American experience," former President Barack Obama said in a statement. "In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade -- our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace."
READ MORE CELEBRITY TRIBUTES HERE
Legendary soul singer and Franklin's friend of more than sixty years, Sam Moore, had words of sorrow and comfort to offer.
"I adored her and I know the feelings were mutual. While I'm heartbroken that she's gone I know she's in the Lord's arms and she's not in pain or suffering anymore from the damn cancer that took her away from us," he said in a statement. "I'm going to hope, pray and count on the fact that I will see her again sometime. Rest in the Lord's arms in love, Re."
Franklin's fans paid tribute with flowers and a crown left on her Hollywood Walk of Fame star in Los Angeles.
Her death comes three days after a source close to Franklin told CNN's Don Lemon that the singer was in hospice care.
"In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins knew no bounds," Franklin's family said.
"We have been deeply touched by the incredible outpouring of love and support we have received from close friends, supporters and fans all around the world. Thank you for your compassion and prayers. We have felt your love for Aretha and it brings us comfort to know that her legacy will live on. As we grieve, we ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time."
Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days, the statement said.
The singer had been reported to be in failing health for years and appeared frail in recent photos, but she kept her struggles private.
In February 2017, Franklin announced she would stop touring, but she continued to book concerts. Earlier this year, she canceled a pair of performances, including at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, on doctor's orders, according to Rolling Stone.
The singer's final public performance was last November, when she sang at an Elton John AIDS Foundation gala in New York.
Sing it: R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Over the course of a professional career that spanned more than half a century, Franklin's songs not only topped the charts but became part of the vernacular.
She made "Respect," written by Otis Redding, a call to arms. "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," a Carole King song, was an earthy expression of sexuality. "Think," which she wrote with her then-husband, Ted White, became a rallying cry for women fed up with loutish men.
The first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she had 88 Billboard chart hits during the rock era, tops among female vocalists. At the peak of her career -- from 1967 to 1975 -- she had more than two dozen Top 40 hits.
"Aretha Franklin is not only the definitive female soul singer of the Sixties," according to her Rolling Stone biography, "she's also one of the most influential and important voices in pop history."
She won 18 Grammy awards, including the honor for best female R&B performance for eight straight years.
There was nothing run-of-the-mill about a Franklin performance. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" is slinky and gritty, Franklin's voice sometimes a whisper over Spooner Oldham's electric piano.
"The House That Jack Built" fairly crackles: "I got the house / I got the car / I got the rug / And I got the rack / But I ain't got Jack," Franklin belts.
In Franklin's delivery, "Eleanor Rigby" was a figure of defiance; with Franklin's voice, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" went places not even Art Garfunkel, whose angelic tenor dominated Simon & Garfunkel's original version, could take it.
Her soul was as deep as her voice was strong.
"I think of Aretha as 'Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,'" wrote the late Jerry Wexler, Franklin's producer at Atlantic Records. "Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don't pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura."
A recording career at 14
Perhaps more than any other soul star, Franklin's voice embodied the music's debt to gospel.
She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, but was raised mostly in Detroit, where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a prominent minister and a nationally known gospel singer. Franklin sang in the choir of her father's church and, though she declined her dad's offer of piano lessons and taught herself instead, began recording gospel music at age 14.
She toured the gospel circuit with her father, befriending stars such as Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke. She later performed at Jackson's funeral.
She was signed to Columbia Records in 1960 by John Hammond, the eagle-eyed talent scout who also discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but she had only limited success at the label. It wasn't until her arrival at Atlantic Records in the decade's second half that she gave up trying to become a polished all-purpose entertainer for a career as a soul and R&B singer, backed by an earthy rhythm section from Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
"The backup musicians provided a much grittier, soulful and R&B-based accompaniment for Aretha's voice," according to the All Music Guide, "which soared with a passion and intensity suggesting a spirit that had been allowed to fly loose for the first time."
Over a year-and-a-half stretch from 1967 to 1968, Franklin racked up 10 Top Ten hits.
"It had looked for the longest time like I would never have a gold record," she told Time magazine in 1968. "I wanted one so bad."
Songs like "Respect" were not only huge sellers, they were also adopted by African-Americans and feminists as anthems for social change.
Civil rights icon and US Rep. John Lewis recalled Franklin's "unwavering" commitment to the movement.
"What made her talent so great was her capacity to live what she sang," Franklin said in a statement Thursday. "Her music was deepened by her connection to the struggles and the triumphs of the African American experience growing up in her father's church, the community of Detroit, and her awareness of the turmoil of the South."
After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Franklin sang at his funeral.
The hits kept coming throughout the early 1970s, including "Spanish Harlem" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
By the late '70s, Franklin's star power began to wane, as the golden age of soul ended and as critics and fans became less enthusiastic about her continuing output. However, she re-emerged in the 1980s, releasing the 1985 album "Who's Zoomin' Who?", which spawned the hit "Freeway of Love."
She also collaborated with the Eurythmics on "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" and British pop star George Michael on the smash duet, "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)." The latter hit No. 1, her last chart-topper.
"Don't say Aretha is making a comeback," she said at the time. "Who's Zoomin' Who" was released, she said, "because I've never been away."
Personal pain lent depth to her music
Franklin's reportedly tumultuous personal life, meanwhile -- she was twice divorced and had brushes with the law -- was shrouded in secrecy.
She was the mother of four sons -- she gave birth to the first at 15 and the second at 17, according to a 1995 Ebony magazine profile. The article depicted her as a warm, down-to-earth woman with a crackling sense of humor, who answered the door in bare feet and confided her diet secret was a combination of Slim-Fast and younger men. She also was reportedly an accomplished cook, telling Ebony, "I can wear some chitlins out."
The Ebony profile suggested the source of some of that pain might have been Franklin's growing up largely without a mother -- Barbara Franklin left the family in 1948, when Franklin was 6, and died four years later -- or the anguish of losing her father.
C.L. Franklin was shot in his home by burglars in 1979 and lived for five years in a semi-coma before dying, the magazine said. Asked the toughest decision she ever had to make, Franklin told Ebony, "It was when my dad was in the hospital," and began to cry.
But Franklin's lows and the emotion involved fueled her music. She saw a number of resurgences in the past three decades and her image as a pop icon endured, with President Barack Obama featuring her singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" at his inauguration in 2009. She also performed at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1992.
Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2005. In 1986, her voice was declared a national resource by the Michigan Legislature. She even had an asteroid named for her.
"She looks rested and relaxed, like a housewife headed out to do some shopping at the local K-Mart," Ebony reporter Laura Randolph wrote in the 1995 profile. "There, or at the Woolworth's Five and Dime where, she recalls, she's spent many an afternoon 'browsing and buying knick-knacks' then 'sitting down at the counter to a scrumptious turkey and dressing plate with mashed potatoes oozing with gravy and loving it.' "
Health issues derailed her late career
Franklin battled health issues in recent years, struggling with weight gain and associated ailments.
In August 2010, she canceled two free concerts in New York because of "fractured ribs and pain in the abdomen," spokeswoman Gwendolyn Quinn said, adding that Franklin's doctors had told her to come in for tests immediately.
That November, her doctors ordered her to cancel all personal appearances for the next six months, the Detroit Free Press reported. In early December, Franklin underwent surgery deemed "highly successful."
She also canceled some appearances in 2013.
However, she recovered enough to return to touring in 2014, including a performance at New York's Radio City Music Hall. She'd also lost almost 100 pounds.
"It's fun buying new clothes!" she told USA Today. "I couldn't stay out of the mirror, just turning every way. This is my natural weight."
As for her old wardrobe? The shopper knew exactly what to do with those outfits.
"I'm thinking of giving them to a resale shop," Franklin said.
Her final album, "A Brand New Me," paired Franklin's original recordings of some of her greatest hits with modern musical arrangements from London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
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Aretha Franklin: Biography, Singer, Queen of Soul, Grammy Winner
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2014-04-03T01:08:57
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Multiple Grammy winner and "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin was known for such hits as "Respect," "Freeway of Love" and "I Say a Little Prayer."
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en
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/_assets/design-tokens/biography/static/images/favicon.3635572.ico
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Biography
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https://www.biography.com/musicians/aretha-franklin
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(1942-2018)
Who Was Aretha Franklin?
A gifted singer and pianist, Aretha Franklin toured with her father's traveling revival show and later visited New York, where she signed with Columbia Records. Franklin went on to release several popular singles, many of which are now considered classics. In 1987 she became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2008 she won her 18th Grammy Award, making her one of the most honored artists in Grammy history.
Early Life and Career
The fourth of five children, Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Baptist preacher Reverend Clarence La Vaughan "C. L." Franklin and Barbara Siggers Franklin, a gospel singer.
Franklin's parents separated by the time she was six, and four years later her mother succumbed to a heart attack. Guided by C. L.'s preaching assignments, the family relocated to Detroit, Michigan. C. L. eventually landed at New Bethel Baptist Church, where he gained national renown as a preacher.
Franklin's musical gifts became apparent at an early age. Largely self-taught, she was regarded as a child prodigy. A gifted pianist with a powerful voice, Franklin got her start singing in front of her father's congregation.
By the age of 14, she had recorded some of her earliest tracks at his church, which were released by a small label as the album Songs of Faith in 1956. She also performed with C. L.'s traveling revival show and, while on tour, befriended gospel greats such as Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Clara Ward.
Children
At the age of 12, she became a mother for the first time with a son, Clarence. A second child, Edward, followed two years later — with both sons taking her family's name. Franklin would later have two more sons: Ted White, Jr. and Kecalf Cunningham.
Albums and Songs
'Aretha'
After a brief hiatus, Franklin returned to performing and followed heroes such as Cooke and Dinah Washington into pop and blues territory. In 1960, with her father's blessing, Franklin traveled to New York, where after being courted by several labels, including Motown and RCA, she signed with Columbia Records, who released the album Aretha in 1961.
Though two tracks from Aretha would make the R&B Top 10, a bigger success came that same year with the single "Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," which crossed over to No. 37 on the pop charts.
But while Franklin enjoyed moderate results with her recordings over the next few years, they failed to fully showcase her immense talent. In 1966 she and her new husband and manager, Ted White, decided a move was in order, and Franklin signed to Atlantic. Producer Jerry Wexler immediately shuttled Franklin to the Florence Alabama Musical Emporium (FAME) recording studios.
"I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)"
Backed by the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Franklin recorded the single "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." In the midst of the recording sessions, White quarreled with a member of the band, and White and Franklin left abruptly.
But as the single became a massive Top 10 hit, Franklin re-emerged in New York and was able to complete the partially recorded track, "Do Right Woman—Do Right Man."
'Respect'
Hitting her stride in 1967 and 1968, Franklin churned out a string of hit singles that would become enduring classics, showcasing Franklin's powerful voice and gospel roots in a pop framework.
In 1967, the album I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) was released, and the first song on the album, "Respect" — an empowered cover of an Otis Redding track — reached No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts and won Franklin her first two Grammy Awards.
She also had Top 10 hits with "Baby I Love You,'' "Think," "Chain of Fools,'' "I Say a Little Prayer," "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman."
Dubbed the 'Queen of Soul'
Franklin's chart dominance soon earned her the title Queen of Soul, while at the same time she also became a symbol of Black empowerment during the civil rights movement.
In 1968 Franklin was enlisted to perform at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during which she paid tribute to her father's fallen friend with a heartfelt rendition of "Precious Lord." Later that year, she was also selected to sing the national anthem to begin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Amidst this newfound success, Franklin experienced upheaval in her personal life, and she and White divorced in 1969. But this did not slow Franklin's steady rise, and the new decade brought more hit singles, including "Don't Play That Song," "Spanish Harlem" and her cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters."
'Amazing Grace'
Spurred by Mahalia Jackson's passing and a subsequent resurgence of interest in gospel music, Franklin returned to her musical origins for the 1972 album Amazing Grace, which sold more than 2 million copies and went on to become the best-selling gospel album at the time.
Franklin's success continued throughout the 1970s, as she branched out to work with producers such as Curtis Mayfield and Quincy Jones and expanded her repertoire to include rock and pop covers. Along the way, she took home eight consecutive Grammy Awards for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance, the last coming for her 1974 single "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing."
Career Struggles
But by 1975, Franklin's sound was fading into the background with the onset of the disco craze, and an emerging set of young Black singers, such as Chaka Khan and Donna Summer, began to eclipse Franklin's career.
She did, however, find a brief respite from slumping sales with the 1976 soundtrack to the Warner Brothers film Sparkle — which topped the R&B charts and made the Top 20 in pop — as well as an invitation to perform at the 1977 presidential inauguration of Jimmy Carter. In 1978 she also married actor Glynn Turman.
A string of chart failures ended Franklin's relationship with Atlantic in 1979. The same year, her father was hospitalized after a burglary attempt in his home left him in a coma. As her popularity waned and her father's health declined, Franklin was also saddled with a massive bill from the IRS.
However, a cameo in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers helped Franklin revive her flagging career. Performing "Think'' alongside comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd exposed her to a new generation of R&B lovers, and she soon signed to Arista Records.
Her new label released 1982's Jump To It, an album that enjoyed huge success on the R&B charts and earned Franklin a Grammy nomination. Two years later, she endured a divorce from Turman as well as the death of her father.
More Albums and Songs: 1980s and On
'Who's Zoomin' Who?'
In 1985 Franklin returned to the top of the charts with a smash-hit album: the polished pop record Who's Zoomin' Who? Featuring the single "Freeway of Love," as well as a collaboration with the popular rock band The Eurythmics, the record became Franklin's biggest-selling album yet.
'I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)'
Her follow-up, 1986's Aretha, also charted well and eventually went gold, and her duet with British singer George Michael, "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),'' hit No. 1 on the pop charts.
In 1987 Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Detroit. That same year, she released the album One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, which won the Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance.
Following another relatively quiet period in her career, in 1993, Franklin was invited to sing at the inauguration of Bill Clinton, and the following year she received both a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honors. She would also be the focus of multiple documentaries and tributes as the decade progressed.
'A Rose Is Still a Rose'
Nearing its conclusion, Franklin reprised her former role in Blues Brothers 2000, released the gold-selling "A Rose Is Still a Rose" and stood in for Luciano Pavarotti, who was too ill to accept his Lifetime Achievement Award, with her rendition of "Nessun Dorma" commanding stellar reviews.
'So Damn Happy'
In 2003 Franklin released her final studio album on Arista, So Damn Happy, and left the label to found Aretha Records. Two years later, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became the second woman ever to be inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame.
In 2008 she received her 18th Grammy Award for "Never Gonna Break My Faith" — a collaboration with Mary J. Blige — and was tapped to sing at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.
With 18 Grammys under her belt, Franklin is one of the most honored artists in Grammy history, ranked among the likes of Alison Krauss, Adele and Beyoncé Knowles. In 2011 Franklin released her first album on her own label, A Woman Falling Out of Love.
To support the project, she performed several concerts, including a two-night stint at the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York. With fans and critics alike impressed with her performances, she successfully proved that the Queen of Soul still reigned supreme.
'Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics'
In 2014 Franklin underscored that point with Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics, which reached No. 13 on the pop charts and No. 3 R&B.
In February 2017, the 74-year-old Queen of Soul told Detroit radio station WDIV Local 4 that she was collaborating with Stevie Wonder to release a new album.
“I must tell you, I am retiring this year," she said in the interview, adding: "I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from and where it is now. I’ll be pretty much satisfied, but I’m not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing. That wouldn’t be good either.”
Death
On August 12, 2018, it was reported that a "gravely ill" Franklin was bedridden in her Detroit home, surrounded by family and friends. As news of her condition spread, more luminaries paid a visit to express their well wishes, including Wonder and Jesse Jackson.
Four days later, on the morning of August 16, Franklin succumbed to her illness, which her family revealed to be pancreatic cancer.
A public viewing was held later that month at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, with fans camping out overnight for the chance to pay their respects to the iconic singer. Her televised funeral was set to be held at the city's Greater Grace Temple on August 31, with Wonder, Khan and Hudson among the scheduled performers, and Jackson, Clinton and Smokey Robinson highlighting the list of speakers.
Movie
In January 2018, it was announced that Franklin hand-picked singer and actress Jennifer Hudson to play her in an upcoming biopic. After being pushed back several times, Respect will be released on August 13, 2021.
QUICK FACTS
Birth Year: 1942
Birth date: March 25, 1942
Birth State: Tennessee
Birth City: Memphis
Birth Country: United States
Gender: Female
Best Known For: Multiple Grammy winner and "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin was known for such hits as "Respect," "Freeway of Love" and "I Say a Little Prayer."
Industries
Music
Astrological Sign: Aries
Interesting Facts
Aretha Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Aretha Franklin is one of the most honored artists in Grammy Award history, winning her 18th honor in 2008.
Death Year: 2018
Death date: August 16, 2018
Death State: Michigan
Death City: Detroit
Death Country: United States
Fact Check
We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right,contact us!
CITATION INFORMATION
Article Title: Aretha Franklin Biography
Author: Biography.com Editors
Website Name: The Biography.com website
Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/aretha-franklin
Access Date:
Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
Last Updated: September 15, 2021
Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
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https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
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Aretha Franklin’s childhood home could become a Memphis landmark
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"jennifer lopez",
"lighting",
"london",
"madonna",
"memphis",
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"pool"
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[
"Corynne Cirilli",
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2017-05-29T21:54:26+05:30
|
Plus, 8 other celebrity childhood homes that should also be given the official status
|
en
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/verso/static/architectural-digest/assets/favicon-ad-int.ico
|
Architectural Digest India
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
|
Aretha Franklin may have left her humble Memphis, Tennessee roots when she was barely two years old, but the city is nevertheless desperate to save its small connection to the “Queen of Soul.". In 1942, Franklin was born in this tiny wooden home, but her family left Memphis about two years later. Now, the Memphis mayor's office is trying to save the dilapidated structure, left vacant for years, to preserve it as a landmark. A group from the mayor's office is seeking funding sources to assist in the preservation and future use of the historic home.
[#instagram: A post shared by Kon (@konradstagram) on May 28, 2017 at 8:20am PDT]
Franklin isn't the only star whose childhood home has been deemed unworthy of being landmarks. Plenty of stars homes, living and deceased, have not received official landmark status. Below, we visit the places where some of the most famous faces in Hollywood grew up—and the hometowns that should consider following in Memphis's footsteps.
[#instagram: A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on May 3, 2017 at 4:58pm PDT]
MADONNA
These days, Madonna's permanent residences are in London and New York—but the pop star grew up in flyover country. Madonna Louise Ciccone lived in a two-storey brick Colonial in Rochester Hills, Michigan (about 30 minutes outside Detroit) with her parents and seven siblings until she was 18. Her father and stepmother moved out in July 2001, selling the home for $270,000, but in 2008 the home burned down, reportedly due to arson. It later sold partial state for $91,700 in 2012. The property still attracts hordes of tourists to this day, despite the home not being in its original condition.
[#instagram: A post shared by Farrah Fawcett Foundation (@farrahfawcettfn) on May 4, 2017 at 11:18am PDT]
FARRAH FAWCETT
Famous for her feathered blond hair and a starring role on “Charlie's Angels,” Farrah Fawcett got her start in Texas. Before heading to Hollywood, Fawcett lived with her parents (her father was an oil man) in this 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom house in Corpus Christi, Texas. After her 2009 death, the actress's childhood home was remodeled with new paint, tile, carpeting, lighting, and bathroom fixtures before being listed for $215,000.
MARLON BRANDO
This five-bedroom, four-bathroom frame house in Omaha, Nebraska is where legendary actor Marlon Brando grew up with his father (a pesticide and chemical feed manufacturer) mother, and two older sisters. (Fun fact: After winning an Oscar in 1973, Brando returned to the house and shocked the new owners by asking for a tour.) Public records show the 4,119-square-foot home was built in 1900 and while it has been updated, and though it now includes a pool, it's yet to be landmarked.
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Jackson family's Gary, Indiana residence was The King of Pop's first home. And while the house has long been part of the history of Michael and the Jackson Five's rise from poverty to international fame, the tiny 672-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 1-bath house (which housed 11 people) has never been made a historic landmark. The property is reportedly still owned by the family.
[#instagram: A post shared by Janis Joplin (@janisjoplin) on May 10, 2017 at 5:49pm PDT]
JANIS JOPLIN
Oh lord won't you buy me … a music legend's childhood home? In the 1940s and 1950s, Janis Joplin grew up in this Port Arthur, Texas, house. She even carved her first name into the floor of the garage in the 1,450-square-foot, 5-bedroom residence. Though the homeowners did contact the Museum of the Gulf Coast about acquiring the house, the museum declined. It went on the market last year for $500,000.
KURT COBAIN
In one of the rare cases of preserved childhood homes, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain's Aberdeen, Washington home is pretty much in the same condition as when he lived there. From the flowered wallpaper and shag carpeting to the linoleum floors and yellow Formica kitchen counters, the grunge icon's mother Wendy O'Connor didn't remodel after the musician died in 1994. Many hope the home does eventually become a tribute museum as thousands visit the nearby Kurt Cobain Memorial Park annually.
[#instagram: A post shared by Barack Obama (@barackobama) on Oct 7, 2016 at 1:09pm PDT]
BARACK OBAMA
Other than the four years he spent living in Indonesia between 1967 and 1971, President Barack Obama was raised primarily in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though he and his family lived in multiple houses there, Obama's first boyhood home was a pale yellow bungalow on Kalaniana'ole Highway in Makiki. The current owners bought the house without ever knowing the 44th president of the United States lived there, and, though it's not a historical site, they say many people come by to photograph the residence.
[#instagram: A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Oct 30, 2016 at 12:33am PDT]
JENNIFER LOPEZ
She started out as "Jenny From the Block", but musician and actress Jennifer Lopez went on to be one of the most famous names in Hollywood. The block where she started out was Blackrock Avenue in the Bronx, New York in a 5-bedroom, 3-bathroom townhouse in the Castlerock neighbourhood. Her family sold the house in 1999—the year “If You Had My Love” was released and hit the Billboard Hot 100. Though fireworks set the home ablaze in 2003, it was eventually fixed and resold.
This story originally appeared on Architectural Digest.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 28 |
https://www.wtvr.com/2018/08/16/secret-trips-to-petersburg-aretha-franklins-connection-to-central-virginia
|
en
|
Secret trips to Petersburg: Aretha Franklin’s connection to Central Virginia
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2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
While she called Detroit home, Franklin made quite a few stops in Central Virginia over the years.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
CBS 6 News Richmond WTVR
|
https://localtvwtvr.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/secret-trips-to-petersburg-aretha-franklins-connection-to-central-virginia/
|
RICHMOND, Va. -- Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. At the age of four, her family moved to Detroit, the city where she would find fame and fortune.
The daughter of a preacher, Franklin was just 14 years old when she released her first album, a gospel record.
Her singing ability eventually got the attention of Columbia Records, which gave her a contract in 1960.
But Franklin’s life, and the lives of many music fans, would change forever in 1967, when she signed with Atlantic records. That year, she would release two of her signature songs, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Respect.”
“That song, even today, generation, generation, generation, what are woman saying? Give me respect, just a little bit,” said King Tutt, midday host, 105.7 Kiss FM.
Those hits would kick off a career of chart topping success, making Franklin one of the most popular recording artists in the world.
She sold more than 75 million records.
Won so many Grammys that they eventually named an award after her.
In 1987, the Queen of Soul was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Aretha was a prime example of what God can do for a person,” said Richmond native Stu Gardner.
In 1988, Franklin sang the theme song for the television show “A Different World,” which was co-written by Gardner who was also the musical director for the television show.
“We went in the studio. We cut that track in about 30 minutes, I mean she had never heard it, all she had heard was the music, she put the background together, the whole concept together, and it was one of the funkiest theme songs on TV, man," explained Gardner.
During her life, Aretha Franklin serenaded popes and presidents and in 2005 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award.
“She did bring a lot of people together, of all races,” said Sheilah Belle, midday host, Praise 104.7 FM.
A few years ago, Franklin sat down with our Washington DC sister station to talk about her history in the nation’s capital, where she first performed as a teenager.
She also spoke about what it was like singing for numerous presidents, including her famous performance at the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
“It truly was a historical moment and what a moment to be there and of course Dr. King’s dream is still active and still alive,” said Franklin.
While she called Detroit home, Franklin made quite a few stops in Central Virginia over the years.
But many of them were done in secret.
For nearly four decades, a local man named Norman Dugger served as Franklin’s road manager and personal assistant.
“She would always pull into the Greyhound bus station back in the day, a Trailways bus station when it was open late at night," said Darlene Thomas, Norman Dugger’s cousin.
She and her family would often visit him at his home in Petersburg, but Dugger would keep those trips quiet to protect Franklin’s privacy.
“Norman raised her sons, as they were on the road. Her sons were in Petersburg from little toddlers, he would bring them here to stay with him,” said Thomas.
“Aretha was probably here a couple a times a year and no one ever knew,” she added.
But Franklin also had more public visits to Central Virginia.
She was one of the first musical acts to play the Richmond Coliseum after it opened its doors in 1971.
She famously returned to the River City in 1998, taking the stage with the Richmond Symphony.
More recently, it was announced that Franklin would have a show at the Altria Theater in November of 2014, but that was cancelled because of a scheduling conflict.
“A lot of what we hear today on the radio, when you talk about your Mariah Careys, your Janet Jacksons, your Beyonces, that is Aretha Franklin… a lot of what they got today is from Aretha,” explained Jackie Paige, midday host, iPower 92.1 FM.
In February of 2017, after a lifetime of performing and influencing countless other artists, Franklin announced that was she was planning to retire, saying she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.
But there were concerns about her health. It had been reported in 2011 that Franklin had been diagnosed with cancer. Something that she denied at the time.
But during a performance at an AIDs benefit last November, Franklin had noticeably lost a lot of weight.
Then, earlier this month, came reports that the iconic singer was gravely ill. Those reports would turn out to be true.
Aretha Franklin died this morning at her home in Detroit. Her family confirmed that it was the result of a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
She was 76 years old.
“That’s a big gap that’s being left now in the music industry,” said Sheilah Belle.
“I do believe Aretha Franklin with all she has done and all she has given us in the music community… she is the true ‘Queen of Soul’ and no one can ever take that away from her, she lived that life, rest in peace,” added King Tutt.
The “Queen of Soul” may be gone, but her voice will never be forgotten.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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0
| 66 |
https://www.brightonk12.com/Page/4512
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en
|
Tulley Classroom Website
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https://www.brightonk12.com/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brightonk12.com%2Fsite%2Fdefault.aspx%3FPageID%3D4512
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Aretha Franklin singer, Memphis Tennessee - Born March 25, 1942. She has been dubbed for years " The Queen Of Soul " but many also call her "Lady Soul," as well as the even more affectionate "Sister Re." As a child, Aretha moved from Tennessee to New York and then to Detroit. At age 14, she made her first recordings in a local Detroit church. She ten had her first two sons around this time. Clarence, Jr. was born when she was 15 and Edward "Eddie" was born when she was 16. She dropped out of high school soon after the birth of her second son. Her grandmother took in her sons to help Aretha move on in her career. Among her most successful hit singles from the 60's and 70's were "Chain of Fools", "You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman)", "Think", "Baby, I Love You", "The House That Jack Built", and "Respect", which became her signature song. She currently lives in Detroit when she is not on tour.
|
|||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 90 |
https://mashable.com/article/aretha-franklin-dies-at-age-76
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul, dead at 76
|
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2018-08-16T14:05:14+00:00
|
The singer known for her contributions to soul music passed away on Monday, after reports that she had fallen "gravely ill."
|
en
|
/favicons/favicon.svg
|
Mashable
|
https://mashable.com/article/aretha-franklin-dies-at-age-76
|
Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin died Thursday at the age of 76, the Associated Press reported.
Known for hits such as "Respect" and "Chain of Fools," the icon influenced artists for decades, making hits for long after she got a foothold in the music industry in the 1950s.
The news comes after Franklin's hospitalization was reported Monday. Her family told local Detroit news station WDIV-TV at the time that the singer was "gravely ill." She was reportedly visited at home by Stevie Wonder and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
When news of her illness broke, Beyoncé and Jay-Z dedicated their concert in Detroit on Monday to Franklin, declaring their love for her.
Many celebrities and public figures shared lyrics, memories, and condolences on Twitter following the news.
Mashable Top Stories
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Franklin was named the greatest singer of all time by Rolling Stone in 2010 and it's easy to see why. The acclaimed singer was the recipient of 18 Grammy Awards and received the The Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 2005. Franklin also became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Franklin was born March 25, 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee but her family moved to Detroit a few years later. Her father was famed preacher and civil rights activist C.L. Franklin. Franklin's love of music began when she started singing in her father's church on Sundays, according to the Detroit Historical Society, and when she was 17 her grandmother brought her to New York to pursue her singing ambitions. From there, Franklin's music career, which spanned gospel, R&B, soul, and pop, took off.
Last year, Franklin announced her plans to retire after the release of her new album in an interview with WDIV-TV.
"I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from, and where it is now," Franklin said. "I'll be pretty much satisfied, but I'm not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing. That wouldn't be good either."
A film about Franklin's life, starring Jennifer Hudson is expected to start filming next year, according to Rolling Stone.
Franklin is survived by her four sons, Kecalf Cunningham, Ted White Jr., and Edward and Clarence Franklin.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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0
| 89 |
https://entertainment.time.com/2012/03/24/happy-birthday-aretha-franklin-the-queen-of-soul-turns-70/
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en
|
Happy Birthday Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul Turns 70
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2012-03-24T00:00:00
|
As the legendary singer turns 70, TIME looks back on the highs and lows of her extraordinary career....
|
en
|
TIME.com
|
https://entertainment.time.com/2012/03/24/happy-birthday-aretha-franklin-the-queen-of-soul-turns-70/
| ||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 82 |
https://www.wtvr.com/2018/08/16/secret-trips-to-petersburg-aretha-franklins-connection-to-central-virginia
|
en
|
Secret trips to Petersburg: Aretha Franklin’s connection to Central Virginia
|
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[
"Mike Bergazzi"
] |
2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
While she called Detroit home, Franklin made quite a few stops in Central Virginia over the years.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
CBS 6 News Richmond WTVR
|
https://localtvwtvr.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/secret-trips-to-petersburg-aretha-franklins-connection-to-central-virginia/
|
RICHMOND, Va. -- Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. At the age of four, her family moved to Detroit, the city where she would find fame and fortune.
The daughter of a preacher, Franklin was just 14 years old when she released her first album, a gospel record.
Her singing ability eventually got the attention of Columbia Records, which gave her a contract in 1960.
But Franklin’s life, and the lives of many music fans, would change forever in 1967, when she signed with Atlantic records. That year, she would release two of her signature songs, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Respect.”
“That song, even today, generation, generation, generation, what are woman saying? Give me respect, just a little bit,” said King Tutt, midday host, 105.7 Kiss FM.
Those hits would kick off a career of chart topping success, making Franklin one of the most popular recording artists in the world.
She sold more than 75 million records.
Won so many Grammys that they eventually named an award after her.
In 1987, the Queen of Soul was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Aretha was a prime example of what God can do for a person,” said Richmond native Stu Gardner.
In 1988, Franklin sang the theme song for the television show “A Different World,” which was co-written by Gardner who was also the musical director for the television show.
“We went in the studio. We cut that track in about 30 minutes, I mean she had never heard it, all she had heard was the music, she put the background together, the whole concept together, and it was one of the funkiest theme songs on TV, man," explained Gardner.
During her life, Aretha Franklin serenaded popes and presidents and in 2005 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award.
“She did bring a lot of people together, of all races,” said Sheilah Belle, midday host, Praise 104.7 FM.
A few years ago, Franklin sat down with our Washington DC sister station to talk about her history in the nation’s capital, where she first performed as a teenager.
She also spoke about what it was like singing for numerous presidents, including her famous performance at the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
“It truly was a historical moment and what a moment to be there and of course Dr. King’s dream is still active and still alive,” said Franklin.
While she called Detroit home, Franklin made quite a few stops in Central Virginia over the years.
But many of them were done in secret.
For nearly four decades, a local man named Norman Dugger served as Franklin’s road manager and personal assistant.
“She would always pull into the Greyhound bus station back in the day, a Trailways bus station when it was open late at night," said Darlene Thomas, Norman Dugger’s cousin.
She and her family would often visit him at his home in Petersburg, but Dugger would keep those trips quiet to protect Franklin’s privacy.
“Norman raised her sons, as they were on the road. Her sons were in Petersburg from little toddlers, he would bring them here to stay with him,” said Thomas.
“Aretha was probably here a couple a times a year and no one ever knew,” she added.
But Franklin also had more public visits to Central Virginia.
She was one of the first musical acts to play the Richmond Coliseum after it opened its doors in 1971.
She famously returned to the River City in 1998, taking the stage with the Richmond Symphony.
More recently, it was announced that Franklin would have a show at the Altria Theater in November of 2014, but that was cancelled because of a scheduling conflict.
“A lot of what we hear today on the radio, when you talk about your Mariah Careys, your Janet Jacksons, your Beyonces, that is Aretha Franklin… a lot of what they got today is from Aretha,” explained Jackie Paige, midday host, iPower 92.1 FM.
In February of 2017, after a lifetime of performing and influencing countless other artists, Franklin announced that was she was planning to retire, saying she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.
But there were concerns about her health. It had been reported in 2011 that Franklin had been diagnosed with cancer. Something that she denied at the time.
But during a performance at an AIDs benefit last November, Franklin had noticeably lost a lot of weight.
Then, earlier this month, came reports that the iconic singer was gravely ill. Those reports would turn out to be true.
Aretha Franklin died this morning at her home in Detroit. Her family confirmed that it was the result of a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
She was 76 years old.
“That’s a big gap that’s being left now in the music industry,” said Sheilah Belle.
“I do believe Aretha Franklin with all she has done and all she has given us in the music community… she is the true ‘Queen of Soul’ and no one can ever take that away from her, she lived that life, rest in peace,” added King Tutt.
The “Queen of Soul” may be gone, but her voice will never be forgotten.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
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https://wsvn.com/entertainment/the-last-time-detroit-honored-aretha-franklin/
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en
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The last time Detroit honored Aretha Franklin - WSVN 7News
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2018-08-27T18:26:21+00:00
|
(CNN) — Vince Paul had known Aretha Franklin for years when he snagged her to be the headliner for his inaugural Detroit Music Weekend in<a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://wsvn.com/entertainment/the-last-time-detroit-honored-aretha-franklin/">Read More</a>
|
en
|
WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports | Fort Lauderdale
|
https://wsvn.com/entertainment/the-last-time-detroit-honored-aretha-franklin/
|
(CNN) — Vince Paul had known Aretha Franklin for years when he snagged her to be the headliner for his inaugural Detroit Music Weekend in June 2017.
But this time around, he told CNN, there was something very different about the legendary singer.
“There was a lot of crying, the whole weekend,” he said. “Can you imagine Aretha Franklin crying? There was a lot of crying to the point where I was weirded out.”
There will be a great deal of tears in Detroit again this week connected to the Queen of Soul as the city — her city — bids her farewell.
Franklin died August 16 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 76.
A star-studded, private funeral is set for August 31 at 10 a.m. at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit.
Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson, Yolanda Adams, Fantasia, Faith Hill and Pastor Shirley Caesar are among those set to perform at the funeral.
The ceremony will culminate a week of planned events in Detroit, which will include her body lying in state Tuesday and Wednesday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
The Detroit Free Press reported that a public viewing had been added on Thursday at New Bethel Baptist Church, where Franklin’s father, the late Rev. C.L. Franklin, formerly served as pastor.
While she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, Franklin is more closely identified with the city of Detroit, where she lived most of her life.
Paul is the president and artistic director for the Detroit Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, which is described as providing “southeastern Michigan with high quality performing arts programs and education that reflect the diverse mix of cultures that make up our community.”
He is passionate about using the arts to both highlight Detroit’s growth and encourage it.
With the city’s rich history in music — which includes everything from techno to rock and soul — Paul said he had the idea to create a festival that would celebrate the various genres and Detroit.
Having produced for Franklin a half dozen times, he said he went to her with the idea for Detroit Music Weekend in November 2016 and she loved it.
The singer was also aware that to pull off such an event, it would require a well-known artist to draw attendees, and naturally Paul wanted it to be Franklin.
“Aretha is a double-edged sword,” Paul told CNN recently. “She does things, or she doesn’t do things. It’s very definitive. You can’t talk her into it.”
When it came to the festival, the legend wanted it to be outdoor, free to the public and right in the middle of Madison Avenue with other streets blocked off for a big concert to close it out, he said.
Raising the money to put on the event, including paying Franklin’s fee, turned out to be less nerve-racking than the six months back-and-forth of whether Franklin would actually perform, Paul told CNN.
“She’s coming, she’s not coming,” he said. “She’s calling around to people, then she disappeared, then she re-emerges and she starts calling around to different people ‘Everything’s cool, everything’s on schedule.'”
Paul said it turns out she was ill. He said he had heard rumblings three years earlier that she was sick, but she was believed to have gotten better.
So when he heard a few months before the planned festival that she was ill again, he assumed that she would pull through again.
Franklin did and ended up doing what would be the last full concert of her career — three hours long, complete with 29 musicians, backup singers and dancers.
The star looked more frail than she had in the past, but Paul said she delivered to the tens of thousands of fans who turned out to support her.
“It was glorious,” Paul said. “It turned into a four-day celebration of Aretha Franklin in the city of Detroit as it should be.”
There was a tribute concert to her, with video tributes from the likes of Bonnie Raitt and Carole King, a street-naming ceremony for Aretha Franklin Way, and Franklin received the key to the city.
It all proved to be quite an emotional experience for the usually more stoic singer, Paul said.
Now that she is gone, Paul said that to him, Aretha Franklin embodied soul music.
“She personified it, she monetized it, she knew how to produce it, she knew how to arrange it where everybody liked it,” he said. “There isn’t another Aretha Franklin.”
In her honor, the Music Hall plans to rename its Jazz Cafe “Aretha’s Jazz Cafe,” Paul said.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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2
| 23 |
https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/07/12/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
|
en
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Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
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2024-07-12T00:00:00
|
The house at 406 Lucy near McLemore and South Third Street in South Memphis had been in foreclosure and Environmental Court.
|
en
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//webpubcontent.gray.tv/gray/arc-fusion-assets/images/favicons/wmctv/favicon.ico?d=420
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https://www.actionnews5.com
|
https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/07/12/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
|
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - The birthplace of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was sold on the Shelby County Courthouse steps Friday at noon.
The house at 406 Lucy near McLemore and South Third Street in South Memphis had been in foreclosure and Environmental Court.
Franklin was born at the home on March 25, 1942, to parents Barbara and Rev. C.L. Franklin.
The woman who oversees Historic Clayborn Temple, Anasa Troutman, personally bought the Franklin house.
She says she wants to preserve the house and keep it right where it is as a catalyst to help improve the highly challenged and impoverished neighborhood.
Click here to sign up for our newsletter!
Click here to report a spelling or grammar error. Please include the headline.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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1
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https://www.facebook.com/100percentretro/videos/happy-birthday-aretha-franklintoday-in-1942aretha-franklin-was-born-in-memphis-t/1069495710297670/
|
en
|
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ARETHA FRANKLIN (Today in 1942) Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Aretha, the "Queen of Soul", she has twice been placed...
|
[] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
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[] | null |
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ARETHA FRANKLIN
(Today in 1942)
Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee.
Aretha, the "Queen of Soul", she has twice been placed...
|
de
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https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/aGT3gskzWBf.ico
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https://www.facebook.com/100percentretro/videos/happy-birthday-aretha-franklintoday-in-1942aretha-franklin-was-born-in-memphis-t/1069495710297670/
| ||||||
correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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1
| 60 |
https://bittersoutherner.com/aretha-franklin-goes-home
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin Goes Home — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
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To become the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin first had to travel through Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In her memory, we talk to Spooner Oldham and David Hood, who played on the 1967 landmark album that made her a superstar.
|
en
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THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
|
https://bittersoutherner.com/aretha-franklin-goes-home
|
In the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century, the murders started early.
From 1955 forward, Southern white supremacists trying to stop the movement in its tracks killed dozens of black people. From Emmett Till in 1955 to Medgar Evers and the four little girls of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, no-account Kluxers rained terror on Southern blacks.
Did Southern courts bring swift justice to the martyrs’ families? Hell, no. Did every Southern news organization stand against the terrorists? Sadly, just a few.
But something else was going on in those years. Even as countless heartless crimes were committed against African-Americans, small groups of Southern blacks and whites worked together in secret to build a monument of great beauty, a cultural achievement that will stand until the end of time.
Their workshops were recording studios. The monument they built was called soul music. Blacks and whites together built resplendent musical bridges over the old divide, and did it primarily in two places: Memphis, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Thus, in January of 1967, a 24-year-old Aretha Franklin came to magical Muscle Shoals, in search of her groove.
After Columbia Records head John Hammond signed Franklin in 1961, he seemed unable to find the right setting for Franklin’s remarkable voice. Her early albums on Columbia cast her, for the most part, as a jazz singer, and none of them climbed higher than 69 on the U.S. albums chart. After Columbia’s final attempt, 1966’s “Soul Sister,” stalled out, Aretha Franklin moved to Atlantic Records under the direction of Jerry Wexler, one of the label’s founders. Wexler brought Franklin to Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where she spent January and February of 1967 recording with Shoals masters like Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, and David Hood. The result was, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You.” The album was released in March, and it jumped to No. 1 on the U.S. R&B album charts and No. 2 on the Hot 200. It produced Franklin’s first two hit singles: her definitive version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” and the title cut, written by Ronnie Shannon.
That album made — and still makes — perfect, beautiful, Southern sense to me. When word Franklin was gravely ill came earlier this week, I put it back on the turntable. And it reminded me, as it always has, Aretha Franklin had to come home to find the music that could do justice to her inimitable voice and would rocket her to stardom.
I know the South, technically, was not her home: Aretha grew up in Detroit. But her roots in the South run as deeply as those of any African-American family that departed our region during Jim Crow and the Great Migration. She was born in Memphis, but was only 4 when her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, the son of Sunflower County, Mississippi, sharecroppers, settled in Detroit as pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church.
Aretha’s singing career bloomed in that church. She recorded her first album — a gospel record called “Songs of Faith” — at New Bethel in 1956, when she was only 14 years old. Listen to that record (if you can find it), and you’ll hear just how far the threads of Southern music had traveled by the mid-20th century. Black families carried the gospel sounds of their churches with them as they dispersed across the Midwest and Northeast to escape Jim Crow, and their music remained intact in those new locations.
The conclusion is inescapable: Aretha’s musical roots were as Southern as any of you are. And if you’re a student of Southern musical culture, it must always be noted she might have never become a superstar had she not come “home” to the South.
David Hood, known most widely as the bass player in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, played on “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” — but not the bass. He played trombone in the horn section. Hood would later add soulful bass lines to dozens of Aretha’s performances on record and on the stage, but he remains grateful the ’bone got him into the session.
“There was a problem in the booking of the horns,” Hood recalled earlier this week. “The ones they wanted, they couldn't get that day. And so, I got on the session that way.”
He remembers Aretha as a shy young woman who didn’t tell the musicians what she was going for, and instead just showed them.
“We'd been talking to Jerry Wexler. People were recording her wrong, and he wanted to bring her to Muscle Shoals,” Hood said. “It was to get her a little bit more funky style, but also to have her play the piano while she sang. There are some technical problems when doing something like that, but it was great. It helped the musicians find the style and get the feel that she wanted, and I think that's what made the difference. On nearly all the best cuts she ever did, she was playing the piano on as well as singing.”
In other words, she was doing the same things she’d done in church since she was a teenager: playing and singing the gospel.
“You could just pick up the feeling from her piano,” Hood said. “She grew up in a church and had that piano style and vocal style. And that's what Jerry wanted, and that's what everybody picked up on, I think.”
“I expect that was a style y’all would have felt pretty much at home in,” I replied.
“Yes,” Hood said. “Very much so.”
Aretha’s apple had not fallen too far from the tree.
Yesterday, after Aretha’s passing was confirmed, I spoke with another player on “I Never Loved a Man” — the legendary keyboardist and songwriter Spooner Oldham.
“Her dad had been a preacher — a Baptist preacher — and she sang at church as a child prodigy,” Oldham told me. “I guess he’d stack her up on the pulpit or whatever, lift her up where you could see her. So, coming to Muscle Shoals probably resonated the Southern experience in her brain, even though she had been gone forever. And then, when she was allowed to turn loose with all that Southern expression, we just played our hearts out, because we were used to that stuff. I mean, we weren't used to her — because she was top of the heap — but she brought it all out of us. I was curious because I knew she hadn't been around the South much, but she was belting that stuff out like she'd known it forever.”
And the truth was, she had known it forever. But Oldham didn’t know for sure they had recorded a hit album until Wexler called the Muscle Shoals crew to New York to put finishing touches on “I Never Loved a Man” a month after the Alabama sessions.
Between the sessions, Oldham said, “Aretha had been practicing at home with her sisters and family, singing those backup things. And then, when I first heard that re-re-re-respect, just-a-little-bit, sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me thing, all of that was brand new. It had never been done before. I knew something was going on then, you know. I knew it was going to turn the world around.”
Aretha Franklin did turn the world around, starting with that album’s release in March of 1967. On the first cut, she transformed Otis Redding’s pleas for a little respect from his woman into a monumental anthem for all women, who got precious little respect in those days.
For 20 more years, she consistently put singles at No. 1 on the charts, making us dance, sway, even cry: ”Baby I Love You,” “Chain of Fools,” “Sweet Sweet Baby Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Think,” “Share Your Love With Me,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Day Dreaming,” “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” “Something He Can Feel,” “Break It to Me Gently,” “Jump to It,” “Freeway of Love,” “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me.”
For those of us who grew up on soul music, these and many other of her songs are landmarks, caches in which we hide our own memories, touchstones we all go back to repeatedly because they inspire us, comfort us, make us dance as we did in our youth. No voice ever dominated a genre of music as completely as Aretha’s. The Queen of Soul title has no hyperbole in it.
Hood told me a story about the last time he played with Aretha, in 2011 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
“I was part of the stage band,” he said. “We were doing a tribute to Aretha show, and she was not supposed to play or sing or anything. And they had all these other artists to sing her songs — Jerry Butler, Cissy Houston, I can’t even remember all of them. But at the very end of the show, she decided she would sing. She did ‘A Song for You,’ and, my God, I just stood there behind her and tried to find what she was doing and play along with her. I didn’t have a chart or anything. That was a great moment.”
In the video from that night, you can see Hood struggle a bit as Aretha sits at the piano and renders a highly improvisational and profoundly church-like version of Leon Russell’s classic tune. You can also see a giant smile plastered on his face in that moment, as if he knew his own notes didn’t matter much because the Queen had the crowd in the palm of her hand, all on her own, even in this utterly unrehearsed moment.
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3
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http://cohen.house.gov/taxonomy/story-type/enewsletters/remembering-queen-soul-aretha-franklin
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en
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Remembering the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin
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2018-08-17T09:00:00-04:00
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Dear Friend,
|
en
|
/profiles/evo/assets/images/favicon.ico
|
Congressman Steve Cohen
|
http://cohen.house.gov/taxonomy/story-type/enewsletters/remembering-queen-soul-aretha-franklin
|
Dear Friend,
This week, I noted the passing of Memphis native and "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin, paying my R-E-S-P-E-C-Ts at her birthplace on Lucy Street in South Memphis. I also condemned the vindictive revocation of former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearances, commended newspaper editorial pages for defending our First Amendment and standing up to the President's relentless attacks on a free press, wrote to HUD Secretary Ben Carson regarding my concerns about chronic and ongoing health and safety risks related to poor management at some federally subsidized housing facilities in Memphis, recognized the 83rd anniversary of Social Security and provided information about a baby diaper shortage. Keep reading to learn more about my week and follow me on Twitter and Facebook to see more updates as they happen.
Remembering the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin
Defending Former CIA Director John Brennan
Standing Up for a Free Press
Writing to HUD Secretary Ben Carson with Concerns
Holding "Congress On Your Corner" This Thursday Evening
Recognizing the 83rd Anniversary of Social Security
Signing Up for "Congress On Your Corner" and this e-Newsletter
Weekly Health Tip
Quotes of the Week
Remembering the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin
The world lost a great artist on Thursday. I was saddened to learn of the passing of Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, who thrilled millions with her renditions of gospel, Motown, R & B, jazz and pop classics. I went to her Memphis birthplace at 406 Lucy Street in South Memphis Thursday afternoon to pay my R-E-S-P-E-C-Ts and saw many of her fans there for the same purpose. Aretha Franklin taught the world what R-E-S-P-E-C-T means. From her humble origins to her consistent place atop the Billboard charts, Aretha Franklin was truly the "Queen of Soul." What a voice and what a passion she brought to her songs. Detroit, Memphis and the whole world have lost a very bright star.
Defending Former CIA Director John Brennan
Shortly after the President revoked the security clearances of former CIA Director John Brennan, I put out a statement defending the man who helped capture Osama bin Laden and has long been combatting Russian attempts to interfere with our our democracy. Brennan knows a lot about the ongoing investigation of Trump's campaign and Russian interference in our 2016 elections. It's crystal clear that the revocation of the clearances is punishment for Brennan speaking the truth. The President continues to dishonor his high office and the American people with these petty, vindictive attacks. I stand with Brennan and suggest the next president restore this fine public servant's ability to lend his wisdom to our men and women in the intelligence community.
Standing Up for a Free Press
After The Boston Globe suggested that newspapers all across the country write editorials defending a free press on Thursday, I was pleased to see The Memphis Flyer and Commercial Appeal columnist David Waters taking that principled stand. Journalists, generally, but their readers, too, are genuinely fearful of what the President has unleashed with his accusations that reporters are the "enemies of the people" and that accurate, factual news he doesn't like is "fake news." Most serious journalists work hard to write accurate stories with adequate context and, when they fall short, correct errors immediately. Unlike many of the President's favorite outlets, the mainstream media does not fabricate false "news" intended to mislead. I'm pleased the nation's newspapers are making it clear that the only way a true democracy can function is with citizens having access to accurate news and commentary.
Writing to HUD Secretary Ben Carson with Concerns
This week I wrote to U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson with concerns about persistent health and safety risks present at HUD-subsidized housing units in Memphis resulting in low inspection scores. Earlier this Congress, I introduced the Housing Accountability Act with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida to strengthen federal oversight of the inspection process for federally subsidized affordable housing in an effort to address and prevent these safety violations.
The recent low inspection scores indicate ongoing issues of failed maintenance and questionable federal oversight practices despite changes to the law and the media spotlight on the poor management of facilities like those formerly owned by the Global Ministries Foundation. In the letter, I asked HUD Secretary Carson what he is doing to get these properties into compliance with federal standards. I will report on his response when I receive it. See the letter here.
Holding "Congress On Your Corner" This Thursday Evening
On Thursday everning, my office will hold our monthly "Congress On Your Corner" event at the Whitehaven Branch Library, 4120 Millbranch Road, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. My staff will be on hand to help with Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and military service issues, Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and services, Federal Housing Authority (FHA) home loans, federal grant applications, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issues, visas, passports and more. While "Congress On Your Corner" hours have typically been during the day, we are adding some evening events to expand outreach to those whose schedules do not permit daytime attendance.
Recognizing the 83rd Anniversary of Social Security
On Tuesday, I noted the 83rd anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's signing of the Social Security Act into law, creating old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. Critics at the time, including many Republicans, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bar Association, called it "socialism." Eighty-three years later, it is the cornerstone of our country's commitment to seeing that our senior citizens and those who cannot work are able to live out their retirements in dignity and secure financial confidence.
In recent years, we have defeated efforts to erode Social Security benefits or privatize hard-earned investments in our future, but aggressive efforts to push these risky ideas are still circulating and we must remain vigilant. I am committed to making Social Security -- the backbone of the safety net for our senior citizens and families -- as well as Medicare and Medicaid, stronger and to assuring their permanence.
Signing Up for "Congress On Your Corner" and this e-Newsletter
I enjoy meeting regularly with constituents in the district and helping get answers for them to questions about dealing with federal agencies. If you are interested in attending one of my "Congress on Your Corner" events, you can sign up here to receive notification as soon as the next event is scheduled.
For those who haven't participated in a telephone town hall, it's easy to sign up for them by using this form.
If you would like to receive this weekly e-Newsletter, or share it with others, you can do that with this form.
Weekly Health Tip
Each week, I share a health tip in the hope of promoting a healthy lifestyle for residents of the 9thCongressional District. As always, it is best to check with your doctor before making any changes to your diet, exercise routine or lifestyle.
Last week, I held a symposium at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church on infant and maternal health with a variety of medical and other advocates and experts. During our discussion, the unaffordability of basic necessities, including clean diapers, was raised, and so was a proposed solution. In Memphis, 44 percent of children under 3 live in poverty and one in three mothers report running out of diapers each month. As a result, seldom discussed diaper rash is a serious problem in our community. The University of Memphis' Institute for Interdisciplinary Memphis Partnerships to Advance Community Transformation (iIMPACT), the Coordinated Effort to Enhance Development (CEED), the Urban Child Institute and other partners are working to create a Shelby County Diaper Bank. The "Bundles for Babies" initiative is an excellent response to this critical need.
Quotes of the Week
On Thursday, as noted above, the nation's newspapers defended themselves and the First Amendment constitutional right of a free press in hundreds of editorials. Here is a sampling:
"As women's rights pioneer and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in 1982: ‘The people must know before they can act and there is no educator to compare with the press.'" – Falls City(Nebraska) Journal.
"The danger is that over time. Mr. Trump's antics and the incivility he encourages could lead to the arrest of journalists or violence against them, and it could also erode the public's faith in the First Amendment, which is the foundation of all our liberties." – The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal.
"Trump is inflicting massive, and perhaps irreparable, damage to democracy with these attacks." The St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch.
"That 44 percent of Republicans polled recently said Trump should have the autocrat's power to shut down news outlets shows how successful his efforts have already been." – The Kansas City(Missouri) Star.
As always, I remain,
Most sincerely,
|
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correct_birth_00051
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3
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https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
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en
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Aretha Franklin’s childhood home could become a Memphis landmark
|
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2017-05-29T21:54:26+05:30
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Plus, 8 other celebrity childhood homes that should also be given the official status
|
en
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/verso/static/architectural-digest/assets/favicon-ad-int.ico
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Architectural Digest India
|
https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-become-memphis-landmark/
|
Aretha Franklin may have left her humble Memphis, Tennessee roots when she was barely two years old, but the city is nevertheless desperate to save its small connection to the “Queen of Soul.". In 1942, Franklin was born in this tiny wooden home, but her family left Memphis about two years later. Now, the Memphis mayor's office is trying to save the dilapidated structure, left vacant for years, to preserve it as a landmark. A group from the mayor's office is seeking funding sources to assist in the preservation and future use of the historic home.
[#instagram: A post shared by Kon (@konradstagram) on May 28, 2017 at 8:20am PDT]
Franklin isn't the only star whose childhood home has been deemed unworthy of being landmarks. Plenty of stars homes, living and deceased, have not received official landmark status. Below, we visit the places where some of the most famous faces in Hollywood grew up—and the hometowns that should consider following in Memphis's footsteps.
[#instagram: A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on May 3, 2017 at 4:58pm PDT]
MADONNA
These days, Madonna's permanent residences are in London and New York—but the pop star grew up in flyover country. Madonna Louise Ciccone lived in a two-storey brick Colonial in Rochester Hills, Michigan (about 30 minutes outside Detroit) with her parents and seven siblings until she was 18. Her father and stepmother moved out in July 2001, selling the home for $270,000, but in 2008 the home burned down, reportedly due to arson. It later sold partial state for $91,700 in 2012. The property still attracts hordes of tourists to this day, despite the home not being in its original condition.
[#instagram: A post shared by Farrah Fawcett Foundation (@farrahfawcettfn) on May 4, 2017 at 11:18am PDT]
FARRAH FAWCETT
Famous for her feathered blond hair and a starring role on “Charlie's Angels,” Farrah Fawcett got her start in Texas. Before heading to Hollywood, Fawcett lived with her parents (her father was an oil man) in this 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom house in Corpus Christi, Texas. After her 2009 death, the actress's childhood home was remodeled with new paint, tile, carpeting, lighting, and bathroom fixtures before being listed for $215,000.
MARLON BRANDO
This five-bedroom, four-bathroom frame house in Omaha, Nebraska is where legendary actor Marlon Brando grew up with his father (a pesticide and chemical feed manufacturer) mother, and two older sisters. (Fun fact: After winning an Oscar in 1973, Brando returned to the house and shocked the new owners by asking for a tour.) Public records show the 4,119-square-foot home was built in 1900 and while it has been updated, and though it now includes a pool, it's yet to be landmarked.
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Jackson family's Gary, Indiana residence was The King of Pop's first home. And while the house has long been part of the history of Michael and the Jackson Five's rise from poverty to international fame, the tiny 672-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 1-bath house (which housed 11 people) has never been made a historic landmark. The property is reportedly still owned by the family.
[#instagram: A post shared by Janis Joplin (@janisjoplin) on May 10, 2017 at 5:49pm PDT]
JANIS JOPLIN
Oh lord won't you buy me … a music legend's childhood home? In the 1940s and 1950s, Janis Joplin grew up in this Port Arthur, Texas, house. She even carved her first name into the floor of the garage in the 1,450-square-foot, 5-bedroom residence. Though the homeowners did contact the Museum of the Gulf Coast about acquiring the house, the museum declined. It went on the market last year for $500,000.
KURT COBAIN
In one of the rare cases of preserved childhood homes, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain's Aberdeen, Washington home is pretty much in the same condition as when he lived there. From the flowered wallpaper and shag carpeting to the linoleum floors and yellow Formica kitchen counters, the grunge icon's mother Wendy O'Connor didn't remodel after the musician died in 1994. Many hope the home does eventually become a tribute museum as thousands visit the nearby Kurt Cobain Memorial Park annually.
[#instagram: A post shared by Barack Obama (@barackobama) on Oct 7, 2016 at 1:09pm PDT]
BARACK OBAMA
Other than the four years he spent living in Indonesia between 1967 and 1971, President Barack Obama was raised primarily in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though he and his family lived in multiple houses there, Obama's first boyhood home was a pale yellow bungalow on Kalaniana'ole Highway in Makiki. The current owners bought the house without ever knowing the 44th president of the United States lived there, and, though it's not a historical site, they say many people come by to photograph the residence.
[#instagram: A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Oct 30, 2016 at 12:33am PDT]
JENNIFER LOPEZ
She started out as "Jenny From the Block", but musician and actress Jennifer Lopez went on to be one of the most famous names in Hollywood. The block where she started out was Blackrock Avenue in the Bronx, New York in a 5-bedroom, 3-bathroom townhouse in the Castlerock neighbourhood. Her family sold the house in 1999—the year “If You Had My Love” was released and hit the Billboard Hot 100. Though fireworks set the home ablaze in 2003, it was eventually fixed and resold.
This story originally appeared on Architectural Digest.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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0
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https://www.wvlt.tv/video/2024/07/13/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
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Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
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2024-07-13T00:00:00
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correct_birth_00051
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https://countynews4you.com/queen_of_soul_aretha_franklin_dies_at_76.html
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Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin Dies at 76
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News Covering Five Counties- Iredell, Cabarrus, Catawba, Mecklenburg, and Rowan
|
The County News
|
https://countynews4you.com/queen_of_soul_aretha_franklin_dies_at_76.html
|
By STACY M. BROWN
|
||||||
correct_birth_00051
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Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
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[
"breaking news video",
"video updates",
"live video",
"live updates",
"breaking news",
"press conference",
"live speeches",
"real time coverage"
] | null |
[] |
2024-07-13T00:00:00
|
en
|
//webpubcontent.gray.tv/gray/arc-fusion-assets/images/favicons/wvlt/favicon.ico?d=421
|
https://www.wvlt.tv
|
https://www.actionnews5.com/video/2024/07/13/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
| ||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 19 |
https://www.magic925.com/rip-aretha-franklin/
|
en
|
RIP Aretha Franklin
|
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Magic 92.5"
] |
2018-08-16T14:21:22+00:00
|
TMZ is sadly reporting that the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, has passed away at the age of 76 surrounded by family & friends. RIP
|
en
|
https://www.magic925.com/favicon.ico
|
Magic 92.5
|
https://www.magic925.com/rip-aretha-franklin/
|
In all of music history there was never a voice like the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin.
Born in Memphis Tennessee in 1942, the daughter of pastor and civil rights activist C.L. Franklin, Aretha grew up singing in her father’s Baptist church in Detroit. She learned piano by ear, and toured with her father’s gospel caravan as a teen. She signed with Columbia Records in 1960, but the label had her singing pop standards, unsure how to use her incredible voice.
It was with Atlantic Records in 1967 that Aretha established herself as a musical force with hits like “I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You,” “Chain Of Fools” and “Natural Woman.” But it was her gender changing cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” that took her from R&B singer to cultural icon.
In the decades that followed, Aretha’s career would have peaks and valleys, and a huge commercial resurgence in the 80’s, but her legendary voice was always strong.
Her 56 year career resulted in 20 #1 R&B singles, the third most Grammys in history for a female artist, induction into the Gospel and R&B Halls of Fame, and the first woman inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
She announced her retirement from the road last year, but most shows were cancelled for health reasons. Aretha died in her Detroit home, surrounded by family and friends, at age 76.
Magic 92.5 remembers the one and only Queen Of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 55 |
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/genius-aretha-franklin-exploring-black-history-in-detroit
|
en
|
Where to see Aretha Franklin’s past and 9 other places to explore Detroit's Black history
|
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Carole Rosenblat"
] |
2021-03-19T12:08:01.553000+00:00
|
These sites influenced the civil rights movement in Michigan’s Motown and far beyond.
|
en
|
Travel
|
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/genius-aretha-franklin-exploring-black-history-in-detroit
|
Before she was the Queen of Soul and a social justice crusader, Aretha Franklin was the songbird of New Bethel Baptist Church, located in Detroit’s 12th Street neighborhood.
“She was a very quiet kid, and she always liked to sing,” says Fannie Tyler, who worked as personal secretary for Aretha’s father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, and as Aretha’s secretary coordinator for her gospel program.
“She grew up with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. They were young kids together, Smokey, Levi Stubbs, Mary Wilson, and Jackie Wilson,” Tyler continues. Franklin’s father would invite gospel legends including Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, and Ruth Davis of the Davis sisters to their home for jam sessions. “Aretha would call all her friends and say, ‘Guess who’s here?’”
Franklin would go on to sell more than 75 million records worldwide over a career that spanned six decades. Her voice and legacy continue to inspire new generations. Genius: Aretha, the third season of the National Geographic Channel’s Emmy Award-nominated series Genius, premiers March 21.
But Franklin is hardly the only star of the Motor City’s Black narrative. The city has nurtured generations of civil rights legends and the city’s long struggle for social justice is visible in many places, from a half-mile segregation wall to the freedom point of the Underground Railroad.
(Detroit’s winning spirit helps it fight back against COVID-19.)
Here are 10 destinations that influenced the civil rights movement and continue to create conversations for a more inclusive future.
First, honor the Queen
Under the leadership of Aretha’s father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, New Bethel was a central location for the civil rights fight in Detroit. Rev. Franklin organized the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom, the largest civil rights demonstration in history at the time. Martin Luther King, Jr. concluded the march with a portion of his “I Have a Dream” speech, which he would go on to deliver at the historic March on Washington two months later. The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 12, 2021. Make an appointment to visit the church’s museum room to learn more about its role in the civil rights movement.
See Detroit’s segregation wall
The Birwood Wall—also known as Detroit’s Berlin Wall—existed as a physical and psychological barrier between the region’s Black and white residents. In 1940, a white land developer envisioned building an all-white neighborhood near a primarily Black community. However, banks were not issuing loans in majority-Black neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining and described by architectural historian Ruth Mills as “enshrined segregation.”
The Federal Housing Authority rejected the developer’s plans until a compromise was made: a six-foot-high, half-mile-long block wall along Birwood Avenue to separate Black families living in the area from the white residents expected to move in. On January 27, 2021, eighty years after its creation, the wall—now decorated with murals of community leaders, historical scenes, and laughing children—was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and continues to shed a light on the country’s troubled history with housing rights equality.
Explore the Underground Railroad
Venture down to Hart Plaza, along Detroit’s revitalized riverfront, to visit the Gateway to Freedom International Underground Railroad Memorial. The memorial stands at the approximate location where escaped enslaved people made their final push to freedom across the U.S. border into Canada on the T. Whitney riverboat.
The 12,000-pound bronze sculpture, which depicts a group of African Americans looking across the river alongside George DeBaptiste—a Black man who hired a white captain to helm the T. Whitney, as Blacks weren’t allowed to captain a boat—toward a companion sculpture in Windsor, Canada. “It was a joint venture between the U.S. and Canada. It’s one memorial in two places,” says Ed Dwight, the memorial’s creator and the first African-American astronaut trainee.
Climb aboard a slave ship
Walk the decks of a replica slave ship inside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History’s “And Still We Rise” exhibit. The sounds of muffled screams, drums, and clattering chains audibly immerse visitors as they learn about the transatlantic slave trade. A vignette of a branding station, tiered wooden shelves holding mannequins of shackled Africans, and interactive panels provide “a comprehensive look at the history of African-American resilience,” according to the museum.
Other permanent exhibits depict the road to emancipation, the fight for voting rights, the era of Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration, and Black-owned businesses, as well as Black entertainment.
Visit the site that started a rebellion
In 1967, two soldiers were celebrating their return from Vietnam at a “blind pig,” a term used to describe an illegal, after-hours bar. Jamon Jordan, owner of Black Scroll Network Tours says, “the bar,” located in a strip of unauthorized businesses along Clairmont Avenue and Twelfth Street (renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard), “was also the United Community League for Civic Action, a community political organization that was involved in registering people in this neighborhood to vote and finding people to run for different offices.”
With longstanding accusations of police brutality against Blacks, and unemployment, poverty, and systemic racism running high, a July 23, 1967 police raid on the bar was the spark that set off an agonizing five-day riot in the streets of Detroit. When the smoke cleared a few days after 7,000 National Guard troops were deployed, 43 people were dead, 342 injured, and 1,400 buildings burned.
(2020 is not 1968: To understand today’s protests, you must look further back.)
Most experts agree that the rebellion was a catalyst for increased fair-housing laws, additional equal opportunities in the job force, and energized community efforts to work for change. The flashpoint, located in what is now Gordon Park, is memorialized by a green historical marker telling the story of those dark days. There are also plans to open the Karasi Education and Cultural Center, a mixed-use development that will tell the history of the area from voices within the community.
Sit in Rosa Parks’ seat
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, but did you know she lived most of her life in Detroit? In 1957, Parks and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit, where they eventually settled into the ground floor of a rented bungalow at 3201 Virginia Park Street.
(Take a road trip through Alabama’s civil rights history.)
While living here, Parks worked as a secretary for Representative John Conyers and continued fighting for civil rights, traveling to support the Selma to Montgomery Marches, the Freedom Now Party, and the Black Panthers. She convinced Martin Luther King to appear with John Conyers on the election trail and befriended Malcolm X. On February 5, 2021, the house was listed on the National Register for Historic Places. After seeing her home, take a drive to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan to sit on the bus where Parks protested.
Meet the good doctor
Ossian Sweet, a wealthy Black doctor, and his wife Gladys moved into a two-story brick house in an all-white neighborhood on September 8, 1925. The following night, a mob of white people arrived, throwing rocks and bottles at the house, breaking windows, and terrifying those inside. Bullets were fired from inside the home, leaving one white person injured and another killed.
All adults in the house, including Sweet, were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The doctor’s brother, Henry, was the only one put on trial, as he alone admitted to firing shots. The NAACP hired celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Henry, who was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. The presiding judge, Frank Murphy, later became the governor of Michigan and a Supreme Court Justice.
The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, after receiving a $500,000 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund of the National Park Service, the current owner is restoring the home to its original 1920s design and building an interactive learning center to share its important story. The destination is set to debut in 2022.
Experience television history
On September 29, 1975, WGPR-TV hit the airwaves and became the first Black-owned and operated TV station in the U.S. Its iconic dance show, The Scene, featured live performances from artists, including George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, and the Four Tops; the latest dance moves of the time; and showed off the hottest fashions of the time, often featuring clothes from neighborhood shops, until 1987. It had a “great impact on the young community, both the African American and the general young community,” says Joe Spencer, former programming manager for WGPR-TV and WGPR-FM. “Much of what happened culturally came through those programs.”
Big City News, the network’s twice-daily news show, focused on stories about the Black community locally, nationally, and internationally. Other shows included Rocky & His Friends, Spirit of Detroit, and Strictly Speaking.
The William V. Banks Broadcast Museum, housed in the original home of WGPR-TV and the current home to WGPR-FM—the building was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places—is free to visit. Inside, visitors learn about these pioneers in Black media ownership and watch some of the original programming geared towards Black viewers.
Listen to the blues
Detroit’s booming auto industry inspired thousands of African Americans to migrate from the rural south to the urban north during the 1900s. With them, came the blues.
Many of these new residents settled in the former Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods, and Hastings Street, which ran through both, became a cultural hub for the blues and jazz.
Most of the businesses were razed in the 50s to make room for a freeway, but travelers can still hear notes of the past just a few blocks away at the Raven Lounge and Restaurant, Michigan’s oldest continuously operating blues club.
(These are America’s most musical cities.)
Opened in 1966, the club was created “to give up-and-coming Motown [talent] a place to play. It’s where stars came to listen to the blues,” says current owner Tommy Stephens. Some of those stars included B.B. King, Diana Ross, Martha Reeves, and Smokey Robinson. Be sure to wear your finest attire—well, at least an ironed shirt and a pair of slacks—as Stephens says, “It’s a place where people dress up to listen to the blues.”
Get your Motown on
While Hastings Street may have brought blues and jazz to the Motor City for a couple of decades, the Motown Sound, created by Berry Gordy and his Motown Records, is Detroit’s musical legacy.
The Motown Museum, located in the house Gordy bought in 1959 to serve as both a studio and his home, invites visitors to view rotating exhibits and its permanent gallery, which includes Michael Jackson’s famed sequined glove and black fedora; the candy machine where 11-year-old Stevie Wonder bought his much-loved Baby Ruth candy bars—always in the slot, fourth from the left, so he could find them—and sequined dresses worn by the Supremes.
In Studio A, you’ll see a restored 1877 Steinway piano used to make Motown records (restoration was partially paid for by Paul McCartney) along with the control room used to create the signature Motown Sound of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, and The Jackson 5.
|
|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 57 |
https://southmemphisrenewal.org/aretha-franklin-house-preservation/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin House Preservation – South Memphis Renewal Community Development Corporation
|
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en
|
https://southmemphisrenewal.org/aretha-franklin-house-preservation/
|
Aretha Franklin Birthplace Restoration Project
CLICK HERE for the latest updates.
OUR GOAL
The Aretha & C. L. Franklin Center (ACLFC) is a Community effort by thought leaders and innovators committed to restoring and preserving the birthplace home of Aretha Franklin and honoring the legacy of her father, a renowned gospel preacher. While being committed to stabilizing inner city neighborhoods and creating urban spaces that celebrate our neighborhoods.
OUR MISSION
We are intentionally preserving a legacy and expanding on the critical mass already created in South Memphis and SoulsvilleUSA. We are aligning a historical musical figure, a powerful gospel preacher and creating a space that provides economic opportunities for residents, churches, artist, musicians and youth to use this space communally. We are creating a world class lasting memorial to Memphis’ own Aretha Franklin. We are attempting to share best practices in urban gentrification by those who live in the South Memphis Community.
OUR PLAN
This plan address several major concerns of those who want to see the house renovated. Initially, the creation of a non-profit that will oversee all activity of the revitalization; create a diverse board of no more than 10 to include members of the House Family;
Financial accountability of all funds received;
Ensure the best possible repurpose/reuse of the facility is thoughtful and in the best interest of all concerned;
Respectively of those who want to see the house remain at its location at 406 Lucy. What we know: The Lucy Street community is one in great need of revitalization. Infrastructure is needed, blighted vacant housing exist; overgrown lots; and improvement needed. There are cost estimate of between $5 – $20 million dollars of investments needed to bring this street into a place that is safe, decent and affordable for anyone choosing to live, work or play.
Conversely, moving the house to a location in SoulsvilleUSA, a targeted Memphis 3.0 site. It is close to STAX Museum of American Soul Music, near the historic J. E. Walker House, the historic Metropolitan Baptist Church, the famous Four–Way Grill, the original Mississippi Blvd. Christian Church, Knowledge Quest/Green Leaf Organic Farms, LeMoyne-Owen College (the city’s only HBCU), the Firehouse Black Arts Alliance and South Memphis Alliance, in the midst of a community that has seen over $150 million in capital, social and equity investments since 1999.
Our suggestion and plan will be determined by the new non-profit and its board.
This plan has not been created in a vacuum. After careful consideration and conversation with the original homeowner-Mrs. Vera House. Reaching out to community leadership, we are utilizing the Memphis Music Magnet Plan created nine years by residents and community partners, all in an effort to be inclusive to ensure we properly honor the legacy of Ms. Franklin and her Father.
FINANCIAL PLAN
The financial plan is segmented into three phases:
1) Initially, securing the house at its current location to stabilize the house as it is in need of structural stability ( within 2 months);
2)the finances needed to restore the house;
3)and creating a fitting memorial to Aretha Franklin, either on Lucy or at New Location honoring all interest.
|
|||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 41 |
https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3526437080467-aretha-franklin-s-south-memphis-home-and-birthplace-purchased
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
|
https://img.particlenews.com/img/id/2bd3qH_0uPJgxCS00?type=thumbnail_1600x1200
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https://img.particlenews.com/img/id/2bd3qH_0uPJgxCS00?type=thumbnail_1600x1200
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[
""
] | null |
[
"Joe Birch"
] |
2024-07-12T22:07:00
|
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - The birthplace of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was sold on the Shelby County Courthouse steps Friday at...
|
en
|
#
|
NewsBreak
|
https://www.newsbreak.com/memphis-tn/3526437080467-aretha-franklin-s-south-memphis-home-and-birthplace-purchased
|
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments. It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency: our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. We strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation. Join us in shaping the news narrative together.
|
||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 14 |
https://www.britannica.com/question/Where-is-Aretha-Franklin-from
|
en
|
Where is Aretha Franklin from?
|
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Where is Aretha Franklin from? Although she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, Aretha Franklin spent most of her early years in Detroit, Michigan, with h
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en
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/favicon.png
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/question/Where-is-Aretha-Franklin-from
|
Although she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, Aretha Franklin spent most of her early years in Detroit, Michigan, with her mother, a gospel singer, and her father, a Baptist minister. After her parents separated, Franklin remained with her father in Detroit. In 1960 she moved to New York City to pursue a career in secular music.
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correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 16 |
https://www.instagram.com/ghostsigns_etcetera/p/C8BN3oLxl1a/
|
en
|
The humble birthplace of Aretha Franklin. Memphis, Tennessee. . . #memphis #memphistennessee #vancouverphotographer #aretha...
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[
""
] | null |
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202 likes, 12 comments - ghostsigns_etcetera on June 9, 2024: "The humble birthplace of Aretha Franklin. Memphis, Tennessee.
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#memphis #memphistennessee #vancouverphotographer #aretha #arethafranklin #soul #respect #backroads #exploreusa #stax #ipulledoverforthis #rockabillystyle #vancouverbc #ilovememphis #bc #yvr #vancouverhistory #rockhistory #elvis #50s #elvispresley #memphistn #thingstodoinmemphis #landmark #streetphotography #ipulledoverforthis #blackhistory #exploreamerica #tennessee #ilovememphis #tennesseelife".
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en
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Instagram
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https://www.instagram.com/p/C8BN3oLxl1a/?img_index=ghostsigns_etcetera
| ||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 43 |
https://www.peters.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senate-passes-peters-stabenow-resolution-honoring-aretha-franklin
|
en
|
Senate Passes Peters, Stabenow Resolutio...
|
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2018-08-23T00:00:00
|
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow announced Senate passage of a...
|
en
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/assets/images/favicon.ico
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https://www.peters.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senate-passes-peters-stabenow-resolution-honoring-aretha-franklin
|
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow announced Senate passage of a resolution they introduced celebrating the life and legacy of singer Aretha Franklin. Franklin moved to Detroit as a young girl and began her singing career at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Peters and Stabenow were joined by a bipartisan group of 36 cosponsors.
“Aretha Franklin broke barriers with her once in a generation singing voice, but also her fierce advocacy for civil rights and women’s rights,” said Senator Peters. “Aretha was a Detroit icon, whose voice and spirit symbolize the city’s strength and resilience, and there is perhaps nowhere she will be missed more. Her life’s work will continue to inspire artists and activists for generations to come, and I am proud to join my colleagues in honoring the life and legacy of Aretha Franklin.”
“Aretha Franklin’s voice and soul were truly larger than life,” said Senator Stabenow. “Today, we celebrate her legacy and recognize her contributions to the arts, civil rights and the City of Detroit. She will never be forgotten.”
The full list of bipartisan cosponsors includes Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV), Senator Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Senator Doug Jones (D-AL), Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Senator Edward Markey (D-MA), Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Senator Tina Smith (D-MN), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
Text of the Resolution follows:
Title: Honoring the life and legacy of Aretha Franklin and the contributions of Aretha Franklin to music, civil rights, and the city of Detroit.
Whereas Aretha Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee;
Whereas Aretha Franklin moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1946, at the age of 4;
Whereas Aretha Franklin began a career singing gospel at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan;
Whereas Aretha Franklin traveled with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., across the country as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached nonviolence in the movement for civil rights;
Whereas Aretha Franklin was an active supporter of the civil rights movement and her song “Respect” became an anthem for the civil rights movement and the women’s movement;
Whereas Aretha Franklin is most known for her powerful songs such as “Respect”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “Spanish Harlem”, and “Think”;
Whereas Aretha Franklin was known as the “Queen of Soul” and on January 3, 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;
Whereas Aretha Franklin has won 18 Grammy Awards and sold over 75,000,000 records worldwide;
Whereas Aretha Franklin was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2001, the United Kingdom’s Music Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Gospel Music Association’s Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012;
Whereas in June 2017 the city of Detroit honored Aretha Franklin with a key to the city and renamed a segment of Madison Avenue in downtown Detroit “Aretha Franklin Way”;
Whereas Aretha Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 9, 2005;
Whereas Aretha Franklin received honorary degrees for her contributions to the arts from Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Brown University, Berklee College of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music, University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Bethune-Cookman College;
Whereas Aretha Franklin inspired a generation of artists and enthralled the world with powerful music; and
Whereas Aretha Franklin passed away on August 16, 2018, at the age of 76 at her home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Senate celebrates the life and legacy of Aretha Franklin and the iconic contributions of Aretha Franklin to music, arts, and civil rights.
###
|
|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 34 |
https://celebritygraveland.com/2022/12/19/aretha-franklin/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin
|
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2022-12-19T00:00:00
|
March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018 Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. Her father, a Baptist minister, moved the family to Detroit when Aretha was 5 years-old to preach at New Bethel Baptist Church. After her mother died in 1952, 10 year-old Aretha found solace through singing in the church.…
|
en
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https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
|
Celebrity Graveland
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https://celebritygraveland.com/2022/12/19/aretha-franklin/
|
March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018
Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1942. Her father, a Baptist minister, moved the family to Detroit when Aretha was 5 years-old to preach at New Bethel Baptist Church. After her mother died in 1952, 10 year-old Aretha found solace through singing in the church. It was immediately apparent to everyone who heard, that there was something special about her. She continued to sing and gain attention and by the time she turned 18, she signed a recording contract with Columbia records. Though her time with Columbia taught her about the business and generated a few minor hits, it would take a change for the world to finally meet Ms. Franklin. In 1966, Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic records and exploded onto the international music landscape.
Known by all as the “Queen of Soul,” Aretha’s time at Atlantic produced dozens of hits and spawned 3 gold records, 9 gold singles and 3 Grammy awards. “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You),” “Natural Woman,” “Rock Steady”…and on and on. And that was just the first FOUR years of her stardom.
Aretha continued to churn out iconic recordings and live performances for decades to follow. The word “legendary” is thrown around a lot, but the impact that her gospel-tinged voice and catalog had on Soul, R&B, Pop, Rock and Roll and countless other genres cannot be considered anything other than exactly that. She recorded with artists ranging from James Brown to Adele. She influenced generations of singers. There was not before, and never will be again, another like Aretha Franklin.
Aretha struggled with health, weight and substance issues most of her life. But, she always gave everything she had in a performance. In 2018, she died at the age of 76 in her Detroit home of pancreatic cancer. Her public memorial at New Bethel Baptist Church was attended by 100 “pink Cadillacs” – a nod to her 1983 hit “Freeway of Love – and included a complete costume change prior to the final public viewing. It was the 4th different outfit her body wore that week. A legendary queen to the end.
Burial
Woodlawn Cemetery – Detroit, MI
Specific Location
Mausoleum, Lower Level, Section 185-188 – Enter the mausoleum from the lower level door on the south side. Aretha and her family are buried in the first alcove on your left as you enter. She is on the top row on the right side of the alcove.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
1
| 95 |
https://www.countynews4you.com/aretha_franklin_perhaps_the_greatest_singer_ever.html
|
en
|
Beyond the Rhetoric: Aretha Franklin â Perhaps the Greatest Singer Ever
|
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News Covering Five Counties- Iredell, Cabarrus, Catawba, Mecklenburg, and Rowan
|
The County News
|
https://countynews4you.com/aretha_franklin_perhaps_the_greatest_singer_ever.html
|
By HARRY C. ALFORD
|
||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 63 |
https://eachother.org.uk/aretha-franklin-is-a-human-rights-inspiration-heres-why/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin Is A Human Rights Inspiration
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2018-08-17T16:27:31+00:00
|
Aretha Franklin was born on 25 March 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, when racial segregation was in full swing. Repressive legislation enforced the segregation of African Americans from white Americans in all public places, including schools and public transport. Relationships between different races were illegal. In 1946, Aretha’s father, Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, a Baptist Minister, moved […]
|
en
|
EachOther
|
https://eachother.org.uk/aretha-franklin-is-a-human-rights-inspiration-heres-why/
|
Aretha Franklin was born on 25 March 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, when racial segregation was in full swing.
Repressive legislation enforced the segregation of African Americans from white Americans in all public places, including schools and public transport. Relationships between different races were illegal.
In 1946, Aretha’s father, Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, a Baptist Minister, moved the family north to Detroit, Michigan.
Clarence was a leading civil rights activist, and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a regular visitor to the Franklin family home.
Steeped In The Civil Rights Movement
Image via Andrew McFarlane / Flicker
On 23 June 1963, Clarence organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom – the largest civil rights demonstration in America at that time. Protesters demanded equality for African Americans in every aspect of life, including education, housing, public services and voting.
Martin Luther King was one of the 125,000 who joined the Detroit Walk to Freedom and delivered an early incarnation of the historic ‘I Have A Dream’ speech that he would deliver in August 1963 when 250,000 people marched on Washington.
In 1967, Aretha released arguably her most well known song, a cover of Otis Redding’s Respect. Respect became one of the defining anthems for the civil rights movement, and was also embraced as a women’s rights anthem, with its unflinching demand: ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’.
Following Martin Luther King Junior’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968, the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1968, marked the end of a centuries-long struggle for African Americans to be granted equal rights as fully fledged citizens in the eyes of the law.
One Of The Strongest Supporters Of The Civil Rights Movement
Aretha Franklin’s steadfast commitment to the civil rights movement can be seen in her singing at the funeral of Martin Luther King Junior, offering to post $250,000 bail following the arrest of civil rights activist Angela Davis, and in her refusal to play to segregated audiences.
Franklin told biographer David Ritz: “Daddy had been preaching black pride for decades and we as a people had rediscovered how beautiful black truly was and were echoing, ‘Say it loud, I’m black, and I’m proud.’”
Her music gave us a greater sense of determination to never give up or give in, and to keep the faith.
– Congressman John Lewis
Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, a key figure in the bloody Selma marches that were integral in securing the Voting Rights Act in 1965, yesterday declared Franklin had a “lifelong, unwavering commitment to civil rights and was one of the strongest supporters of the movement.”
Lewis continued, “her music gave us a greater sense of determination to never give up or give in, and to keep the faith.”
For a singer who was so integral to the civil rights movement to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration, to the highest office of the United States of America in 2009, was a deeply moving and symbolic moment.
Last night, the former US President paid tribute to the singer and pianist who has left an indelible mark: “Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace.”
|
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
| 0 |
https://www.tnvacation.com/point-of-interest/aretha-franklins-birthplace
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en
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Aretha Franklin's Birthplace - Tennessee's Trails and Byways
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Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer and pianist. She began her career as a child singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father, C. L. Franklin, was minister.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
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TN Vacation
|
https://www.tnvacation.com/point-of-interest/aretha-franklins-birthplace
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Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer and pianist. She began her career as a child singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father, C. L. Franklin, was minister. In 1960, at the age of 18, she embarked on a secular career, recording for Columbia Records but achieving only modest success. After signing to Atlantic Records in 1967, Franklin achieved commercial acclaim and success with songs such as "Respect", "Chain of Fools", "Think", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", and "Spanish Harlem".
By the end of the 1960s she was being called "The Queen of Soul". Franklin recorded acclaimed albums such as I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Lady Soul (1968), Young, Gifted and Black (1972) and Amazing Grace (1972), before experiencing problems with her record company by the mid-1970s. After her father was shot in 1979, she left Atlantic and signed with Arista Records, finding success with the albums Jump to It (1982) and Who's Zoomin' Who? (1985), and her part in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. In 1998, Franklin received international acclaim for singing the opera aria "Nessun dorma" at the Grammy Awards that year, replacing Luciano Pavarotti. Later that year, she scored her final Top 40 song with "A Rose Is Still a Rose".
Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles, becoming the most charted female artist in the chart's history. Franklin's other well-known hits include "Rock Steady", "Jump to It", "Freeway of Love", "Who's Zoomin' Who", "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)", "Something He Can Feel", "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" (with George Michael), and a remake of The Rolling Stones song "Jumpin' Jack Flash". She won 18 Grammy Awards, including the first eight awards given for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, from 1968 through to 1975, and is one of the bestselling musical artists of all time, having sold more than 75 million records worldwide.[1]
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/19/aretha-franklin-fame-studios-muscle-shoals-1967-rick-hall
|
en
|
The day Aretha Franklin found her sound – and a bunch of men nearly killed it
|
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2018-08-19T00:00:00
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In Muscle Shoals in 1967, the Queen of Soul recorded her first hit – despite swirling clouds of drink, jealousy and masculine competition
|
en
|
the Guardian
|
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/19/aretha-franklin-fame-studios-muscle-shoals-1967-rick-hall
|
It was the tumultuous recording session in which Aretha Franklin found her voice – and a controlling bunch of men almost screwed it up.
The consequences would help define modern music, not only launching Franklin but sparking a feud in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which started a wave of creativity that helped define music in the 1970s, bringing a stream of superstars to the cluster of four towns on the banks of the Tennessee river.
But first, there was a bottle of vodka.
Before she was the Queen of Soul, Franklin had a false start, singing in quite a controlled way on poppy, jazzy releases for Columbia Records. Atlantic picked her up and in early 1967 sent her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where a hard-charging wannabe impresario named Rick Hall had made his first No 1 hit the year before. The singer of what became a soul classic, When a Man Loves a Woman, was Percy Sledge. When the song was recorded, he was working as a hospital orderly.
Franklin, aged 24, was at a grand piano in FAME’s wood-panelled Studio A, trying to turn an idea into a song. Session man Spooner Oldham was fiddling around with a five-note riff on a Wurlitzer electronic piano.
Oldham got the intro and by the time Franklin broke loose with “You’re a no good heart-breaker / You’re a liar and you’re a cheat”, her first big hit was on the way. I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) made it to No 9 in the Billboard 100 and became the title track of Franklin’s breakthrough album. The raw power which made her famous was unleashed.
But in many ways, the session was an absolute disaster.
Hall died in January this year, aged 85 and widely acclaimed for his remarkable contribution to music. In an interview in 2013, at the control desk of Studio A, he told the story of the day Aretha came to town – and the extraordinary consequences for modern music.
Hall recalled that Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer from Atlantic Records, had told him: “I got this girl, I’m thinking of signing her, I’d like to bring her down here.”
“Course, I’d never heard of her,” Hall said. “She couldn’t get arrested. She’d never had a hit record, I didn’t know whether she could have a hit record. She came in here and she had her song down and she sat at the piano here, right by the window … and played Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You. We were immune to that. ‘What’s this song all about? It sounds like an old waltz! It’s got a waltz beat, you can’t dance to it, it’s not gonna happen.”
But he wanted Wexler’s business, so he said to himself: “We’re gonna make it happen.”
Franklin had married at 19. Her husband, Ted White, was also her manager. They divorced the following year and a later biography suggested they often had ugly fights. Some have assumed her breakthrough song was about their troubled relationship.
Hall said: “He brought in a bottle of vodka, or sent out and got a bottle of vodka, and he began to drink and pass the bottle around to some of the horn players. Well everything was groovy until about two o’clock in the afternoon. And he started getting pretty loopy.”
White came into the studio’s console room and told Hall: “I want you to fire the trumpet player. He’s making passes at my wife.”
The trumpet player was sent home. A couple of hours later, after another complaint from White, the tenor sax was fired too.
“So tension begins to get thick in the studio and people start to get a little antsy and they know things aren’t good and they wonder what’s going on … Jerry said, ‘Let’s just call the session off.’ We’d done one song and were into the second song.”
Halfway through recording Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, the session was stopped.
“So to settle my nerves,” Hall said, “I had to have a drink or two of vodka myself and I said to Jerry, ‘I’m going over to the hotel where they’re staying and work this out. We’ll have a drink together and we’ll talk it out and everything will be fine tomorrow.’
“And he said, ‘Oh God, please don’t Rick, don’t go over there, it’ll be trouble.’
“So I went.”
Wexler was right.
Hall continued: “So I went to talk to Ted, and we came to blows. Jerry said, ‘I’m leaving this town, I’ll never come back, I’ll bury you.’ I said, ‘You can’t bury me, you’re too old.’
“So it was war from then on. I hated him and he hated me, they hated me and I hated them. It wasn’t good for the industry, it was not good for me, I made a terrible mistake going over there and getting into it with Ted, and for all that I was sorry, but you know, things happen.”
‘A very shy, introverted lady’
David Hood, a bass player who worked with Etta James, Mavis Staples, Sledge and many more, was playing trombone that day at FAME. Speaking this week, after Franklin’s death, he told the Guardian: “Working with her was one of the highlights of my career.
“On that session I was part of the horn section. I’m not a great trombone player but I could do that. She was a very shy, introverted lady at the time, I think she was probably a little nervous at the start of it.”
Never Loved A Man was “kind of a strange song”, Hood said, and the session was going nowhere. But then, he said: “Spooner came up with this great little lick and everyone fell in line with that, started playing, and that saved the song. It was minutes after that we did the horn parts.
“Aretha played the piano while she sang, rather than just standing there singing. Her piano feel really helped the feel the musicians got to play with her.”
Hood recorded his part of the second song but was oblivious to the trouble.
“The rest of the guys didn’t really know what was going on. I wasn’t drinking in a recording session. You don’t go to work and drink. None of the rest of us knew about all this, we came back in the next day to start the session and there was a sign on the door saying session was cancelled.”
Wexler took Hall’s musicians to New York to finish the album, then set them up as rivals on Hall’s turf, buying a building across town at 3614 Jackson Highway, where the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio started.
Director Greg Camalier’s great documentary Muscle Shoals, the story of a small town with a big sound, has a moment when the phenomenal output of the new studio set up by guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bass player Hood and drummer Roger Hawkins is brought home. Key 1970s albums are piled up – among them Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing and Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming.
Paul Simon, Willie Nelson and Elton John all came to record. The Rolling Stones recorded Brown Sugar and Wild Horses here, but couldn’t stay for the full Sticky Fingers album because Keith Richards was banned from the US. Lynyrd Skynyrd first recorded there – their manager gave the studio band their nickname, the Swampers. They are remembered in the lyrics to Sweet Home Alabama.
Hall, not to be outdone, did a deal with Capitol Records and turned the Osmonds into a global success.
Muscle Shoals became a music hub to rival Detroit and Memphis, having managed to start Aretha Franklin on her way.
In Studio A, the grand piano and Spooner Oldham’s Wurlitzer are still there, side by side.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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https://www.wkbw.com/news/aretha-franklins-legacy-started-on-buffalos-eastside
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en
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Eastside started Aretha Franklin's music career
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2018-08-13T18:29:51-04:00
|
News hit this weekend that "The Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin is gravely ill and surrounded by family in Detroit.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
WKBW 7 News Buffalo
|
https://www.wkbw.com/news/aretha-franklins-legacy-started-on-buffalos-eastside
|
News hit this weekend that “The Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin is gravely ill and surrounded by family in Detroit.
What many might not know is that the 76-year-old has a Western New York connection.
“My dad knew her and would talk about Aretha’s talent. I used to hear that all the time. This girl is going to make it and go places,” Buffalo Musician, Van Taylor said.
Taylor remembers The Queen of Soul living part of her childhood in the Queen City. Aretha Franklin grew up on Glenwood Avenue, after her family moved to Buffalo from Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother Barbara was a nurse at Buffalo General Hospital, while her father the late CL Franklin was a pastor at Friendship Baptist Church. It was the first time Taylor heard Aretha blow.
“She could sing. Oh! She could sing,” Taylor said.
Franklin left the Nickel City for the Motor City in 1948 with her family. Her mom then separated from her dad and moved back to Buffalo. The queen would return for summer visits. Even after her mother’s death Franklin would come back to visit her mother’s grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery as well as childhood friends and family.
Taylor said it’s no doubt that Aretha would become the massive star she is today.
“I had the chance to walk in and hear her actually record some tracks. An amazing experience and actually it last with me unto this day,” the Buffalo musician said.
Franklin earned 18 Grammys, performed for presidents and named #1 vocalist of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine. She was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame Class of 2016. But the queen was not able to make it to the ceremony.
“Right after that she slowed cut her touring down because of health,” Taylor said.
Taylor said he’s praying for Franklin. He said no matter what, her legacy will live on into the next generation of music.
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https://www.wgbh.org/news/national/2018-08-16/local-music-promoter-remembers-queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin
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en
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Local Music Promoter Remembers 'Queen of Soul' Aretha Franklin
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[
"Barbara Howard",
"www.wgbh.org",
"barbara-howard"
] |
2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
Franklin died Thursday at her home in Detroit. She was 76 years old.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
GBH
|
https://www.wgbh.org/news/national/2018-08-16/local-music-promoter-remembers-queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin
|
Aretha Franklin, the "Queen of Soul," died today at her home in Detroit from pancreatic cancer. She was 76. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee to a gospel-singing mother and a well-known preacher father. From her start in the gospel scene, to her time recording at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to countless concerts, appearances and performances, Franklin touched the lives of many. Local music promoter Sue Auclair worked with and knew Aretha Franklin. Auclair spoke with WGBH All Things Considered anchor Barbara Howard about her memories of Franklin. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Barbara Howard: So how did you two first meet?
Sue Auclair: Well, I was the public relations director for the Newport Jazz Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, and then in 1995 the Rhythm and Blues Festival, and she was the headliner.
Howard: So tell me about that. What was that first meeting like?
Auclair: It was amazing. She was my idol, she was the queen. She was at the Rhythm and Blues Festival that first year. Some of the other people on the bill were Laverne Baker and Ruth Brown and a host of people from that generation of soul music.
Howard: I understand she was a real admirer of Ruth Brown in particular.
Auclair: She was and we were backstage, I had about six members of the press waiting for an interview with Aretha. She would do only one question each. We had to wait for her to cool off after her performance. And so we were standing out there in the heat, and all of a sudden Ruth Brown walks backstage and she's wearing a black bowler hat and a bright pink suit jacket and a cane and she's strutting and Aretha must've seen her out of the trailer window - Suddenly the door to the trailer opens and there's Aretha standing there in her underwear and she goes “Hey baby, come on in.”
And Ruth says, “I'm comin’ honey I'm comin’.” So it was another half hour before we got any interviews done.
Howard: Two great singers, a little mutual admiration there. You worked with her the next year too, right?
Auclair: Yes, the Newport Jazz Festival the following year, and it was absolutely hysterical because the woman who worked for George Wein who produced all those called me up and said “I'm going to fax you the rider to the William Morris contract for Aretha, because I think you'll get a kick out about what it says.” And so the rider comes through the fax machine and it says "Aretha will do the date, but you have to have those same spare ribs." So we were all howling about that.
A couple months later after the Jazz Festival, she was set to appear at Symphony Hall in Boston. So by this time I had made friends with her publicist and I asked for some tickets, and she said absolutely, no problem, Aretha will see you backstage. So after waiting an hour or so, we went back and I said “Oh hello, Aretha. I don't know if you remember me. I'm Sue Auclair. I worked with you at the Jazz Festival and the Rhythm and Blues Festival in Newport". And she said “oh Newport, what a beautiful place. But those spareribs!”
Howard: What in your mind is her most memorable performance?
Auclair: Well, when I saw her do that Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Carole King, that knocked me out. She came out on stage and everybody was going crazy. Obama was crying. Carole King was going nuts, pulling her hair out, and after she got up off of the piano and went to the bridge of the song, she was really killing it. Right at the crux of the tune, she throws off the mink coat that she had on and everybody just stood up and gave her a huge ovation.
There was nobody like Aretha. Aretha had soul, emotion, depth, she could make people cry. She had that thing. She was one of a kind.
Howard: OK. Thanks for joining us.
Auclair: Oh, you're welcome.
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correct_birth_00051
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https://www.chattanoogan.com/2018/8/20/374748/John-Shearer-Aretha-Franklin-Came-To.aspx
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John Shearer: Aretha Franklin Came To Chattanooga At Least Once
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2018-08-20T00:00:00
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en
|
https://www.chattanoogan.com/2018/8/20/374748/John-Shearer-Aretha-Franklin-Came-To.aspx
|
In recent days, WRCB-TV 3 and perhaps other media have been pointing out that noted singer Aretha Franklin, who died on Aug. 16, had come to Chattanooga at least once – in 1960.
The basis of that is an old promotional poster pointing out that Ms. Franklin performed at “Howard Hi” – short for the currently named Howard School of Academics in Technology -- in Chattanooga on Monday, April 4.
It does not say which year, but perhaps someone has assumed that must be about the time period she would have been touring with her father, the noted pastor C.L.
Franklin of Detroit, and with the Staple Singers and Sammie Bryant.
Other years during that general time period when April 4 also fell on Monday were 1949, 1955 and 1966.
April 4, of course, was also the day of the year when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. (And Ms. Franklin died on the same day of the year as Elvis Presley).
In April 1960, Ms. Franklin – the queen of soul – was 18, about the same age as the Howard seniors.
As it turns out, that small promotional poster is also on display at none other than the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. A segment on Ms. Franklin on NBC’s Sunday “Today” show featuring Willie Geist showed the poster on display in the background at the Hall of Fame.
If it was 1960 when she came, a check of the Chattanooga Times, Chattanooga News-Free Press and the Chattanooga Observer – the paper designed for black readers – showed no reference to it, unless it was buried inconspicuously.
The Chattanooga Times and News-Free Press would probably not have highlighted the mostly black-oriented event that greatly at that time, unless it was at somewhere like Memorial Auditorium or featured someone then really famous.
And the Chattanooga Observer at that time only appeared to publish a paper about every few weeks, and most of the copy focused on church activities or wire news related to the black struggle at the time, which included the sit-in movement.
Mentioned in the two major Chattanooga newspapers, though, were the opening of Holiday Bowl on Brainerd Road and that British-born journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke was to speak at an Arts and Education Council event here.
Just six weeks before Ms. Franklin’s apparent appearance, the Howard students had taken part in the nationally inspired sit-ins at the local dime stores to encourage integration of such facilities.
Howard High in 1954 moved to its current location on South Market Street, so the Franklin event would have been held there.
Among those also listed as appearing, Mr. Franklin was a very prominent minister and civil rights advocate whose connections no doubt opened doors for Aretha, although her talent obviously did as well. Described as the man with the million-dollar voice, he first served at New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis in the 1940s, where Aretha was born in 1942.
Like Ms. Franklin, the Staple Singers, which were initially more of a gospel-singing group, also were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the 1970s, they had such rhythm and blues-style hits as “Respect Yourself,” I’ll Take You There,” “If You’re Ready” and “Let’s Do It Again.”
They were from Chicago, but like Rev. Franklin, patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples was originally from Mississippi.
Ms. Bryant, who was said to be only three feet tall but had a powerful voice, was from Detroit. She evidently produced a 1966 album of earlier recordings titled “Rev. C.L. Franklin Presents Sammie Bryant.”
The Chattanooga event that the poster promoted started at 8 p.m., and tickets at the door were $1.25.
If Ms. Franklin came and performed in Chattanooga at any other times, no information on it could be found in the local history and genealogy section of the downtown Chattanooga Public Library.
Although the library in recent decades has tried to document when articles were written on noted musical acts performing here, she could have come at another time, such as the late 1960s, when perhaps only a Memorial Auditorium ad ran.
She came to nearby Nashville several times since 2010, and also performed in Memphis in recent years.
But her soulful sound has appeared here for decades over the radio and television through such hits as “Respect,” “A Natural Woman,” “Freeway of Love,” “Chain of Fools,” and my personal favorite, “I Say a Little Prayer.”
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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2
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https://southern.libguides.com/tennessee/franklin
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en
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Research Guides at Southern Adventist University
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Research Guides: Tennessee: History, Famous Figures, & More: Aretha Franklin
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https://southern.libguides.com/tennessee/franklin
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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1
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https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/07/12/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
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2024-07-12T00:00:00
|
The house at 406 Lucy near McLemore and South Third Street in South Memphis had been in foreclosure and Environmental Court.
|
en
|
//webpubcontent.gray.tv/gray/arc-fusion-assets/images/favicons/wmctv/favicon.ico?d=420
|
https://www.actionnews5.com
|
https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/07/12/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
|
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - The birthplace of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was sold on the Shelby County Courthouse steps Friday at noon.
The house at 406 Lucy near McLemore and South Third Street in South Memphis had been in foreclosure and Environmental Court.
Franklin was born at the home on March 25, 1942, to parents Barbara and Rev. C.L. Franklin.
The woman who oversees Historic Clayborn Temple, Anasa Troutman, personally bought the Franklin house.
She says she wants to preserve the house and keep it right where it is as a catalyst to help improve the highly challenged and impoverished neighborhood.
Click here to sign up for our newsletter!
Click here to report a spelling or grammar error. Please include the headline.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 54 |
https://andscape.com/features/aretha-franklin-1942-2018-long-live-the-queen-of-soul/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018: long live the Queen of Soul
|
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[
"Kelley L. Carter",
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2018-08-16T10:09:58-04:00
|
And now, it’s time to pay the Queen our utmost respect. After a largely private battle with pancreatic cancer, musical icon Aretha Louise Franklin has died at t…
|
en
|
Andscape
|
https://andscape.com/features/aretha-franklin-1942-2018-long-live-the-queen-of-soul/
|
And now, it’s time to pay the Queen our utmost respect. After a largely private battle with pancreatic cancer, musical icon Aretha Louise Franklin has died at the age of 76. The woman who gave women a voice — the woman who is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, with a litany of accolades, including 18 Grammy Awards — has left us all.
And I am not OK.
The statement from her family is heartbreaking “In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins knew no bounds.”
Over the course of her career, Franklin gave us anthemic music; her sound was as unique as it was familiar, Pentecostal pipes over Southern fried basslines as she wailed about the loss of love, the longing for freedom or the very simple notion of earning (and getting) the respect she so rightly deserved. Her music transcends generation, race and cultures, but her sound remains firmly rooted in black musical traditions.
It was her music — alongside the luscious, genre-defining sounds of Motown — that helped change the world. Over the course of my career, I’ve had to report and opine and write about beloved, larger-than-life figures dying. This one is personal.
Franklin is as emblematic of Detroit as a Ford Model T fresh off the factory line. Yes, she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but she came to my hometown when she was 4, as her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, took a job as pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church. Like her mother, Barbara, Franklin was gifted with a voice that could shake the rafters, and since Barbara died before she was 10, Franklin was partly reared and very influenced by women such as the gospel legend Mahalia Jackson. Her father’s status in the civil rights movement meant that folks such as Clara Ward, James Cleveland, Albertina Walker, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke were frequent guests at her childhood home.
Franklin’s early career was rooted in gospel. The good reverend saw that his daughter’s voice would be a change agent — her spiritual vocals would help guide churchgoing black folks looking for a reprieve from their lack of inalienable rights in the 1950s. One of her most stirring recordings at that time was a rousing recording of Thomas Dorsey’s gripping “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” The music was amazing. And it was healing. But Franklin had a bigger vision.
She’d barely turned 18 when she told her father that she wanted to go in a different direction — to follow Cooke’s lead and start making pop. Though she was a Detroiter, she never inked a deal with Motown; her dad thought Berry Gordy’s Tamla label was too green, and instead she went to Columbia Records. But her real impact came when she made the move to Atlantic.
In 1967, a year of so much civil unrest around the country and a year that changed her beloved — our beloved — Detroit forever, she found her voice. And her calling. Her voice would minister to black folks, to black women, to women everywhere.
Franklin was an icon to the world, but to us, she was a neighbor. She was accessible in ways that would blow the minds of outsiders.
I didn’t truly understand how important Franklin’s contribution was until a little over a decade ago. I was an entertainment reporter at my hometown newspaper, the Detroit Free Press. Franklin was an icon to the world, but to us, she was a neighbor. She was accessible in ways that would blow the minds of outsiders. She was a larger-than-life persona, yet very human and tangible — to a fault.
I arrived at the Free Press in 1998, right around the time when the paper was publishing a special report about how Franklin (or someone in her camp who was charged with this duty) was failing to pay outstanding local bills, mostly to mom-and pop businesses. That story was splashed across the front page, with an unflattering cutout of Franklin’s likeness.
As you might imagine, Franklin wasn’t happy and she went on a campaign. Mason in the Morning was the top black music morning radio show in Detroit at the time on WJLB, and I can still remember the interview clearly. As I drove into work one morning, John Mason, now the public address announcer for the Detroit Pistons at Little Caesars Arena, said, “You need to write an iconic story if you’re going to write about an icon.”
And I wanted to do that. My chance came in 2007. The previous year, a top editor at my paper mentioned in passing to me and my then-editor Steve Byrne that Franklin’s recording of “Respect” would turn 40 the following year. Maybe we’d do a quick story about it. Or maybe, I thought, we could do more.
Early in 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I happened to be in New York that week because Jemele Hill was doing her first appearance on ESPN’s Cold Pizza, the show that would become First Take, and I was there for support and celebration. I popped over to the Waldorf Astoria because I knew Hall of Famer Franklin (the first woman to be inducted, in 1987!) would be there for a special tribute to Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who had died in 2006.
I had backstage credentials and I wanted to see if I could get some time with her — just one quote for my would-be story. Because of the story about her failure to pay bills, she’d cut the Free Press off. No interview requests were granted. Not even to talk about her iconic song and its forthcoming anniversary. But in a room backstage at an awards show, I could be somewhat anonymous.
I raised my hand and she called on me. I’d heard a rumor that she loved the version of “Respect” that this blue-eyed soul group from Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Rationals, had recorded. A crew of white boys from Washtenaw County had taken an Otis Redding track and somehow did something to it that made Franklin and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, take notice. It was my chance to get something from her. And I would have taken anything from her to help push whatever my story on her ended up being.
I remember her looking out at me as I asked. I purposefully coughed over my affiliation’s name because I knew the disdain she had for the Free Press. She gave me what I was looking for. It was a quick reply; she was humored. “We added the sock-it-to-me’s to it,” she said, looking down on me from a stage in that small room. I could tell for a brief moment that she was thinking of her sisters, who had died long ago: Erma from throat cancer and Carolyn from breast cancer. I saw it in her face. The memory was dancing in her mind.
I went back to Detroit with a kernel of an idea. Newspapers were trying to figure out how to elevate the work we were already doing in the digital space. Simply putting print versions of our work online wasn’t going to suffice for much longer. We needed something else. I was walking out of the office one day, passing by the photo desk, when a friend and photographer, Mandi Wright, stopped me. She’d just come back from a workshop and was eager to test out some tricks that did not involve still photography. We wanted to team up, I told her my idea and we got to work.
Somehow, a couple of newspaper journalists were going to become broadband film documentarians. Wright and I spent months working on a project that would document Franklin’s recording of 1967’s “Respect,” the civil unrest in Detroit that same year, and thusly this country in 1967. We’d tell how, in that song, women found a sororal battle cry.
When I asked my mother, a longtime Detroiter, to tell me what the summer of ’67 in Detroit was like during the thick of the riots, the summer Franklin’s song hit No. 1, I was taken aback as she shared with me how men and women were running in the streets, shouting back at police officers, “Sock it to me!” as they were trying to stay alive, clearly inspired by Franklin’s anthem, which had hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in early June.
We never got an interview with Franklin for this project, though I did try — even showed up at an open audition she had about the biopic she so wanted on her own life. I gave her a framed, throwback photo of herself and her sisters that I’d heard she loved — but ultimately I had to treat the project as if I were doing her obituary.
We talked to everyone: producers such as Mike Powell and Paul Allen; music history professors; Ortheia Barnes, who was one of her longtime backup singers; Duke Fakir of the Four Tops; and even Franklin’s son Teddy Richards, who played in her band for years and shocked us when we saw that on his mantelpiece, unprompted by our visit to his home that day, sat Franklin’s Grammy for “Respect.”
And I, surprisingly, was able to talk with legendary producer Jerry Wexler, who coined the term “rhythm and blues” and produced Franklin for that iconic album in 1967. He told me that Franklin was also a brilliant pianist who was a cross between Thelonious Monk and Mildred Falls. We won an Emmy for that documentary. And a year later, after I’d left Detroit, I heard from Franklin herself, who loved it and wanted a DVD copy for her personal archives.
That project taught me a lot. And in some ways, it solidified the work I try to do now. Music isn’t just music. Entertainment isn’t just entertaining. Not always. And Franklin did more than just layer delicious sounds over mouthwatering melodies. It was activism. And it was important.
She was a child when she was sitting in her father’s church basement, listening to men and women who would become some of this country’s most prominent voices in the face of uncertainty for black folks. She sat at their feet while they were working to figure out a master plan. And because she came from the church, she knew the importance of voice — and how music was a ministry. That music guided church folk. It guided us. And I firmly believe that at 18, when she made the choice to try to elevate her audience and amplify her voice by switching to become a pop musician, she knew that she needed a wider audience to take in her sound.
She knew we needed it. Hers wasn’t just music about freeways of love and being one of the chains of fools for a man or taking a bridge to get over troubled waters. Her music was the music that got black folks through. And it still does. Because in the late 1960s, she was creating music that would resonate a half century later.
Sock it to me? Show me some R-E-S-P-E-C-T? You damn right, we wanted some respect. And still do.
Now that she’s gone, we’ll celebrate her legacy and thank her for the gifts that she treated us to over the years. And rightly so — the Queen deserves to be honored by her parishioners. Because this is personal. And for that, we should all give her majesty one final curtsy.
Kelley L. Carter is a senior entertainment reporter and the host of Another Act at Andscape. She can act out every episode of the U.S. version of The Office, she can and will sing the Michigan State University fight song on command and she is very much immune to Hollywood hotness.
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|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
1
| 56 |
https://www.whowasbookseries.com/books/who-was-aretha-franklin/
|
en
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[] |
[] |
[] |
[
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[] |
2019-01-31T21:39:40+00:00
|
There is only one QUEEN OF SOUL! Discover why Aretha Franklin garners so much R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Aretha Franklin was a musical and cultural icon whose legacy spanned six decades! Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha got her start singing in front of her father’s Baptist congregation and found minor success as a gospel singer. She […]
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Who HQ
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https://www.whowasbookseries.com/books/who-was-aretha-franklin/
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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2
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https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-fans-gather-memphis-birthplace-news-death-spreads/1009020002/
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en
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Remembering Aretha Franklin: 'It's like a part of Memphis is dying'
|
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[
"Ron Maxey, The Commercial Appeal",
"Ron Maxey"
] |
2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
Fans gathered at Aretha Franklin's Memphis birthplace Thursday following news of her death.
|
en
|
Memphis Commercial Appeal
|
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-fans-gather-memphis-birthplace-news-death-spreads/1009020002/
|
The soulful strains of the Queen of Soul wafted across Lucy Avenue and landed gently on a tearful Erica Qualy.
"It's like a part of Memphis is dying," Qualy said after leaving a purple bouquet at the door of Aretha Franklin's birthplace.
More: Aretha Franklin dies at 76: Detroit star transformed American music
More: Efforts to preserve Aretha Franklin's childhood Memphis home has been ongoing saga
She joined others who, along with reporters, began to clog the narrow South Memphis street Thursday morning in the hours after word of Franklin's death began spreading.
Franklin, 76, died at her home in Detroit surrounded by family, according to reports. A family statement said she died of pancreatic cancer.
Visitors in Memphis came to Lucy Avenue to write on the boarded windows of the tiny, dilapidated clapboard cottage where Franklin was born in 1942. They just wanted to show a little respect for the woman who put the soul in Soulsville.
"She was like a source of joy," said Qualy, who has called Memphis home for eight years. "She was really soothing. When I hear the album 'Lady Soul,' it really speaks Memphis to me."
Though most identified with Detroit, Aretha belongs to Lucy. Residents say they only let the rest of the world borrow her.
"It's always been an honor having her house across the street," said James Johnson.
It was from a speaker on the front lawn of his house that Franklin's music greeted those passing by Thursday morning. But it wasn't just Thursday; Johnson said he plays Franklin's music for visitors often.
"We play it all the time, out of respect," Johnson said. "I met her a couple of times. She was a very nice person."
Franklin's family moved to Detroit when she was 2 years old, and she seldom visited her Lucy Avenue birth place over the years. She did, however, become involved with efforts to restore the home in recent years. Those involved with restoration efforts said earlier this week they're making progress.
More: Memphis soul veterans mourn Aretha Franklin, recall her musical connections to the city
Jeffrey Higgs, executive director of the LeMoyne-Owen College Community Development Corp., said earlier this week efforts to preserve and promote the home are "in a pretty good place."
So far, a fence has been erected around the house to secure it and Mayor Jim Strickland last year unveiled a plaque outside the home.
Higgs said multiple issues have slowed any plans for the house — untangling ownership issues, getting permission from Franklin's family to use names and likenesses, and deciding what direction to go in promoting the house.
"We've finally figured that last one out," Higgs said, "but we can't talk about it yet. We think we have a very positive message to tell. We have some grant money."
Rico Scott, like Qualy, said at the site Thursday that there was just something so Memphis about Franklin's music.
"I grew up on Aretha Franklin," Scott said. "Both gospel and R&B. There's just no other woman who could compare. Her music taught me how to continue to love the Lord. I'm just so grateful she was born in my hometown."
"The passion appealed to me," added Qualy. "I'm a musician myself, so you know it when you hear it in someone else. She's just such an inspiration."
And the house, Qualy said, needs to stay where it is, in spite of talk of relocating it.
"Keep it where it is," she said. "I read that they were talking about cleaning it up and moving it somewhere, which is so ridiculous. Leave it in this place and this neighborhood. This is Memphis. Don't try to make it pretty like Beale Street."
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https://miamivice.fandom.com/wiki/Aretha_Franklin
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Aretha Franklin
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"Contributors to Miami Vice Wiki"
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2024-07-03T16:38:30+00:00
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Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 - August 16, 2018, Memphis, Tennessee, a.k.a. The Queen of Soul) was an American R&B singer whose song "Who's Zoomin' Who" appeared in the episode "French Twist" of the series Miami Vice. Franklin taught herself to play the piano as a young girl, and by the...
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en
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/skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico
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Miami Vice Wiki
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https://miamivice.fandom.com/wiki/Aretha_Franklin
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Miami Vice Performer
Born
March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee
Died
August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan (cancer)
Active
1956-2018
Spouse(s)/Children
Ted White (1961-69, divorced, one son)
Glynn Turman (1978-84, divorced)
Three sons from other relationships
Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 - August 16, 2018, Memphis, Tennessee, a.k.a. The Queen of Soul) was an American R&B singer whose song "Who's Zoomin' Who" appeared in the episode "French Twist" of the series Miami Vice.
Career[]
Franklin taught herself to play the piano as a young girl, and by the age of 14 she recorded her first album, of gospel music, but her career was derailed by motherhood, she had two sons before she was 16 years old. Franklin returned to singing in 1960, signing a contract with Columbia Records, then moved to Atlantic in 1966 when commercial success eluded her. Once with Atlantic, her career took off. Her first single for her new label, "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" reached the Billboard Top 10 and seven weeks at the top of the R&B charts. The album of the same name also included her soul anthem, "Respect", which reached #1 on both the Hot 100 and the R&B charts. Other singles during this time include "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" and "Chain of Fools", both Top 10 hits. In 1968 she won the first two of 18 Grammys. In the 1970s Franklin continued her success, but in 1974 her single "Until You Come Back To Me" would be her last Top 10 single for over a decade, and her career went into decline. In 1980 her appearance in The Blues Brothers (and singing "Think") brought her back to the public consciousness. In 1982 she released Jump To It which did well, but it was followed by another disappointing album before striking gold in 1985 with Who's Zoomin' Who (featuring the title track, "Freeway of Love", both Top 10 singles, a third single, a duet with the New Wave duo Eurythmics, "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves", reached the Top 20). 1986's Aretha featured her first #1 single since the 1960s, "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", a duet with Wham's George Michael, her last #1 single. Her rendition of America The Beautiful at the WWE's Wrestlemania III is still recognized as an all-time moment in the 25+ years of the event. She released an album of gospel songs in 1987 but did not do well commercially as did her two followup albums. Her 1998 album A Rose Is Still A Rose went Gold, her first album in 12 years to do so, and played an impromptu performance at the Grammys that year. Her version of the Beatles' song "Lady Madonna" was used as the theme to the comedy show Grace Under Fire in the 1990s. She records sporadically (her last studio album was in 2003) and performs live occasionally, she was the only singer to play at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Personal Achievements[]
One of three artists (Madonna and Marvin Gaye are the others) to have had a song reach each position (1 through 10) in the Billboard Top 10
Received Grammy Awards in each of five different decades (1960s/70s/80s/90s/2000s)
Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2005
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the first woman so honored
Sang the Star Spangled Banner (along with Aaron Neville) at Super Bowl XL in 2006.
Became the first female artist to have 100 songs chart on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip Hop Chart in 2014
Personal life[]
Franklin had two sons, Clarence and Edward, before she was 16 years old, but never identified their fathers. She married (against her family's wishes) Ted White in 1961 until their divorce in 1969, they had one son, Ted White, Jr. (born 1964). Franklin had a long relationship with her road manager Ken Cunningham, their son Kecalf (named by using the initials of his mother and father and pronounced "Kelf") was born in 1970. Franklin then married actor Glynn Turman (A Different World) in 1978 until their divorce in 1984, but performed the theme to his show for three seasons in the 1980s. In 2012, Franklin announced her engagement to William "Wilkie" Wilkerson, but called off the wedding within weeks of the announcement.
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https://www.wkbw.com/news/aretha-franklins-legacy-started-on-buffalos-eastside
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Eastside started Aretha Franklin's music career
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2018-08-13T18:29:51-04:00
|
News hit this weekend that "The Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin is gravely ill and surrounded by family in Detroit.
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en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
WKBW 7 News Buffalo
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https://www.wkbw.com/news/aretha-franklins-legacy-started-on-buffalos-eastside
|
News hit this weekend that “The Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin is gravely ill and surrounded by family in Detroit.
What many might not know is that the 76-year-old has a Western New York connection.
“My dad knew her and would talk about Aretha’s talent. I used to hear that all the time. This girl is going to make it and go places,” Buffalo Musician, Van Taylor said.
Taylor remembers The Queen of Soul living part of her childhood in the Queen City. Aretha Franklin grew up on Glenwood Avenue, after her family moved to Buffalo from Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother Barbara was a nurse at Buffalo General Hospital, while her father the late CL Franklin was a pastor at Friendship Baptist Church. It was the first time Taylor heard Aretha blow.
“She could sing. Oh! She could sing,” Taylor said.
Franklin left the Nickel City for the Motor City in 1948 with her family. Her mom then separated from her dad and moved back to Buffalo. The queen would return for summer visits. Even after her mother’s death Franklin would come back to visit her mother’s grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery as well as childhood friends and family.
Taylor said it’s no doubt that Aretha would become the massive star she is today.
“I had the chance to walk in and hear her actually record some tracks. An amazing experience and actually it last with me unto this day,” the Buffalo musician said.
Franklin earned 18 Grammys, performed for presidents and named #1 vocalist of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine. She was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame Class of 2016. But the queen was not able to make it to the ceremony.
“Right after that she slowed cut her touring down because of health,” Taylor said.
Taylor said he’s praying for Franklin. He said no matter what, her legacy will live on into the next generation of music.
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https://www.actionnews5.com/story/38873821/aretha-franklin-dies-at-76/
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en
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Memorial created at Aretha Franklin's Memphis home upon her death
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"Action News 5"
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2018-08-13T22:46:58+00:00
|
She sang about respect, and she earned it. Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942.
|
en
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//webpubcontent.gray.tv/gray/arc-fusion-assets/images/favicons/wmctv/favicon.ico?d=420
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https://www.actionnews5.com
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https://www.actionnews5.com/story/38873821/aretha-franklin-dies-at-76/
|
MEMPHIS, TN (WMC) - She sang about respect, and she earned it.
Aretha Franklin died Thursday after several days on hospice care.
Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942.
She lived in a cottage home on Lucy Avenue, a home now recognized by the city as a historic landmark.
Moments after her death was announced, fans flocked to her childhood home to leave flowers and words of love on the building's exterior.
"Just devastated. Just devastated, but I've been trying to prepare myself for it because I knew this day would come," Anthony Prather said.
"I don't know; it's like a part of Memphis is dying. I don't know; I just felt moved," Erica Qualy said.
August 16 is a day of mourning in Memphis--and for music fans around the world. In addition to now being the date Aretha Franklin died, it's also the day Elvis Presley died.
"Two of the greatest people died on this day is tragic. It really stinks, but like we remember them by playing their music everyday and their greatest hits," Erica Stephenson said.
Elvis fans were already in the Bluff City remembering the King of Rock 'n' Roll. Music experts said August 16 will go down as a bittersweet day for the city.
"Every year as it rolls around--we get through celebrating Memphis in May and we get through celebrating Live at the Garden--August 16 is always going to roll around. It's always going to be a bittersweet day for Memphis, Tennessee, because we lost two of the greatest musicians that might have ever walked the Earth," Memphis Rock and Soul Museum Executive Director John Doyle said.
Unlike Elvis, Franklin spent just a few years in the Bluff City. Her father, a Baptist preacher, moved the family to Detroit shortly after she was born.
Her musical talents encompassed not only a powerhouse voice; she was also a gifted pianist.
By age 14, she recorded some of her earliest music in church.
"Her music has a lot of roots in gospel, so it really gets to your core being and when she plays the piano, it's phenomenal," Boo Mitchell said.
Mitchell, Royal Studios' co-owner, has fond memories of his father Willie Mitchell's time with Franklin.
"My dad and my Uncle James and I think the rest of the Memphis Horns would go to most of her shows and do sessions for her," Mitchell said. "She sent my dad something for his wedding anniversary and I can't remember what it was but she signed the card to the maestro."
Franklin later visited New York and signed with Columbia Records.
Her 1967 cover version of Otis Redding's "Respect," written in Memphis at Stax Record Company, helped catapult her to fame.
"And now it's number five on the Rolling Stones' Top 500 Songs of All Time," Tim Sampson, communications director at Stax Museum of American Soul Music, said.
"Next door at the Stax Music Academy, the kids learn a lot of Aretha Franklin's music, and when they do, you can tell that they feel very honored to be performing music by somebody like Aretha Franklin," Sampson said.
Franklin won a Grammy for her cover of Sam and Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin', which was written by David Porter and Issac Hayes.
"I was a friend and just a huge fan as well," Porter said. "There's certainly a spirit in this community--because of Memphis as a community--that's grounded in music credibility to have had the wonderful gift of the life of Aretha Franklin born in this city."
Franklin's dominance on the charts earned her the title "Queen of Soul."
"She just had that special something in her voice that was like velvet, but it also had all that soul in it," Sampson said.
In 1987, she was the first woman to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In 2003, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
"Everybody could relate to Aretha Franklin because when she'd sing, 'you make me feel like a natural woman,' you believed her," Sampson said. "She had a way of connecting with people that few artists ever possessed."
In 2008, The Queen of Soul returned home to perform by the Mississippi River for Memphis In May.
"We chased after her for--I bet, the 20 years that I've been here; you know the first 10 years--before finally we were able to secure a performance with her," Memphis In May CEO Jim Holt said.
Franklin's Beale Street Music Festival performance happened Sunday, May 4, 2008. Then-Mayor Willie Herenton declared the day Aretha Franklin Day.
"She had a great crowd that night. I think we had Michael McDonald open up for her with the Doobie Brothers, and she just really, really wowed the crowd," Holt said. "She was excited about playing Memphis. She had not played in Memphis--even though she was born here--very frequently, and it was a special night."
Franklin was actually asked to headline the 2018 BSMF, but she declined due to a prior commitment. She ended up canceling that prior commitment due to health reasons.
President Barack Obama invited Franklin to sing at his inauguration in 2009. She performed My Country 'Tis of Thee.
With 18 Grammy awards, Franklin is one of the most celebrated singers and musicians of all time.
"There will always be awesome singers, but there will only be one Aretha Franklin," Mitchell said.
Aretha Franklin was 76 years old.
The Memphis community has began to share their condolences on her passing.
"Aretha Franklin taught to world what R-E-S-P-E-C-T meant and what it was like to feel like a 'natural woman.' From her humble origins -- born at 406 Lucy Street in Memphis -- to her consistent place atop the Billboard charts, Aretha Franklin was truly the 'Queen of Soul.' What a voice and what a passion she brought to her songs. Detroit, Memphis and the whole world has lost a very bright star." -- Congressman Steve Cohen
The National Museum of African American Music in Nashville also shared a statement on her passing:
"The Queen of Soul" was born in Memphis, steeped in the gospel tradition of her father's church, and made an indelible impression on American popular music with songs like "Respect" and "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman." Her powerful voice and skillful songwriting made Aretha Franklin one of the top-selling artists of all time and earned her 18 Grammy awards, along with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, several honorary degrees, an array of lifetime achievement awards and a place in the hearts of all Americans.
Franklin's influence on subsequent generations of musicians is too pervasive to sum up in a few words; but perhaps President Barack Obama described it best when he said that her music "captures the fullness of the American experience, the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence."
Aretha Franklin was a true genius of American music. We hope that her journey is a peaceful one. While we look forward to celebrating her at the National Museum of African American Music, she will be sorely missed.
Copyright 2018 WMC Action News 5. All rights reserved.
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Efforts ramp up to protect Aretha Franklin’s Memphis birthplace
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"Willie James Inman"
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2018-08-30T16:00:00-04:00
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Aretha Franklin was called the Queen of Soul, but long before she made her mark on the music industry, she spent her early years in Memphis.
|
en
|
//static.foxnews.com/static/orion/styles/img/fox-news/favicons/favicon.ico
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Fox News
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https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/efforts-ramp-up-to-protect-aretha-franklins-memphis-birthplace
|
Aretha Franklin was called the Queen of Soul, but long before she made her mark on the music industry, she was making her way in Memphis.
Located in south Memphis at 406 Lucy Ave., the 400-square-foot home where Franklin was born has become dilapidated, with boarded-up windows. After the legendary singer's death, there’s a renewed effort – and a fight – to preserve the home.
Vera Lee House, the current owner, says members of the community want the building restored. House says there has been talk of moving the building closer to Soulsville, which is a redeveloped neighborhood in south Memphis. The house has been unlivable for more than a decade, and discussions about what to do with the property have been ramping up.
Franklin was born in the house on March 25, 1942, but her family moved from the area about two years later.
“I turned it over to the receiver so I could keep it standing here, not [somewhere] else. When I found out they wanted to move it, I’ve really been against it because it’s not only just Aretha’s home, it’s my home,” House told Fox News.
“I raised my kids in this house. I live in this neighborhood. I don’t want everything that I’ve worked for to just leave.”
House said the taxes, which total just over $1,200, will be paid soon after a court hearing to determine the fate of the property is held this week. The court hearing was scheduled well before Franklin’s death.
Speaking of Franklin, House told Fox News about a meeting she had with the Queen of Soul when she visited the home in 1995.
“She stayed a pretty good while that day, and she talked and walked through the house and told me the things that [happened] with her family here,” House said. “She talked about the tree there, how her sisters and brothers used to climb the tree and play in it.”
A judge ordered the house to be demolished two years ago; an alternative plan to keep the building standing called for the home to be placed under the receivership of a local community corporation to develop plans to maintain it because of its historic significance.
Jeffrey Higgs, the executive director of South Memphis Renewal CDC, says there have been no decisions made as to how the preservation process will go. Higgs did note that he once took a call from Franklin herself, and she told him that she would have liked to see the home preserved.
“Everybody is looking at what’s going to happen to it,” Higgs said. “There are a variety of interests [and] people who want to see different things happen to the house. And so our efforts have and always been on restoring the house and making sure that her interests are protected as the owner of the house. … We don’t own the house, we’re just the court-appointed receiver.”
Higgs says it will cost about $200,000 to restore the property, and that it would take up to tens of millions of dollars to improve the surrounding neighborhood. He also mentioned that as the receiver of the property, his corporation would likely end up paying the outstanding taxes on the site.
“We will bring everybody together and do what’s best for the community, for Lucy [Avenue], for the city and globally because Ms. Franklin was loved by everybody,” Higgs added.
To help with the costs associated with the upkeep and restoration of Franklin’s former home, a GoFundMe campaign was started by local music industry executive Gebre Waddell, CEO of Soundways.
“A symbol as powerful as a house can be something that affects the neighborhood and affects the city at a very deep level,” Waddell said. “When you think about Memphis, you think about Graceland perhaps, the home of Elvis Presley. And with Aretha Franklin and the level of legend that we’re talking about here, the level of impact that she had, we also need to preserve her home.”
Whatever happens to the Queen of Soul’s first home, the community wants to make sure Franklin’s legacy lives on. Vera Lee House’s children have even floated the idea of renaming the street Aretha Franklin Place. House and her family hope the city of Memphis will also step in and help out with the restoration efforts.
“I’m sure that we could do something for this,” House said. “They may say nothing can be done, but I think we should come together.”
House, Higgs and the city have until Oct. 16 to come up with a plan to preserve the building, as per court orders. Higgs told Fox News any meeting for next steps would take place after Franklin’s memorial service, which is scheduled for Friday. A vigil honoring the singer will be held at her former south Memphis home on the same day.
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https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/exploring-music-country-everything-to-see-and-do-in-memphis-and-nashville-tennessee/
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en
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Exploring music country: Everything to see and do in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee
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2023-05-12T14:01:17+00:00
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A music lover’s dream, this region of the U.S. is famous for its noteworthy strains of blues, soul and rock ‘n’ roll, plus the many music legends that were born here
|
en
|
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/exploring-music-country-everything-to-see-and-do-in-memphis-and-nashville-tennessee/
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It’s been open to the public for 40 years, and yet Graceland remains the second most visited home in the United States, after the White House. Numbers are spiking again thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated biopic Elvis and the tragic death of his only child, Lisa Marie Presley, who was at Graceland to mark the King’s 88th birthday two days after my visit.
What is remarkable is that despite welcoming more than 650,000 people on average each year, the colonial revival house and its expansive grounds somehow retain the feeling of a family home. Perhaps it’s the fact that the upstairs, Elvis’ private refuge, and the room where he died, remains off-limits to the public.
When you enter the mansion, you see the living room, dining room, and foyer, with kitschy touches, an abundance of gold fabric, heavy blue curtains, stained glass peacock room dividers, with a “P” for Presley in the transom window. However, when you get to the back of the house and to the “jungle room,” with faux Polynesian tiki furnishings and the TV and billiard rooms downstairs, you really get a sense of Elvis. The golden yellow TV room, in particular, leaves the strongest impression of the King.
It is not the product of a professional decorator but reflects the imagination of Elvis himself. The room houses a jukebox, three inset televisions, a bar, and a lightning bolt on the wall behind the couch – a reference to Elvis’ maxim, “TCB,” which stands for “taking care of business in a flash.”
It also boasts his record collection of 2,000 albums. Pioneering rock greats Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers are represented, but so too are later bands, such as The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.” But Elvis’s musical tastes were broad, representing the elixir of traditional forms – blues, jazz, gospel, country, soul – that produced the King and made Memphis the cradle of rock ‘n’ roll.
Graceland may be the best-known, but it is by no means the only stop for music aficionados in Memphis, a mid-sized city far from the country’s major economic hubs, yet serves as the epicentre of modern American music and culture.
Memphis is also a great jumping-off point for Nashville, just down the road, with the Country Music Hall of Fame, National Museum of African American Music, and Ryman Auditorium. Nashville calls itself Music City, but this entire region of the U.S. is music country. As a result, it’s had an outsized impact on global culture, and Graceland is only the beginning.
Blues Hall of Fame Museum
A must-see destination in Memphis for devotees of the Blues, but fascinating too for casual visitors. A series of exhibits tell the story of the blues through artifacts from Pee Wee Crayton’s Fender Stratocaster to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s kimono. Opened in May of 2015, the Blues Hall of Fame Museum also showcases hard-to-find album covers and photographs, awards, unique art, musical instruments and costumes, tour jackets and other special items.
DittyTV
Located in the South Main arts district of Memphis, DittyTV is a 24/7 music television network streaming roots rock and other musical forms. On the exterior, the hip storefront, Vibe & Dime, sells “music, merch and mojo.” This active and growing company, dedicated to handcrafted music, proves that, for all its museums and historic sites, Memphis remains a dynamic centre for American music.
Sun Records
Founded by Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, Sun Records is an American independent record label that launched in February, 1952. Initially, Phillips focussed on Black musicians, like B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Ike Turner. However, his recordings of Elvis Presley shook up the world. Elvis was soon joined by Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and others, all recording in the simple, one-room studio, still intact and boasting the original vocal mic that launched the rock era.
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
Soul’s answer to rock’s Sun Records, Stax Records helped create the Memphis soul sound, and its artists from Booker T & the M.G.’s, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes are legends. This great museum captures the essence of soul, and nothing Elvis had in his garage at Graceland can compare to Isaac Hayes’s gold-plated 1972 Cadillac on display. It has a fur-lined interior, television, bar and gold windshield wipers.
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
This vast institution in Nashville, dedicated to preserving and celebrating country music, boasts 350,000 square feet of exhibition space, two theatres, an archives and an education centre. Cash is there, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and all the greats of this distinctly American musical form. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum also showcases different pop-up exhibits, including Through Taylor Swift’s Eras that will be running until May 31, 2023.
National Museum of African American Music
Opened in 2021 in Nashville, the National Museum of African American Music integrates Black history with the astounding influence African Americans have had on U.S. music. It is an enormous subject area, covering all the genres “created, influenced, and/or inspired by African Americans,” from spirituals to hip hop, from Nat King Cole to Prince. This highly immersive experience features large touch screens, videos and galleries that allow visitors to learn about the evolution of African American music traditions, the history, influence and survival of religious music and more.
Beale Street
Every Memphis music pilgrimage is not complete without a visit to Beale Street, a cultural mecca, where blues and jazz legends, including Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, and B.B. King, once played. Beale Street is a major tourist attraction (witness the presence of the Hard Rock Café at 126 Beale), but A. Schwab’s dry goods store still operates, and blues music still fills the night air at places like B.B. King’s Blues Club, and Rum Boogie Café.
Aretha Franklin’s birthplace
Like the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Queen of Soul came from humble beginnings. The King died in Memphis, and the Queen was born there. Her birthplace, 406 Lucy Avenue, near the Soulsville neighbourhood, sits abandoned, boarded up, and behind a chain-link fence with a treble clef on the front. Although the home is not open to visitors, a sign out front informs visitors of this landmark location.
Elvis Presley’s birthplace
In contrast to Aretha Franklin’s birthplace, Elvis’s birthplace, a two-room “shotgun shack” in Tupelo, Mississippi, is immaculately preserved. The King only lived there for a few years before his impoverished parents were forced out, eventually ending up in low-income housing in Memphis. A visit to Tupelo is needed to understand Elvis’s remarkable rags-to-riches story.
Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum
Created by the Smithsonian, the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum off Beale Street recounts the intersection of musical influences and the racial and economic factors that underpin them that altered the course of popular culture. It’s an ambitious museum with seven galleries filled with instruments and stage costumes by some of the most famous artists on the planet.
Johnny Cash’s boyhood home
There is a pattern here of music somehow transcending grinding poverty and hardship. Cash grew up in a small wooden-framed house a short drive northwest of Memphis, across the state line in Arkansas. A farmhouse in a New Deal colony, Cash’s family suffered terrible setbacks while working their cotton field, including floods and the tragic accidental death of Cash’s older brother Jack. It proved, however, to be fertile ground for one of America’s great musical geniuses.
Johnny Cash Museum
If you have been to Sun Studios in Memphis, and visited Cash’s boyhood home in Arkansas, then your journey is not complete without a stop at the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville. It is filled with Cash memorabilia, from his gold records, handwritten lyrics, and costumes, to furniture once owned by the Man in Black.
Honky Tonk Highway
Also known by its official name, lower Broadway, and Nashville’s answer to Beale Street in Memphis, with live music until the wee hours, neon lights, and bars galore, from the Pontoon Saloon to AJ’s Goodtime Bar, this is the epicentre of Music City, the place where country greats like Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson got their start. Yippie aye oh, yippie aye ay!
Where to stay
Central Station Hotel, Memphis
With a rock and blues sensibility, this boutique hotel is ideally situated in the South Main arts districts, across the street from DittyTV, and within walking distance of the music mecca Beale Street. Incorporating an active Amtrak station, the hotel retains many of the features of the original bustling station, with neon directional signage and period passenger benches. Yet it also celebrates the musical heritage of Memphis, with the lobby boasting a wall of amplifiers and a beaded portrait of Isaac Hayes. Among its many features is a listening room, where guests can rock out, and a hip lounge with a 500-album record collection curated by a deeply knowledgeable DJ. There is also the excellent Bishop, a French brasserie with a mouth-watering menu that matches the sophisticated surroundings. Add to this splendid room with fantastic views of the beating heart of this historic city, ample parking, and a helpful, courteous staff, and you have the perfect Memphis hotel.
Placemakr Music Row, Nashville
Complete with a full kitchen and large rooms, this apartment hotel provides maximum flexibility for visitors to Nashville. Located just steps away from some of Nashville’s best restaurants, such as the Fable Lounge and Electric Jane’s, and a short drive to Broadway, this hotel is the global high street of country music. Placemakr is close to all the action and yet just far enough away to allow for a restful night. With free on-site parking, a gorgeous outdoor pool and a helpful front desk, Placemakr Music Row is a great Nashville base.
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https://www.10news.com/home/homepage-showcase/aretha-franklin
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en
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Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, dies at 76
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2018-08-16T06:58:15-07:00
|
Legendary R&B singer Aretha Franklin has died at the age of 76.
|
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|
/apple-touch-icon.png
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ABC 10 News San Diego KGTV
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https://www.10news.com/home/homepage-showcase/aretha-franklin
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Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title "the Queen of Soul," has died, a family statement said Thursday. She was 76.
Franklin died at 9:50 a.m. at her home in Detroit, surrounded by family and friends, according to a statement on behalf of Franklin's family from her longtime publicist Gwendolyn Quinn.
The "official cause of death was due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin's oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit," the family statement said.
PHOTOS: REMEMBERING ARETHA FRANKLIN
Tributes and tears flooded in Thursday after news of her death broke.
"Aretha helped define the American experience," former President Barack Obama said in a statement. "In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade -- our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace."
READ MORE CELEBRITY TRIBUTES HERE
Legendary soul singer and Franklin's friend of more than sixty years, Sam Moore, had words of sorrow and comfort to offer.
"I adored her and I know the feelings were mutual. While I'm heartbroken that she's gone I know she's in the Lord's arms and she's not in pain or suffering anymore from the damn cancer that took her away from us," he said in a statement. "I'm going to hope, pray and count on the fact that I will see her again sometime. Rest in the Lord's arms in love, Re."
Franklin's fans paid tribute with flowers and a crown left on her Hollywood Walk of Fame star in Los Angeles.
Her death comes three days after a source close to Franklin told CNN's Don Lemon that the singer was in hospice care.
"In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins knew no bounds," Franklin's family said.
"We have been deeply touched by the incredible outpouring of love and support we have received from close friends, supporters and fans all around the world. Thank you for your compassion and prayers. We have felt your love for Aretha and it brings us comfort to know that her legacy will live on. As we grieve, we ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time."
Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days, the statement said.
The singer had been reported to be in failing health for years and appeared frail in recent photos, but she kept her struggles private.
In February 2017, Franklin announced she would stop touring, but she continued to book concerts. Earlier this year, she canceled a pair of performances, including at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, on doctor's orders, according to Rolling Stone.
The singer's final public performance was last November, when she sang at an Elton John AIDS Foundation gala in New York.
Sing it: R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Over the course of a professional career that spanned more than half a century, Franklin's songs not only topped the charts but became part of the vernacular.
She made "Respect," written by Otis Redding, a call to arms. "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," a Carole King song, was an earthy expression of sexuality. "Think," which she wrote with her then-husband, Ted White, became a rallying cry for women fed up with loutish men.
The first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she had 88 Billboard chart hits during the rock era, tops among female vocalists. At the peak of her career -- from 1967 to 1975 -- she had more than two dozen Top 40 hits.
"Aretha Franklin is not only the definitive female soul singer of the Sixties," according to her Rolling Stone biography, "she's also one of the most influential and important voices in pop history."
She won 18 Grammy awards, including the honor for best female R&B performance for eight straight years.
There was nothing run-of-the-mill about a Franklin performance. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" is slinky and gritty, Franklin's voice sometimes a whisper over Spooner Oldham's electric piano.
"The House That Jack Built" fairly crackles: "I got the house / I got the car / I got the rug / And I got the rack / But I ain't got Jack," Franklin belts.
In Franklin's delivery, "Eleanor Rigby" was a figure of defiance; with Franklin's voice, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" went places not even Art Garfunkel, whose angelic tenor dominated Simon & Garfunkel's original version, could take it.
Her soul was as deep as her voice was strong.
"I think of Aretha as 'Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,'" wrote the late Jerry Wexler, Franklin's producer at Atlantic Records. "Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don't pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura."
A recording career at 14
Perhaps more than any other soul star, Franklin's voice embodied the music's debt to gospel.
She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, but was raised mostly in Detroit, where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a prominent minister and a nationally known gospel singer. Franklin sang in the choir of her father's church and, though she declined her dad's offer of piano lessons and taught herself instead, began recording gospel music at age 14.
She toured the gospel circuit with her father, befriending stars such as Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke. She later performed at Jackson's funeral.
She was signed to Columbia Records in 1960 by John Hammond, the eagle-eyed talent scout who also discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but she had only limited success at the label. It wasn't until her arrival at Atlantic Records in the decade's second half that she gave up trying to become a polished all-purpose entertainer for a career as a soul and R&B singer, backed by an earthy rhythm section from Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
"The backup musicians provided a much grittier, soulful and R&B-based accompaniment for Aretha's voice," according to the All Music Guide, "which soared with a passion and intensity suggesting a spirit that had been allowed to fly loose for the first time."
Over a year-and-a-half stretch from 1967 to 1968, Franklin racked up 10 Top Ten hits.
"It had looked for the longest time like I would never have a gold record," she told Time magazine in 1968. "I wanted one so bad."
Songs like "Respect" were not only huge sellers, they were also adopted by African-Americans and feminists as anthems for social change.
Civil rights icon and US Rep. John Lewis recalled Franklin's "unwavering" commitment to the movement.
"What made her talent so great was her capacity to live what she sang," Franklin said in a statement Thursday. "Her music was deepened by her connection to the struggles and the triumphs of the African American experience growing up in her father's church, the community of Detroit, and her awareness of the turmoil of the South."
After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Franklin sang at his funeral.
The hits kept coming throughout the early 1970s, including "Spanish Harlem" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
By the late '70s, Franklin's star power began to wane, as the golden age of soul ended and as critics and fans became less enthusiastic about her continuing output. However, she re-emerged in the 1980s, releasing the 1985 album "Who's Zoomin' Who?", which spawned the hit "Freeway of Love."
She also collaborated with the Eurythmics on "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" and British pop star George Michael on the smash duet, "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)." The latter hit No. 1, her last chart-topper.
"Don't say Aretha is making a comeback," she said at the time. "Who's Zoomin' Who" was released, she said, "because I've never been away."
Personal pain lent depth to her music
Franklin's reportedly tumultuous personal life, meanwhile -- she was twice divorced and had brushes with the law -- was shrouded in secrecy.
She was the mother of four sons -- she gave birth to the first at 15 and the second at 17, according to a 1995 Ebony magazine profile. The article depicted her as a warm, down-to-earth woman with a crackling sense of humor, who answered the door in bare feet and confided her diet secret was a combination of Slim-Fast and younger men. She also was reportedly an accomplished cook, telling Ebony, "I can wear some chitlins out."
The Ebony profile suggested the source of some of that pain might have been Franklin's growing up largely without a mother -- Barbara Franklin left the family in 1948, when Franklin was 6, and died four years later -- or the anguish of losing her father.
C.L. Franklin was shot in his home by burglars in 1979 and lived for five years in a semi-coma before dying, the magazine said. Asked the toughest decision she ever had to make, Franklin told Ebony, "It was when my dad was in the hospital," and began to cry.
But Franklin's lows and the emotion involved fueled her music. She saw a number of resurgences in the past three decades and her image as a pop icon endured, with President Barack Obama featuring her singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" at his inauguration in 2009. She also performed at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1992.
Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2005. In 1986, her voice was declared a national resource by the Michigan Legislature. She even had an asteroid named for her.
"She looks rested and relaxed, like a housewife headed out to do some shopping at the local K-Mart," Ebony reporter Laura Randolph wrote in the 1995 profile. "There, or at the Woolworth's Five and Dime where, she recalls, she's spent many an afternoon 'browsing and buying knick-knacks' then 'sitting down at the counter to a scrumptious turkey and dressing plate with mashed potatoes oozing with gravy and loving it.' "
Health issues derailed her late career
Franklin battled health issues in recent years, struggling with weight gain and associated ailments.
In August 2010, she canceled two free concerts in New York because of "fractured ribs and pain in the abdomen," spokeswoman Gwendolyn Quinn said, adding that Franklin's doctors had told her to come in for tests immediately.
That November, her doctors ordered her to cancel all personal appearances for the next six months, the Detroit Free Press reported. In early December, Franklin underwent surgery deemed "highly successful."
She also canceled some appearances in 2013.
However, she recovered enough to return to touring in 2014, including a performance at New York's Radio City Music Hall. She'd also lost almost 100 pounds.
"It's fun buying new clothes!" she told USA Today. "I couldn't stay out of the mirror, just turning every way. This is my natural weight."
As for her old wardrobe? The shopper knew exactly what to do with those outfits.
"I'm thinking of giving them to a resale shop," Franklin said.
Her final album, "A Brand New Me," paired Franklin's original recordings of some of her greatest hits with modern musical arrangements from London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
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correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
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3
| 1 |
https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-her-nashville-connections-and-memphis-roots/976013002/
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin dead at 76: Memphis roots and Nashville connections
|
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"Dave Paulson, The Tennessean",
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2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
The Queen of Soul's epic musical journey included several stops in Music City.
|
en
|
The Tennessean
|
https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-her-nashville-connections-and-memphis-roots/976013002/
|
She was born in Memphis, and during her earliest visits to Nashville, Aretha Franklin would light up the famed R&B clubs of Jefferson Street.
Half a century later, the "Queen of Soul" would play her final Nashville shows at the city's most prestigious venues and events: the Swan Ball and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
The epic musical journey of Franklin — who died Thursday at age 76 — included many intersections with Music City over the years. In addition to concerts and award ceremonies, she recorded a handful of country songs and would prove to be an immeasurable influence on some of the genre's most celebrated vocalists.
Raised on an eclectic musical diet of gospel, R&B, classical and jazz, she blossomed out of her father's Detroit church to become the most distinguished black female artist of all time, breaking boundaries while placing nearly 100 hits on Billboard’s R&B chart — 20 of them reaching No. 1.
The Queen of Soul, as she was crownd in the 1960s, leaves a sprawling legacy of classic songs that includes "Respect," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "Think" and "Freeway of Love," along with a best-selling gospel catalog.
Her death follows several years of painstakingly concealed medical issues, which led to regular show cancellations and extended absences from the public eye.
A family statement released by her publicist Gwendolyn Quinn said "Franklin's official cause of death was due to advance pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin's oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute" in Detroit.
Memphis roots
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis. Two years later, her family would move to Detroit, where she began singing at her father's New Bethel Baptist Church. Her childhood home and birthplace in Memphis — a 1920s "clapboard cottage" — is still standing at 406 Lucy in South Memphis.
In the hours after Franklin's death, visitors came to the house to write tributes on the boards that covered up its windows.
"It's like a part of Memphis is dying," local resident Erica Qualy told The Commercial Appeal, leaving a purple bouquet at the door.
Jefferson Street
In 1960, Franklin made the jump from gospel to secular music, and her earliest years as an R&B singer included visits to Nashville's Jefferson Street. There was even a four-night run at The New Era Club, which she recalled during a late-night interview with The Tennessean in 1971.
Reporter Jack Hurst caught up with Franklin at the King of the Road Motel, "just before she punched the button for the elevator," he wrote.
"I like Nashville," she said. "It's a beautiful town. Nice climate."
Franklin was in town that year to headline a benefit concert for Fisk University, which she deemed a "terribly worthy cause."
The Nashville Grammys
Two years later in 1973, when the Grammy Awards were held in Nashville for the first and only time, Franklin was among the stars in attendance.
She presented an award at the Tennessee Theatre during the CBS telecast, and picked up two awards the next morning at a "champagne breakfast" at Municipal Auditorium. Those wins — for best female R&B vocal performance and best soul gospel performance — are a small portion of her 18 career Grammys.
Country connections
In the 1960s, Franklin put a one-of-a-kind spin on several country songs. Among them was Willie Nelson's "Night Life," John Hartford's "Gentle On My Mind" and "I May Never Get to Heaven," penned by Bill Anderson and Buddy Killen.
On social media, Nelson called Franklin "the greatest gift and the voice of a generation. She could turn any song into a hymn."
A few decades later, country artists were the ones covering Franklin and claiming her as an influence. Reba McEntire rocked the boat at the 1988 CMA Awards by belting out "Respect."
Faith Hill and Franklin recorded a duet for the latter's 2011 album, "A Woman Falling Out of Love," but the track was ultimately shelved. Last year, Hill and Tim McGraw opened their "Soul2Soul" tour concerts with "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)."
"The choir of angels now have the greatest voice of all time to lead, praise and join in to sing before Jesus," Hill wrote on social media Thursday.
Gospel glory
In 2012, the Nashville-based Gospel Music Association inducted Franklin into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
"Aretha most certainly brought her gospel roots into secular R&B," the hall wrote on its website, calling her "one of the finest songwriters of all time as well as one of (the) finest pianists in gospel today."
A newer Nashville institution — the National Museum of African American Music — shared its own tribute Thursday morning.
"Aretha Franklin was a true genius of American music," museum President Henry Beecher Hicks III wrote Thursday. "We hope that her journey is a peaceful one. While we look forward to celebrating her at the (museum), she will be sorely missed."
Her final Nashville performances
In 2012, Franklin performed at Nashville's Swan Ball, an annual white-tie gala known as one of the South's premier social events.
That came after two stops at the historic Ryman Auditorium in 2010 and 2011, where fans waited in the alley behind Tootsie's to catch a glimpse of the queen.
Her final Music City performance was a sold-out concert at Schermerhorn Symphony Center in 2015. Franklin, then 73, proudly proclaimed it was her 60th year in the music business, and treated an ecstatic crowd to a 90-minute set that featured “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” "Freeway of Love" and, finally, "Respect."
"She can still fill every inch of a concert hall with her powerful voice," wrote The Tennessean's Juli Thanki.
The Detroit Free Press and Memphis Commercial Appeal contributed to this report.
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| 37 |
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
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en
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Aretha Franklin | Biography, Songs, Albums, & Facts
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1999-10-20T00:00:00+00:00
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Aretha Franklin, American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s. Known as the ‘Queen of Soul,’ she made hit songs such as ‘I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),’ ‘Respect,’ and ‘Think.’ Learn more about Franklin’s life and career in this article.
|
en
|
/favicon.png
|
Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
|
Aretha Franklin (born March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan) was an American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s.
Franklin’s mother, Barbara, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, and was a minister of national influence. A singer himself, he was noted for his brilliant sermons, many of which were recorded by Chess Records. Her parents separated when she was six, and Franklin remained with her father in Detroit. Her mother died when Aretha was 10. As a young teen, Franklin performed with her father on his gospel programs in major cities throughout the country and was recognized as a vocal prodigy. Her central influence, Clara Ward of the renowned Ward Singers, was a family friend. Other gospel greats of the day—Albertina Walker and Jackie Verdell—helped shape young Franklin’s style. Her album The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin (1956) captures the electricity of her performances as a 14-year-old.
Britannica Quiz
Pop Culture Quiz
At age 18, with her father’s blessing, Franklin switched from sacred to secular music. She moved to New York City, where Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who had signed Count Basie and Billie Holiday, arranged her recording contract and supervised sessions highlighting her in a blues-jazz vein. From that first session, “Today I Sing the Blues” (1960) remains a classic. But, as her Detroit friends on the Motown label enjoyed hit after hit, Franklin struggled to achieve crossover success. Columbia placed her with a variety of producers who marketed her to both adults (“If Ever You Should Leave Me,” 1963) and teens (“Soulville,” 1964). Without targeting any particular genre, she sang everything from Broadway ballads to youth-oriented rhythm and blues. Critics recognized her talent, but the public remained lukewarm until 1966, when she switched to Atlantic Records, where producer Jerry Wexler allowed her to sculpt her own musical identity.
At Atlantic, Franklin returned to her gospel-blues roots, and the results were sensational. “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” (1967), recorded at Fame Studios in Florence, Alabama, was her first million-seller. Surrounded by sympathetic musicians playing spontaneous arrangements and devising the background vocals herself, Franklin refined a style associated with Ray Charles—a rousing mixture of gospel and rhythm and blues—and raised it to new heights. As a civil-rights-minded nation lent greater support to black urban music, Franklin was crowned the “Queen of Soul.” “Respect,” her 1967 cover of Otis Redding’s spirited composition, became an anthem operating on personal, sexual, and racial levels. “Think” (1968), which Franklin wrote herself, also had more than one meaning. For the next half-dozen years, she became a hit maker of unprecedented proportions; she was “Lady Soul.”
In the early 1970s she triumphed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco before an audience of flower children and on whirlwind tours of Europe and Latin America. Amazing Grace (1972), a live recording of her performance with a choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is considered one of the great gospel albums of any era. By the late 1970s disco cramped Franklin’s style and eroded her popularity. But in 1982, with help from singer-songwriter-producer Luther Vandross, she was back on top with a new label, Arista, and a new dance hit, “Jump to It,” followed by “Freeway of Love” (1985). A reluctant interviewee, Franklin kept her private life private, claiming that the popular perception associating her with the unhappiness of singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday was misinformed.
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https://www.visitmusiccity.com/welcome/black/did-you-know
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en
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Did You Know?
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2021-02-17T15:05:29+00:00
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Take the time to learn interesting facts about Nashville's Black History.
|
en
|
/themes/custom/vmc/icons/favicon.ico
|
Visit Nashville TN
|
https://www.visitmusiccity.com/welcome/black/did-you-know
|
Firsts | Facts | Figures
From legendary performers to influential leaders, learn how Black History helped shape the city of music.
Notable "Firsts":
Nashville is the FIRST Southern city to desegregate public facilities.
Justice Adolfo A. Birch Jr. was the FIRST African American to serve as Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court – and father of Adolfo A. Birch III, SVP & Chief External Affairs Officer for the Tennessee Titans.
Attorney Avon Williams (name of TSU’s downtown campus) was the FIRST African American senator to be elected in the state. He was also a cousin of Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall (the FIRST African American Supreme Court Justice).
Fisk University is the FIRST institution of higher learning in Nashville.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers® are the FIRST African American ensemble to export the Negro spiritual to global stage.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers® are the FIRST collegiate music group to win a Grammy. This was during the same year the ensemble celebrated its 150th anniversary.
The FIRST gym built for African Americans in the country is located at Fisk University.
Fisk University was the FIRST HBCU to have a NCAA women’s gymnastics team.
Fisk University hosted a panel discussion on January 14th featuring all six Black female head coaches from around the country representing the following collegiate gymnastics teams: Brown, Fisk, Iowa State, Rutgers, Talladega, and William & Mary. This was the FIRST time these leaders would assemble in this manner. The historic gymnastics meet between all six college teams on MLK Day was canceled due to weather. The event was to occur at Vanderbilt University’s Memorial Gym, where Candice Lee is the institution's FIRST Black woman Athletic Director.
The Tennessee State University Aristocrat of Bands is the FIRST collegiate marching band to win not one but two Grammys. Find out more about the “Band of Firsts".
Tennessee State University is the FIRST HBCU to offer men’s ice hockey at the collegiate level.
The FIRST public park built for African Americans in the country is Hadley Park in Nashville, located near TSU’s campus.
The National Museum of African American Music is the FIRST and only museum of its kind in the world dedicated to the education, preservation, and celebration of Black music and its influence on over 50+ genres and sub-genres of American music.
Interesting Facts:
The Bijou Theater on Fourth Avenue North first began hosting Black performers in the 1920s.
Fort Negley is the largest inland stone fortification built during the Civil War.
Night Train is a two-disc compilation of R&B songs from 1945-1970. Produced at Nashville’s WLAC-TV studios, “Night Train” predated “Soul Train” by five years, and was the first television program to feature an all-Black cast.
Nashville is home to four Historically Black Colleges & Universities that gave educational opportunities for many African Americans who were once legally denied an education - American Baptist College, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee State University.
When the leaders from American Baptist College needed foot soldiers for the movement, they knew they could get several from Elliott Hall at Tennessee State University. Articles from The Tennessean on the days following the sit-ins posted students’ names and addresses. Seventy-nine students were arrested, and 50 were from TSU.
The Morris Memorial Building is now the only extant building in the downtown core connected with Black enterprise —A monument of sorts to achievement by Black Nashville on its own terms, particularly in a time when every power structure was aligned against such accomplishments. The Morris Memorial Building is a historic building, built in the 1920s for the African American National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.
Key Figures/Groups:
Aaron Douglas
In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk until his retirement in 1966. During his tenure as a professor in the Art Department, he was the founding director of the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts, which included both white and African American art in an effort to educate students on being an artist in a segregated American South. Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years to come.
Alice Randall
Author, songwriter, and the first African American woman to co-write a number-one country hit.
Anne Holt
The first woman, the first African American, and the first news anchor to receive the Donald G. Hileman Distinguished Alumni Award from the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters.
Aretha Franklin
After making the jump from gospel to secular music in 1960, Aretha Franklin’s earliest years as an R&B singer included a four-night run at The New Era Club on Jefferson Street.
Bobby Hebb
A Nashville native who wrote and recorded the classic “Sunny,” which reached No. 2 on the pop chart in 1966, and led to him opening for the Beatles on their final tour.
Candice Storey Lee
Vanderbilt University Vice Chancellor for Athletics and University Affairs and Athletics Director, Vanderbilt University’s first female athletic director, and the first African American woman to head an SEC athletics program.
Carrie Gentry
A Civil Rights Activist and influential in the effort to desegregate Nashville and one of the first African American members of the Davidson County Democratic Party’s Women Club.
Charley Pride
A true country music legend became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1993.
A. Cherrie Epps
Former President/CEO of Meharry Medical College, the only African American woman with a Ph.D. degree to become Dean of a U.S. medical school.
Dorothy L. Brown
Surgeon and first African American woman elected to Tennessee’s House of Representatives.
Earl Gaines
Born in Alabama and relocated to Nashville. Famous American Soul and electric blues singer.
Etta James
In 1963, over two nights at Nashville’s New Era Club, the singer recorded her live album, “Etta James Rocks the House.” James was one of the countless Black superstars who performed in Nashville’s famed R&B clubs, making the city a top destination on the so-called “Chitlin Circuit” in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Fisk Jubilee Singers
Fisk treasurer George Leonard White assembled a group of nine members in 1871 and booked a tour to raise money for the school. It introduced the world music Black Americans made for themselves. They had raised $50,000 for the university and with it, they constructed Jubilee Hall, the South’s first permanent structure built for the education of Black students, the Fisk Memorial Chapel, completed in 1892, and more. A century and a half later, the group still survives, rejuvenating itself with new student members each year.
Frank Howard
A popular vocalist and a staple on the Jefferson Street music scene.
Freddie Waters
Nashville musician whose career began in the mid-1960s as lead singer for a vocal group called the Hytones.
Glenda Baskin Glover
A woman of many, Glenda is Tennessee State University President, certified public accountant, an attorney, and is one of two African American women to hold the Ph.D.-CPA-JD combination in the nation.
Higgins Bond
Freelance Illustrator and Fine Artist, the first African American woman ever to illustrate a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service
Inez Crutchfield
First African American woman to serve as a Representative for Tennessee on the Democratic National Committee, and first African American woman to serve as president of the Democratic Women’s Club of Davidson County.
Jimi Hendrix
Came to Nashville in 1962 and scored a residency at Club Del Morocco with his band, The King Kasuals, and lived rent-free in an apartment above a Jefferson Street beauty school. A 22-year-old Hendrix made his television debut backing up soul duo Buddy & Stacey. The show was “Night Train.”
John Lewis
Participated in student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville, as well as other nonviolent protests aimed at dismantling the racist systems of the Jim Crow era.
Little Richard
Stayed in Nashville for long, lucrative stretches, performing at the New Era Club and Club Revillot.
Lorenzo Washington
Opened Jefferson Street Sound Museum in 2010 to house all of Jefferson Street’s musical history. The building also houses a production studio and rehearsal space for the next generation of Jefferson Street musicians.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Spoke during the Impact Symposium at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee on May 4, 1964.
Oprah Winfrey
Got her start in Nashville as a female anchor at WTVF while she was a student at Tennessee State University.
Ray Charles
In 1959, Ray Charles and his band thrilled the crowd at Maceo’s on Jefferson Street - the same year he’d have his biggest crossover hit yet with “What’d I Say.”
Robert Knight
A soul singer and Nashville-area native recorded the pop hit “Everlasting Love” – written by Buzz Cason and Mac Gayden in Music City.
Thelma Harper
The first African American woman elected to the Tennessee Senate.
Z. Alexander Looby
Home at 2012 Meharry Blvd was bombed and led directly to the silent march culminating in Nashville’s famous colloquy with Mayor West.
|
||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 96 |
http://www.myblackhistory.net/Aretha_Franklin.htm
|
en
|
Aretha Franklin: African American Singer
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The queen of soul, Aretha Franklin is one of the giants of soul music, and indeed of American pop as a whole.
|
en
| null |
Aretha Franklin
The queen of soul, Aretha Franklin was one of the giants of soul music, and indeed of American pop as a whole. More than any other performer, she epitomized soul at its most gospel-charged. Although renowned for her soul recordings, Franklin is also adept at jazz, blues, R&B and gospel music. Rolling Stone magazine ranked Franklin No. 1 on its list of The Greatest Singers of All Time.
Aretha Franklin was one of the most honored artists by the Grammy Awards, with 18 competitive Grammys to date, and two honorary Grammys. She has scored a total of 20 No. 1 singles on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart, one of which also became her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100: "Respect" (1967). She also has the most million-selling singles of any female artist with 14. Between 1967 and 1982 Aretha had 10 #1 R&B albums - more than any other female artist.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born at a two-room house in Memphis Tennessee. She was the second of four children born to Barbara and C.L. Franklin. Franklin's family moved to Buffalo, when Franklin was two, and then by six, had settled in Detroit. Following the move to Detroit, Franklin's parents, who had a troubled marriage, split. Due to her father's work as a Baptist minister, Franklin was primarily raised by her grandmother, Rachel. Aretha Franklin suffered a tragedy when her mother died in Buffalo when Aretha was ten. Franklin sang in church at an early age and learned how to play piano by ear. By her late preteens, Franklin was regularly singing solo numbers in her father's New Bethel Baptist Church. Franklin's father, C.L., was a respected and popular preacher. Franklin grew up with local and national celebrities hanging out at her father's home including gospel greats Albertina Walker and her group The Caravans, Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward, three women who played a pivotal role in her vocal development as a child.
After Franklin's father gained fame for his recorded sermons for Checker Records and for gaining even more popularity for his work as a civil rights activist, he helped his daughter sign a contract with Checker's JVB gospel record division. In 1956, when Aretha was only fourteen she released her first album, Songs of Faith. Aretha Franklin began touring the gospel circuit and worked under the direction of James Cleveland. When it seemed that the child prodigy was unstoppable her career hit a road block.
By the time she was fifteen years old, Aretha Franklin was pregnant and at the age of seventeen she was the mother of two children. Aretha overcame these hitches in style. John Hammond was Columbia Record’s official talent scout; he offered Aretha a contract with the famous company.
|
||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 60 |
https://booksofwonder.com/products/9780451532398
|
en
|
Who Was Aretha Franklin?
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There is only one QUEEN OF SOUL! Discover why Aretha Franklin garners so much R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Aretha Franklin was a musical and cultural icon whose legacy spanned six decades! Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha got her start singing in front of her father’s Baptist congregation and found minor success as a gosp
|
en
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Books of Wonder
|
https://booksofwonder.com/products/9780451532398
|
There is only one QUEEN OF SOUL! Discover why Aretha Franklin garners so much R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Aretha Franklin was a musical and cultural icon whose legacy spanned six decades! Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha got her start singing in front of her father’s Baptist congregation and found minor success as a gospel singer. She then set her sights on becoming a pop music artist and used her powerful voice and impressive skills on the piano to get a record deal. Aretha released her first of many celebrated albums at the age of 18. In 1987, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, making her the first female artist to grace the prestigious list. With iconic hits such as “Respect” and “Think,” and countless awards to her name including eighteen Grammys, Aretha Franklin was one of the bestselling artists of all time.
|
||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
3
| 35 |
https://www.facebook.com/wxyzdetroit/videos/special-report-life-and-legacy-of-aretha-franklin/937351259785436/
|
en
|
7 Action News Special Report: Join us as we honor the life and legacy of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
|
[] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] | null |
7 Action News Special Report: Join us as we honor the life and legacy of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
|
de
|
https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/aGT3gskzWBf.ico
|
https://www.facebook.com/wxyzdetroit/videos/special-report-life-and-legacy-of-aretha-franklin/937351259785436/
| ||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 4 |
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/08/27/owner-aretha-franklin-birth-place-ready-defend-her-stake-home/1107613002/
|
en
|
Owner of Aretha Franklin birthplace ready to protect her stake as plans proceed
|
[
"https://www.gannett-cdn.com/appservices/universal-web/universal/icons/icon-instagram_24.png"
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[] |
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[
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] | null |
[
"Ron Maxey, The Commercial Appeal",
"Ron Maxey"
] |
2018-08-27T00:00:00
|
Vera Lee House, owner of the Memphis home where Aretha Franklin was born, says she plans to protect her interests as plans to restore the home advance.
|
en
|
Memphis Commercial Appeal
|
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/08/27/owner-aretha-franklin-birth-place-ready-defend-her-stake-home/1107613002/
|
Efforts to preserve and renovate Aretha Franklin's Memphis birthplace are heating up in the wake of the Queen of Soul's death, with the home's current owner saying she will be in court Tuesday to make sure her interests are protected.
Vera Lee House for about 30 years has owned the dilapidated 1920s clapboard cottage where Franklin was born. She said through a spokeswoman Monday that her and her family's interests will not be overlooked as plans for making the house a shrine to Franklin's legacy move forward.
More: Efforts to preserve Aretha Franklin's childhood Memphis home has been ongoing saga
More: Memphis soul veterans mourn Aretha Franklin, recall her musical connections to the city
"They want to turn this into a Graceland, which is fine, but we want to make sure that, whatever goes down, Mrs. House has a better life as a result of that," said Patricia Rogers, a community leader speaking on House's behalf.
Rogers and members of House's family are expected to attend an Environmental Court hearing set for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The hearing was already scheduled prior to Franklin's Aug. 16 death in Detroit.
Environmental Court has been overseeing efforts to preserve the South Memphis property at 406 Lucy Ave. since 2012, when it was declared a public nuisance because of rotting floors and a collapsing roof. Retired Judge Larry Potter saved it from the wrecking ball amid competing plans for how to honor Franklin.
Franklin's connection to the house was slim — she was born there on March 25, 1942, but her family moved to Detroit when she was 2 years old. Franklin did in later years, however, become involved in efforts to preserve the home.
Rogers said House — who at one point submitted a plan to make the home the headquarters of WLRM-AM 1380, a small blues and soul radio station — wants the home to remain in its current location regardless of how it is used. House also would like to see Lucy Avenue renamed Aretha Franklin Avenue.
Other proposals have floated the idea of moving the home, perhaps closer to the Stax Museum in Soulsville, and making it a tourist attraction there.
Judge Potter put the property into receivership and named Jeffrey Higgs of South Memphis Renewal Community Corp. the receiver.
Higgs could not immediately be reached Monday about Rogers' comment, but he said following Franklin's death that those seeking to restore the home are "in a pretty good position to move forward."
He said untangling ownership issues was among the problems that have slowed plans for the home's future, but that grant money has been secured and a plan is in place that he cannot yet discuss.
The only visible signs of progress at the house so far are a fence that was erected to secure the property and a historical marker noting the home's significance.
One issue House, who now lives the next street over from Lucy on Simpson Avenue, faces in preserving her interest in the property is paying property taxes. Rogers said just under $1,200 is owed, and a fundraising effort is afoot to raise the money. Rogers said she will bring some of the money to court Tuesday and ask for time to raise the remainder.
Mildred House, one of 12 children Vera House raised at the Lucy Avenue home, said her family is eager to see Franklin's Memphis heritage preserved as long as her family's voice is part of the process.
"We think it'll be good for Memphis, Tennessee," House said. "But it's also ours. We think this can be part of something great."
Added Rogers, "Everybody has their own agenda. This is going to be a long process, but we just want to make sure these folks (the House family) are respected."
|
|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
0
| 17 |
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2017/03/21/blight-battle-finds-focus-aretha-franklins-memphis-birthplace/99463668/
|
en
|
Blight battle finds focus at Aretha Franklin's Memphis birthplace
|
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[
"Adrian Sainz, The Tennessean"
] |
2017-03-21T00:00:00
|
In historic Memphis neighborhoods an effort is underway to reclaim the landscape of abandoned houses and trash-strewn vacant lots
|
en
|
The Tennessean
|
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2017/03/21/blight-battle-finds-focus-aretha-franklins-memphis-birthplace/99463668/
|
MEMPHIS — The crumbling house where Aretha Franklin was born looks no different from many others on Lucy Avenue in Memphis' Soulsville neighborhood: empty and shuttered, with plywood over the windows. A rear section has collapsed, and weeds grow all around it. No one has lived there for years.
It's a monument to urban blight, and daunting evidence of how much work it will take to fix it.
Now, however, in historic Memphis neighborhoods such as Soulsville and Orange Mound, an effort is underway to reclaim the landscape of abandoned houses and trash-strewn vacant lots.
It's making Memphis a leader in the fight against the blight epidemic afflicting America's cities.
"I've become frustrated, angry, energized, charged, fired up, all at the same time," said Roger R. Brown, pastor at Greater White Stone Missionary Baptist Church, which has bought abandoned properties and teamed with businesses to beautify the area. "We're going to address this area and make a difference."
Related: DIY Network could save Aretha Franklin's childhood home
Memphis is the first U.S. city to draft a charter document linking city agencies and community organizations to confront neighborhood blight, experts say. An innovative program enlists University of Memphis law students to sue homeowners on the city's behalf, forcing them to develop reclamation plans or give the homes up for demolition.
"The Memphis thing now is a model for a lot of other places, particularly because they did such a good job of establishing a collaborative group," said Kermit Lind, a lawyer who has worked with the Cleveland Municipal Housing Court. "With the charter, that is a step ahead."
Leaders in many American cities have long struggled to reduce vacant lots, abandoned buildings, uncollected litter and environmental contamination, according to a 2016 report by Joe Schilling and Jimena Pinzon. Blight can lead to school closures, drain municipal budgets and decrease property tax collections.
In recent years, several U.S. cities have launched coordinated anti-blight campaigns. Cleveland and Baltimore have used courts and data collection to rescue neighborhoods left empty by job loss, suburbanization and the Great Recession of nearly a decade ago, which set off a wave of foreclosures.
Revitalization has brought mixed results in New Orleans, which saw entire neighborhoods wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, and in Detroit, where vast swaths were turned into ghost towns by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Experts say the Memphis Neighborhood Blight Elimination Charter, crafted by lawyer Steve Barlow with the help of Schilling and Lind in 2016, has generated momentum. Barlow outlined a plan to unify government agencies, community groups, businesses and others to help repair houses or rid neighborhoods of properties beyond saving.
Previously, groups rarely communicated, leading to scattershot, often contradictory programs.
The charter links blight remediation with the city's land use and community development plans, codes and economic development efforts.
"They're creating a new playbook," said Schilling, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute who co-authored an article with Lind about the effort in the University of Memphis law review last year.
The groups use a database to identify neighborhoods with numerous troubled properties.
Clean Memphis, which organizes neighborhood cleanups, enlists volunteers who pick up trash. Employees of Memphis-based businesses pitch in.
"There's so much work to do," said Peyton Dodson, a Watkins Uiberall employee who wore protective gloves as he filled bags with trash in the Soulsville neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Judge Larry Potter presides over Shelby County Environmental Court, where homeowners must address problems identified by code enforcement officers — from crumbling facades to plumbing and electrical problems.
Potter grills owners about their plans. Some tell him they can't maintain properties and surrender them for demolition. Potter presses others to make repairs.
"It's time to put the pedal to the metal," Potter told Lemoyne-Owen Community Development Corp. President Jeffrey Higgs, the receiver in the Franklin case, during a recent hearing.
Lind, a lawyer, used Ohio's residential public nuisance statute in Cleveland's housing court to abate blighted housing conditions. He said students sometimes assist prosecutors for credit or as part-time employees in other cities.
However, "it is unusual, if not unprecedented, for student lawyers to represent a city government" as they are in Memphis, he said.
The home where Franklin was born in 1942 and lived for two years before her family left Memphis is in limbo in Potter's court. It's been vacant for years, and there's no marker indicating its significance.
The house was scheduled for demolition before Memphis Heritage volunteers stabilized it, hoping to avoid demolition. Now a court-appointed receiver is raising money to fix up and move the house to "a location better suited for tourist traffic," said city attorney Kenya Hooks.
"The receiver has also been in contact with Ms. Franklin's representatives and hopes to have her on board to support the project," Hooks said.
Higgs, the receiver, told Potter Feb. 23 he was working on a plan with the DIY Network to move the house to another spot.
"I would like to see this house saved," the judge said. "I want to see it in a secure location."
A hearing is set for Thursday in Potter's court. A spokesman for Franklin said the singer did not respond to a request for comment relayed to her.
Though Franklin's birthplace might be saved, the same can't be said of the empty houses surrounding it on Lucy Avenue. That work will take longer and be harder, and it probably won't be televised.
But those involved say they finally have a plan in place to succeed.
|
|||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
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3
| 15 |
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-22/aretha-franklin-s-memphis-home-as-the-new-graceland
|
en
|
Are you a robot?
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[
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2018-08-22T00:00:00
|
en
| null |
Why did this happen?
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|||||||
correct_birth_00051
|
FactBench
|
2
| 59 |
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-memorial/1015706002/
|
en
|
Eternal soul: Aretha was a singular talent who wowed the world
|
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"Susan Whitall, The Detroit News"
] |
2018-08-16T00:00:00
|
In the music world, the Queen of Soul came to symbolize Detroit as much as General Motors, Ford or Chrysler
|
en
|
The Detroit News
|
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-memorial/1015706002/
|
The death of Aretha Franklin is a huge loss for her family — sons Clarence, Edward, Teddy and Kecalf, and her grandchildren — but also for the city of Detroit, her fans worldwide and the music industry, where her status as a legend has been secure for decades.
She became the undisputed Queen of Soul after a string of hits recorded for Atlantic Records in the late 1960s that included “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You),” “Respect” and “Chain of Fools.”
Franklin was no less than “the greatest female voice of her generation,” according to music critic/historian Dave Marsh. She earned 18 Grammy awards, and in 1987 was the first female artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone put her on top of the list of the best singers of all time in 2008.
The legendary John Hammond, who signed Franklin to Columbia Records in 1960, said Aretha Franklin’s was the best voice he’d heard in 20 years.
In the music world, The Queen of Soul came to symbolize Detroit as much as General Motors, Ford or Chrysler.
She was the essence of Detroit to her core, but she was not a native of the Motor City.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, to a struggling young Baptist minister, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, and his wife, Barbara Siggers Franklin. She was the third of four children born to the couple; the others were Erma, (1939); Cecil (1940); and Carolyn (1943). Her mother’s son Vaughn, from an earlier relationship, was part of the family, too.
The Franklins moved to Detroit in 1942, when C.L. took a position as pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, located in a converted bowling alley at Hastings Street. Aretha was 3.
Hastings Street was the center of the city’s lively east-side black entertainment district, Paradise Valley. Rev. Franklin quickly became a star, singing and preaching with such fervor that when record shop owner Joe Von Battle played one of his records through loudspeakers onto Hastings, it drew as much of a crowd as any pop star’s record.
The Franklin’s marriage foundered, and Aretha suffered an early loss when her mother Barbara moved to Buffalo, New York in 1948, to be close to her parents. She took Vaughn with her but left Erma, Cecil, 6-year-old Aretha and Carolyn in their father’s care.
As an adult, Aretha was sensitive about the way her mother’s departure was framed, insisting that she hadn’t abandoned them. She and her siblings visited Buffalo often in the summer, and Barbara came to Detroit to see them often as well.
But with their father often away from the house, it fell to housekeepers and the children’s grandmother Rachel, Big Mama, to take care of them. Clearly Aretha was drawn to the maternal warmth she found from family friends, such as gospel greats Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson. Both were frequent visitors to the Franklin home, where Jackson would stir up a pot of greens in the kitchen and shower Aretha with attention and career advice. Ward was particularly close to C.L., and Aretha confessed in her memoir that she hoped they would marry — but it wasn’t to be.
Still, it was Clara Ward’s soaring gospel voice that showed Aretha the way, and convinced her that she could and would sing in the church, too.
The Franklins first lived on Boston Boulevard, on the corner of Oakland. Aretha spoke fondly of her 1950s childhood; hanging out with friends at various North End hotspots.
“There was no place like the North End,” she wrote in her 1998 autobiography, “From These Roots,” written with David Ritz. There was the Echo Theatre, where she swooned to the classic French song “La Vie en Rose” in a movie, and loved to spin on the seats at Mrs. Wiggins’ sweetshop on the corner of Oakland and Belmont. Brother Cecil’s best friend Smokey Robinson lived just down the street, on Belmont.
Aretha attended Alger Elementary School and then, Hutchins Junior High, where she learned how to sing harmony in the glee club. She loved roller skating at the Arcadia Roller Rink and enjoyed Boston coolers at the Vernor’s store on Woodward. Cecil was a jazz buff, but Erma and Aretha loved rhythm and blues, whether it was their fellow Detroiter Little Willie John crooning “Talk to Me, Talk to Me” (a song Aretha covered later) or Harvey and the Moonglows chanting the “Ten Commandments of Love.”
Erma and Aretha would sneak off to catch Jackie Wilson or Little Willie John at the Warfield Theater, prompting their exasperated father to lock them out when they returned home late.
It was a devastating blow when Aretha’s mother died in 1952, when she was 10. Her sister Erma told biographer Ritz that Aretha seemed to suffer the most from the loss of her mother.
The free-spirted fun of childhood was interrupted again, when Aretha became pregnant in 1954 by a boy she’d met at the Arcadia — referred to as simply “Romeo” in her memoir. Aretha and “Romeo” would skate to romantic ballads such as “Teach Me Tonight” and slow dance in friends’ basements. When her pregnancy started to show, a concerned C.L. took her to the doctor. But her father wasn’t scolding or judgmental about her condition, Aretha wrote in “From These Roots.” He was “a realist…he expected me to face the reality of having a child.” She and “Romeo” discussed getting married “for a Detroit minute,” but that idea was quickly abandoned, as her father “would kill him,” Aretha mused. He had big plans for his middle daughter.
Featured soloist at age 12
Like her sisters, Aretha had a passion for music; but hers was a particular gift, even her competitive sisters acknowledged. By the age of 10 she was constantly singing and had taught herself to play the piano by ear.
By then the family was living in a handsome home on LaSalle Boulevard.
Two years later, Franklin was one of New Bethel Baptist Church’s three featured soloists. Her arresting voice and presence led to her going on the road with her father’s gospel show. She would never take up formal education again, although she would have benefited from college, and was an avid reader.
The combination of C.L. Franklin’s stirring oratory and the voice of his daughter, a youthful cross between Clara Ward and a young Mahalia Jackson, was an irresistible draw.
After Aretha’s first son was born — named Clarence, after her father — because her grandmother Rachel, Big Mama, lived with the family, she was able to resume touring with her father. At 16, she fell once again for the charms of a roller rink heartthrob — this time she referred to the boy as “Casanova.” Her father was disappointed, but briskly efficient, advising her that she needed to be responsible and take care of her children. She named the baby Eddie, after his father — the most she would reveal of his name. Like Clarence, Eddie would go by her last name, Franklin.
On the road with her urbane, sophisticated father, Franklin got to experience the chitlin circuit of the ’50s firsthand, enjoying the rhythm and blues scene at such places as New Orleans’ Dew Drop Inn. But she found the grind of the road very hard.
“We’d drive thousands and thousands of miles,” she told biographer Mark Bego. “I’ve been to California from Detroit about four times through the desert. Never again! Never again! That’s the way people traveled back then. Baby, those steep mountains with no railing!”
She made her first recording at 14, a gospel album recorded at one of her father’s gospel shows in Oakland, California. The record came out in 1956 on Checker Records and was notable for her transcendent rendition of “Precious Lord.”
Both Erma and Carolyn were professional singers as well. Erma toured with singer Lloyd Price, and recorded the original version of “Piece of My Heart,” which became Janis Joplin’s best-known song. Both sisters sang backup for Aretha from time to time. Carolyn was also a talented songwriter, penning “Ain’t No Way” and “Angel,” and helped her sister come up with the famous “Sock it to me” line in “Respect.”
The sisters were rivals over boyfriends (Erma dated Dennis Edwards of the Temptations before Aretha did) as well as music. According to biographer Ritz, Carolyn once told him that Aretha tried to steer her away from singing, and more toward songwriting. (Carolyn signed with RCA anyway and recorded an album, "Baby Dynamite," although she only had middling success).
Meanwhile, as his star as the country’s preeminent “soul preacher” rose, the Rev. C.L. Franklin was also building a reputation in politics and civil rights. It was Franklin who invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Detroit for the June 1963 Walk to Freedom March—meant to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of the 1943 Detroit race riots. King, Franklin and UAW President Walter Reuther led 125,000 people in a march down Woodward Ave.
Aretha was also close to Dr. King and would often sing “Precious Lord,” the civil rights leader’s favorite song, at his request (she sang it for him at Cobo Hall on Feb. 16, 1968, at “Aretha Franklin Day,” which was announced by Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh).
No Motown for Aretha
Some wonder why Franklin was never a Motown artist. But the timeline, of course, wasn’t in Berry Gordy’s favor. In 1958, Gordy was still barely scratching out a living writing songs with partner Billy “Roquel” Davis. The two had heard Aretha sing, and they came up with a plan to write songs for the teenager and get her signed to Chess Records as an R&B artist. Her father thought she was too young and passed. Instead, older sister Erma Franklin became one of Gordy and Davis’ regular demonstration singers until she went out on the road as part of R&B singer Lloyd Price’s show.
By 1959-’60, when Aretha’s father thought she was ready to sign a recording contract, Gordy had launched Motown but it was still a small-time operation, located in the house on West Grand Boulevard, where he was still building a studio. Franklin wanted to see what the big labels in New York thought of his “child genius” daughter before committing to a local label.
The big labels were impressed. Aretha was signed to the crown jewel, Columbia Records, at age 19 in 1960.
She was able to leave her two sons in the hands of her grandmother Rachel and move to New York, where she was put through her paces, taking dance lessons, meeting with producers and learning everything about the city.
When her father visited her in New York they would hit the town, and go to clubs like the Village Vanguard and Village Gate to check out jazz greats such as Horace Silver, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.
While her vocal talents were held in high esteem, her career during those Columbia years lacked a coherent focus. Aretha would tour with R&B acts like her friend Sam Cooke, but she would also be on jazz bills with artists such as Horace Silver. One of her best albums from the Columbia years is “Unforgettable,” a 1964 tribute album to Dinah Washington, the great Queen of the Blues who had died in December 1963 in Detroit. (Aretha had great admiration for Washington’s vocal abilities and personal style — she was amused when the Queen of the Jukeboxes advised her to keep her shoes in better order in her dressing room).
It took Atlantic Records, and producer Jerry Wexler to harness Franklin’s great talent into commercial success. She signed with the label in 1967 and the release of her first album "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You" (no parentheses in the album title, only on the song) the following year was explosive.
Enduring hits of the 1960s
There was an earthy realness to Franklin that anchored her soaring, five-octave voice, and Wexler had discovered the right template that would show it off. He had Aretha play songs on the piano, and would structure the arrangement around her gospel-tinged playing and singing. Her Atlantic recordings have the soulful immediacy of gospel, but are seated firmly in a contemporary R&B setting.
Her version of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” became an enormous hit in 1967, and an anthem for both the Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement. Watching her soar to the top of the charts with his song, Redding cheerfully admitted, “That girl took my song away from me.”
Her other Atlantic hits; “Chain of Fools,” “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” “I’ve Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You,” and “Dr. Feelgood,” to name a few, were some of the most enduring hits of the 1960s.
Complicated personal life
Aretha’s personal life was complicated. After her two teenage pregnancies — the results of which she insisted, were blessings — she was married to Ted White in 1961. Their son Teddy was her guitarist for some 20 years off and on, starting in the 1980’s.
The marriage to White was reported to be turbulent, although Aretha resented the press reports about her troubles, particularly a Time magazine story. After they divorced, Aretha had a son, Kecalf, in 1970 with boyfriend Ken Cunningham.
After a brief but intense relationship with Dennis Edwards of the Temptations — it led to Aretha writing the romantic song “Daydreaming” — in 1978 she married Glynn Turman, an actor — and was living in Los Angeles. (Her marriage to Turman ended in 1984, and Aretha returned to Detroit).
Even as her Atlantic years were winding down, Franklin was recording some of her best music.
Her contract with Atlantic was ending, so she called former Columbia Records chief Clive Davis, who had just established a new record company, Arista.
“She was working with producers who didn’t quite have the right handle on the material,” Davis told Billboard in 2016. “I went to her house in Los Angeles, and she cooked dinner for me. We spent the evening getting to know each other, and establishing the bond that we have.”
Davis was known for hovering over his female artists, making sure everything was just so, and fussing over the right material for them to record. One hit record he set up for Aretha was the duet “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me),” with George Michael. Michael had begged the record mogul to get him together with her.
“Aretha had never heard of George Michael when I introduced the idea. They made the record. It went to the top of the charts all over the world [in 1987]. It just worked out perfectly. It was a win-win for both artists."
Along with Davis nurturing her career at Arista, Aretha’s cameo appearance in 1980 in the first Blues Brothers film, singing “Think” with potent, grown woman attitude, helped refresh her career and image as well.
The 1980’s were her pop years; she happily turned out hits such as “Freeway of Love” and “Who’s Zoomin’ Who,” as well as collaborating with some of her favorites, such as George Benson (“Love All the Hurt Away” in 1981).
Return to form
In the ‘90s Franklin continued to be a vital force, as artists such as Lauryn Hill wrote music for her to record (“A Rose is Still a Rose”). She filled in singing an operatic aria on live TV for the ailing Luciano Pavarotti with casual aplomb, and after a life-changing illness in 2010, she came back In concert in 2011, surprising audiences with a re-energized voice that harked back to her glory years. She even made President Obama cry at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015.
For some years she reportedly was on the outs with Clive Davis, but all that melted away when she reunited with her former record boss for her album “Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics,” in 2014, an album of covers that Davis masterminded.
It was a welcome return to form, after some false starts when she tried to release her own material on Aretha’s Records, in part because she finally had someone she trusted helping steer her a bit, again.
One of the notable cover versions she did for that album was Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” a song with a message of persisting despite an abusive relationship, that clearly connected with her deeply.
Still, Aretha’s personal challenges, whether the early loss of her mother or her romantic ups and downs, may have helped her tap into a human, universal pain, but she was not the haunted, sad “our lady of sorrows” described by many.
She could be feisty, and sometimes had beefs with other female singers for reasons the other party couldn’t fathom. Her deep friendships with Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney) and Dionne Warwick appeared to have high and low points.
Bettye LaVette, another product of Detroit’s North End, once remarked that if Aretha pretended not to know her at the Kennedy Center that year, there would be “a Detroit moment” between them.
Far from being a tragic figure, Aretha enjoyed her family, loved parties and fun, and was known to invite hundreds to her famous birthday and holiday parties, some in venues as large as the Somerset Collection in Troy. She was an avid and accomplished cook, and had a keen, lifelong interest in fashion and interior design.
Franklin’s own words to The Detroit News on the occasion of Ray Charles’ death, could stand as a description of her own art. “I heard someone say that he created soul, da da da da … My response was, he didn’t create soul. You can’t create soul. That's who he was.”
Susan Whitall is an author and longtime writer and contributor to The Detroit News.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2018/aug/16/queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin-dies-at-76/
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en
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‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin dies at 76
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2018-08-16T00:00:00
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The Nevada Appeal, the Silver State's oldest continuously run newspaper, first published on May 16, 1865.
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en
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http://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2018/aug/16/queen-of-soul-aretha-franklin-dies-at-76/
|
NEW YORK — Aretha Franklin, the undisputed “Queen of Soul” who sang with matchless style on such classics as “Think,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and her signature song, “Respect,” and stood as a cultural icon around the globe, has died at age 76 from pancreatic cancer.
Publicist Gwendolyn Quinn told The Associated Press through a family statement that Franklin died Thursday at 9:50 a.m. at her home in Detroit.
The family added: “In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins knew no bounds.”
The statement continued:
“We have been deeply touched by the incredible outpouring of love and support we have received from close friends, supporters and fans all around the world. Thank you for your compassion and prayers. We have felt your love for Aretha and it brings us comfort to know that her legacy will live on. As we grieve, we ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days.
Franklin, who had battled undisclosed health issues in recent years, had in 2017 announced her retirement from touring.
A professional singer and accomplished pianist by her late teens, a superstar by her mid-20s, Franklin had long ago settled any arguments over who was the greatest popular vocalist of her time. Her gifts, natural and acquired, were a multi-octave mezzo-soprano, gospel passion and training worthy of a preacher’s daughter, taste sophisticated and eccentric, and the courage to channel private pain into liberating song.
She recorded hundreds of tracks and had dozens of hits over the span of a half century, including 20 that reached No. 1 on the R&B charts. But her reputation was defined by an extraordinary run of top 10 smashes in the late 1960s, from the morning-after bliss of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” to the wised-up “Chain of Fools” to her unstoppable call for “Respect.”
Her records sold millions of copies and the music industry couldn’t honor her enough. Franklin won 18 Grammy awards. In 1987, she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Clive Davis, the music mogul who brought her to Arista Records and helped revive her career in the 1980s, said he was “devastated” by her death.
“She was truly one of a kind. She was more than the Queen of Soul. She was a national treasure to be cherished by every generation throughout the world,” he said in a statement. “Apart from our long professional relationship, Aretha was my friend. Her loss is deeply profound and my heart is full of sadness.”
Smokey Robinson, who grew up with her in Detroit, said: “This morning my longest friend in this world went home to be with our father. I will miss her so much but I know she’s at peace.”
Fellow singers bowed to her eminence and political and civic leaders treated her as a peer. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a longtime friend, and she sang at the dedication of King’s memorial, in 2011. She performed at the inaugurations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and at the funeral for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Clinton gave Franklin the National Medal of Arts. President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2005.
Bill and Hillary Clinton issued a statement mourning the loss of their friend and “one of America’s greatest treasures.”
“For more than 50 years, she stirred our souls. She was elegant, graceful, and utterly uncompromising in her artistry. Aretha’s first music school was the church and her performances were powered by what she learned there. I’ll always be grateful for her kindness and support, including her performances at both my inaugural celebrations, and for the chance to be there for what sadly turned out to be her final performance last November at a benefit supporting the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
Franklin’s best-known appearance with a president was in January 2009, when she sang “My Country ‘tis of Thee” at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. She wore a gray felt hat with a huge, Swarovski rhinestone-bordered bow that became an internet sensation and even had its own website. In 2015, she brought Obama and others to tears with a triumphant performance of “Natural Woman” at a Kennedy Center tribute to the song’s co-writer, Carole King.
Franklin endured the exhausting grind of celebrity and personal troubles dating back to childhood. She was married from 1961 to 1969 to her manager, Ted White, and their battles are widely believed to have inspired her performances on several songs, including “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone,” “Think” and her heartbreaking ballad of despair, “Ain’t No Way.” The mother of two sons by age 16 (she later had two more), she was often in turmoil as she struggled with her weight, family problems and financial predicaments. Her best known producer, Jerry Wexler, nicknamed her “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows.”
Franklin married actor Glynn Turman in 1978 in Los Angeles but returned to her hometown of Detroit the following year after her father was shot by burglars and left semi-comatose until his death in 1984. She and Turman divorced that year.
Despite growing up in Detroit, and having Robinson as a childhood friend, Franklin never recorded for Motown Records; stints with Columbia and Arista were sandwiched around her prime years with Atlantic Records. But it was at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father was pastor, that Franklin learned the gospel fundamentals that would make her a soul institution.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee. The Rev. C.L. Franklin soon moved his family to Buffalo, New York, then to Detroit, where the Franklins settled after the marriage of Aretha’s parents collapsed and her mother (and reputed sound-alike) Barbara returned to Buffalo.
C.L. Franklin was among the most prominent Baptist ministers of his time. He recorded dozens of albums of sermons and music and knew such gospel stars as Marion Williams and Clara Ward, who mentored Aretha and her sisters Carolyn and Erma. (Both sisters sang on Aretha’s records, and Carolyn also wrote “Ain’t No Way” and other songs for Aretha). Music was the family business and performers from Sam Cooke to Lou Rawls were guests at the Franklin house. In the living room, the shy young Aretha awed friends with her playing on the grand piano.
Franklin occasionally performed at New Bethel Baptist throughout her career; her 1987 gospel album “One Lord One Faith One Baptism” was recorded live at the church.
Her most acclaimed gospel recording came in 1972 with the Grammy-winning album “Amazing Grace,” which was recorded live at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles and featured gospel legend James Cleveland, along with her own father (Mick Jagger was one of the celebrities in the audience). It became one of of the best-selling gospel albums ever.
The piano she began learning at age 8 became a jazzy component of much of her work, including arranging as well as songwriting. “If I’m writing and I’m producing and singing, too, you get more of me that way, rather than having four or five different people working on one song,” Franklin told The Detroit News in 2003.
Franklin was in her early teens when she began touring with her father, and she released a gospel album in 1956 through J-V-B Records. Four years later, she signed with Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who called Franklin the most exciting singer he had heard since a vocalist he promoted decades earlier, Billie Holiday. Franklin knew Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. and considered joining his label, but decided it was just a local company at the time.
Franklin recorded several albums for Columbia Records over the next six years. She had a handful of minor hits, including “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody” and “Runnin’ Out of Fools,” but never quite caught on as the label tried to fit into her a variety of styles, from jazz and show songs to such pop numbers as “Mockingbird.” Franklin jumped to Atlantic Records when her contract ran out, in 1966.
“But the years at Columbia also taught her several important things,” critic Russell Gersten later wrote. “She worked hard at controlling and modulating her phrasing, giving her a discipline that most other soul singers lacked. She also developed a versatility with mainstream music that gave her later albums a breadth that was lacking on Motown LPs from the same period.
“Most important, she learned what she didn’t like: to do what she was told to do.”
At Atlantic, Wexler teamed her with veteran R&B musicians from Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and the result was a tougher, soulful sound, with call-and-response vocals and Franklin’s gospel-style piano, which anchored “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Natural Woman” and others.
Of Franklin’s dozens of hits, none was linked more firmly to her than the funky, horn-led march “Respect” and its spelled out demand for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
Writing in Rolling Stone magazine in 2004, Wexler said: “It was an appeal for dignity combined with a blatant lubricity. There are songs that are a call to action. There are love songs. There are sex songs. But it’s hard to think of another song where all those elements are combined.”
Franklin had decided she wanted to “embellish” the R&B song written by Otis Redding, whose version had been a modest hit in 1965, Wexler said.
“When she walked into the studio, it was already worked out in her head,” the producer wrote. “Otis came up to my office right before ‘Respect’ was released, and I played him the tape. He said, ‘She done took my song.’ He said it benignly and ruefully. He knew the identity of the song was slipping away from him to her.”
In a 2004 interview with the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, Franklin was asked whether she sensed in the ‘60s that she was helping change popular music.
“Somewhat, certainly with ‘Respect,’ that was a battle cry for freedom and many people of many ethnicities took pride in that word,” she answered. “It was meaningful to all of us.”
In 1968, Franklin was pictured on the cover of Time magazine and had more than 10 Top 20 hits in 1967 and 1968. At a time of rebellion and division, Franklin’s records were a musical union of the church and the secular, man and woman, black and white, North and South, East and West. They were produced and engineered by New Yorkers Wexler and Tom Dowd, arranged by Turkish-born Arif Mardin and backed by an interracial assembly of top session musicians based mostly in Alabama.
Her popularity faded during the 1970s despite such hits as the funky “Rock Steady” and such acclaimed albums as the intimate “Spirit in the Dark.” But her career was revived in 1980 with a cameo appearance in the smash movie “The Blues Brothers” and her switch to Arista Records. Franklin collaborated with such pop and soul artists as Luther Vandross, Elton John, Whitney Houston and George Michael, with whom she recorded a No. 1 single, “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me).” Her 1985 album “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” received some of her best reviews and included such hits as the title track and “Freeway of Love.”
Critics consistently praised Franklin’s singing but sometimes questioned her material; she covered songs by Stephen Sondheim, Bread, the Doobie Brothers. For Aretha, anything she performed was “soul.”
From her earliest recording sessions at Columbia, when she asked to sing “Over the Rainbow,” she defied category. The 1998 Grammys gave her a chance to demonstrate her range. Franklin performed “Respect,” then, with only a few minutes’ notice, filled in for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti and drew rave reviews for her rendition of “Nessun Dorma,” a stirring aria for tenors from Puccini’s “Turandot.”
“I’m sure many people were surprised, but I’m not there to prove anything,” Franklin told The Associated Press. “Not necessary.”
Fame never eclipsed Franklin’s charitable works, or her loyalty to Detroit.
Franklin sang the national anthem at Super Bowl in her hometown in 2006, after grousing that Detroit’s rich musical legacy was being snubbed when the Rolling Stones were chosen as halftime performers.
“I didn’t think there was enough (Detroit representation) by any means,” she said. “And it was my feeling, ‘How dare you come to Detroit, a city of legends — musical legends, plural — and not ask one or two of them to participate?’ That’s not the way it should be.”
Franklin did most of her extensive touring by bus after Redding’s death in a 1967 plane crash, and a rough flight to Detroit in 1982 left her with a fear of flying that anti-anxiety tapes and classes couldn’t help. She told Time in 1998 that the custom bus was a comfortable alternative: “You can pull over, go to Red Lobster. You can’t pull over at 35,000 feet.”
She only released a few albums over the past two decades, including “A Rose is Still a Rose,” which featured songs by Sean “Diddy” Combs, Lauryn Hill and other contemporary artists, and “So Damn Happy,” for which Franklin wrote the gratified title ballad. Franklin’s autobiography, “Aretha: From These Roots,” came out in 1999, when she was in her 50s. But she always made it clear that her story would continue.
“Music is my thing, it’s who I am. I’m in it for the long run,” she told The Associated Press in 2008. “I’ll be around, singing, ‘What you want, baby I got it.’ Having fun all the way.”
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
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en
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Aretha Franklin | Biography, Songs, Albums, & Facts
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Aretha Franklin, American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s. Known as the ‘Queen of Soul,’ she made hit songs such as ‘I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),’ ‘Respect,’ and ‘Think.’ Learn more about Franklin’s life and career in this article.
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
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Aretha Franklin (born March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan) was an American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s.
Franklin’s mother, Barbara, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, and was a minister of national influence. A singer himself, he was noted for his brilliant sermons, many of which were recorded by Chess Records. Her parents separated when she was six, and Franklin remained with her father in Detroit. Her mother died when Aretha was 10. As a young teen, Franklin performed with her father on his gospel programs in major cities throughout the country and was recognized as a vocal prodigy. Her central influence, Clara Ward of the renowned Ward Singers, was a family friend. Other gospel greats of the day—Albertina Walker and Jackie Verdell—helped shape young Franklin’s style. Her album The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin (1956) captures the electricity of her performances as a 14-year-old.
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Pop Culture Quiz
At age 18, with her father’s blessing, Franklin switched from sacred to secular music. She moved to New York City, where Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who had signed Count Basie and Billie Holiday, arranged her recording contract and supervised sessions highlighting her in a blues-jazz vein. From that first session, “Today I Sing the Blues” (1960) remains a classic. But, as her Detroit friends on the Motown label enjoyed hit after hit, Franklin struggled to achieve crossover success. Columbia placed her with a variety of producers who marketed her to both adults (“If Ever You Should Leave Me,” 1963) and teens (“Soulville,” 1964). Without targeting any particular genre, she sang everything from Broadway ballads to youth-oriented rhythm and blues. Critics recognized her talent, but the public remained lukewarm until 1966, when she switched to Atlantic Records, where producer Jerry Wexler allowed her to sculpt her own musical identity.
At Atlantic, Franklin returned to her gospel-blues roots, and the results were sensational. “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” (1967), recorded at Fame Studios in Florence, Alabama, was her first million-seller. Surrounded by sympathetic musicians playing spontaneous arrangements and devising the background vocals herself, Franklin refined a style associated with Ray Charles—a rousing mixture of gospel and rhythm and blues—and raised it to new heights. As a civil-rights-minded nation lent greater support to black urban music, Franklin was crowned the “Queen of Soul.” “Respect,” her 1967 cover of Otis Redding’s spirited composition, became an anthem operating on personal, sexual, and racial levels. “Think” (1968), which Franklin wrote herself, also had more than one meaning. For the next half-dozen years, she became a hit maker of unprecedented proportions; she was “Lady Soul.”
In the early 1970s she triumphed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco before an audience of flower children and on whirlwind tours of Europe and Latin America. Amazing Grace (1972), a live recording of her performance with a choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is considered one of the great gospel albums of any era. By the late 1970s disco cramped Franklin’s style and eroded her popularity. But in 1982, with help from singer-songwriter-producer Luther Vandross, she was back on top with a new label, Arista, and a new dance hit, “Jump to It,” followed by “Freeway of Love” (1985). A reluctant interviewee, Franklin kept her private life private, claiming that the popular perception associating her with the unhappiness of singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday was misinformed.
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1
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
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en
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Aretha Franklin | Biography, Songs, Albums, & Facts
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1999-10-20T00:00:00+00:00
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Aretha Franklin, American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s. Known as the ‘Queen of Soul,’ she made hit songs such as ‘I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),’ ‘Respect,’ and ‘Think.’ Learn more about Franklin’s life and career in this article.
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en
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/favicon.png
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Encyclopedia Britannica
|
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretha-Franklin
|
Aretha Franklin (born March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan) was an American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s.
Franklin’s mother, Barbara, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, and was a minister of national influence. A singer himself, he was noted for his brilliant sermons, many of which were recorded by Chess Records. Her parents separated when she was six, and Franklin remained with her father in Detroit. Her mother died when Aretha was 10. As a young teen, Franklin performed with her father on his gospel programs in major cities throughout the country and was recognized as a vocal prodigy. Her central influence, Clara Ward of the renowned Ward Singers, was a family friend. Other gospel greats of the day—Albertina Walker and Jackie Verdell—helped shape young Franklin’s style. Her album The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin (1956) captures the electricity of her performances as a 14-year-old.
Britannica Quiz
Pop Culture Quiz
At age 18, with her father’s blessing, Franklin switched from sacred to secular music. She moved to New York City, where Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who had signed Count Basie and Billie Holiday, arranged her recording contract and supervised sessions highlighting her in a blues-jazz vein. From that first session, “Today I Sing the Blues” (1960) remains a classic. But, as her Detroit friends on the Motown label enjoyed hit after hit, Franklin struggled to achieve crossover success. Columbia placed her with a variety of producers who marketed her to both adults (“If Ever You Should Leave Me,” 1963) and teens (“Soulville,” 1964). Without targeting any particular genre, she sang everything from Broadway ballads to youth-oriented rhythm and blues. Critics recognized her talent, but the public remained lukewarm until 1966, when she switched to Atlantic Records, where producer Jerry Wexler allowed her to sculpt her own musical identity.
At Atlantic, Franklin returned to her gospel-blues roots, and the results were sensational. “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” (1967), recorded at Fame Studios in Florence, Alabama, was her first million-seller. Surrounded by sympathetic musicians playing spontaneous arrangements and devising the background vocals herself, Franklin refined a style associated with Ray Charles—a rousing mixture of gospel and rhythm and blues—and raised it to new heights. As a civil-rights-minded nation lent greater support to black urban music, Franklin was crowned the “Queen of Soul.” “Respect,” her 1967 cover of Otis Redding’s spirited composition, became an anthem operating on personal, sexual, and racial levels. “Think” (1968), which Franklin wrote herself, also had more than one meaning. For the next half-dozen years, she became a hit maker of unprecedented proportions; she was “Lady Soul.”
In the early 1970s she triumphed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco before an audience of flower children and on whirlwind tours of Europe and Latin America. Amazing Grace (1972), a live recording of her performance with a choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is considered one of the great gospel albums of any era. By the late 1970s disco cramped Franklin’s style and eroded her popularity. But in 1982, with help from singer-songwriter-producer Luther Vandross, she was back on top with a new label, Arista, and a new dance hit, “Jump to It,” followed by “Freeway of Love” (1985). A reluctant interviewee, Franklin kept her private life private, claiming that the popular perception associating her with the unhappiness of singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday was misinformed.
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/queen-aretha-franklin
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en
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19 Times Aretha Franklin Proved She Was The Greatest Of All Time
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[
"Summer Anne Burton"
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2018-08-16T14:49:46+00:00
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Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018 — but she'll be the Queen of Soul forever. Here are 19 legendary songs and performances that prove it.
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BuzzFeed
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/queen-aretha-franklin
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Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018 — but she'll be the Queen of Soul forever. Here are 19 legendary songs and performances that prove it.
Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942 in Memphis, TN.
She was raised by her mom Barbara, a pianist and singer, and her preacher dad, C.L.. Her parents separated when she was a child, and her mother died when she was only nine. Franklin dropped out of high school in her sophomore year, but had learned how to play piano by ear at home.
1. 1956: At age 14, Aretha released her first album, a gospel record called Songs of Faith. Here's "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood."
2. In 1960 Aretha's first Columbia single, "Today I Sing the Blues," was released.
3. In 1961, Aretha released her first secular album and "It Won't Be Long" became her first Billboard Hot 100 single. She was 19.
4. Here she is in 1964 performing "Running Out of Fools" — her first top ten R&B chart single.
5. Throughout the mid-'60s, Franklin was a frequent performer on Shindig!, here she sings her version of "Shoop Shoop Song."
6. And here, also from 1965, her energetic performance of "Mockingbird."
7. In 1967, Aretha left Columbia and signed with Atlantic Records, releasing her first single to hit the pop top ten (and her first R&B number one), "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." Here she is performing the legendary song in Amsterdam a year later.
8. 1967 is also when Aretha released her version of Otis Redding's "Respect," flipping a frankly creepy song about a man demanding more respect from his wife into a feminist and civil right anthem. It also became her first Billboard #1. Here's an incredible performance of that song from the era.
9. (Doing even better versions of dude's songs was kind of an Aretha thing — here she is doing "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and wiping the floor with Jagger IMO)
10. In 1968, she performed "Precious Lord" at Martin Luther King's funeral — through unimaginable pain, her greatness still shines through.
11. I love this clip from 1969. Aretha and Andy Williams had both released versions of "Gentle On My Mind," so they performed together. It's not a competition, but... she obviously won.
12. By 1970, Aretha was rocking the 'fro while performing "I Say A Little Prayer" on TV.
13. An in 1972, Aretha was fully on the funk train, performing one of her best and perhaps one of her most underrated songs — "Rock Steady" — on Soul Train.
14. Just to show em she's still got that range, here she is bringing the house down with "Amazing Grace" — with Rev. James Cleveland on piano.
15. Aretha kicked off the '80s with a performance of "Think" in The Blues Brothers.
16. Throughout the '80s, Aretha had a string of hits — and also did the vocals for the theme song to A Different World (!).
17. Not interested in leaving a single decade behind, here's Aretha performing "I Dreamed A Dream" at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993.
18. She kept up the whole "highlight of the inauguration" trend by wearing this hat at Barack Obama's 2009 ceremony.
19. And just three years ago, in 2015, she made Obama cry (ok, and also made me cry every single time I watch this video even though I've seen it a dozen times by now) with her tribute to Carole King at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Rest in power, Queen.
Share This Article
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correct_birth_00051
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FactBench
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3
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https://www.ryman.com/story/i-spent-weekend-in-nashville-and-discovered-theres-much-more-to-the-city-than-partying-on-broadway
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en
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I spent weekend in Nashville and discovered there's much more to the city than partying on Broadway
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https://www.ryman.com/story/i-spent-weekend-in-nashville-and-discovered-theres-much-more-to-the-city-than-partying-on-broadway
|
By Mark Kavanagh
I was thrilled to travel to Nashville, the capital city of Tennessee in the U.S this spring, excited by its rich history, vibrant culture and renowned music scene.
It has a reputation for being a party city, but I was eager to dig deeper and discover what else was on offer, which as it turned out was a lot more than just the dozens of, admittedly fun, honky-tonks on its Broadway strip where live music seems to run around the clock.
Music City is the moniker you can’t avoid in Nashville, and for a nerdy fan like me it felt at times like being in heaven. It’s not just about country tunes either – Aretha Franklin, Adele, Elton John, Kings of Leon, Kesha and The Black Keys are among the contemporary artists who have recorded here.
... read more.
This article was published by Irish Mirror, read the full article at the link above.
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FactBench
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https://www.kuvo.org/happy-birthday-aretha-franklin/
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en
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Happy Birthday Aretha Franklin!
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2023-03-23T04:00:33+00:00
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Since 1985, KUVO has provided a rare blend of music & news. We broadcast the best in Jazz, Latin Jazz & Blues in addition to 17 locally produced, culturally diverse programs.
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en
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KUVO
|
https://www.kuvo.org/happy-birthday-aretha-franklin/
|
Celebrated and known worldwide as the Queen of Soul. Despite the fact that she was one of the most famous people on the planet with one of the most distinctive voices the music industry has ever heard, there are still a few things that seem surprising about Aretha Franklin’s remarkable life.
Born Aretha Louise Franklin on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, she learned to play piano entirely by ear. She was self-taught, but came to it naturally, as her mother was a fine pianist and singer herself.
Aretha’s mother passed away before Aretha reached age 10. Several women stepped up to help take care of the Franklin kids, including gospel legend Mahalia Jackson.
Aretha’s father was a preacher and gospel singer, and visitors to the Franklin household included the likes of Sam Cooke, James Cleveland, Clara Ward, Jackie Wilson, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
One of the hits for which Aretha became best known, “Respect,” was originally recorded in 1967 by Otis Redding, who wrote the song.
In 1987, Aretha was the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Gospel Music Association’s Hall of Fame, the NAACP Hall of Fame, the Apollo Theater Legends Hall of Fame, and the UK Music Hall of Fame.
Aretha performed at the inauguration of no less than three U.S. presidents: Jimmy Carter (1977), Bill Clinton (1992), and Barack Obama (2009).
Aretha gave a command performance before Queen Elizabeth II at Royal Albert Hall in 1980.
At her peak, Aretha boasted an astonishing four-octave vocal range.
Aretha was nominated for Grammy Awards 44 times, with 18 wins and three additional special Grammys to her credit.
On Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Greatest Singers of All Time, Aretha Franklin is number one.
—Eric Skelly for the Houston Symphony 2022
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correct_birth_00051
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http://popmusic.mtsu.edu/Homeland/places.html
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My Homeland Tennessee
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Tennessee Places
Tennessee's cities and towns have been subjects in popular songs for many years. During the Twentieth Century (especially post-World War I), urban centers might have received more songwriting attention than the natural or imagined attributes of Tennessee common to an earlier period. While cities such as Knoxville, Johnson City, or tiny Nutbush get a mention now and again, the vast majority of city-related songs are connected with either Nashville, Memphis, or Chattanooga.
Nashville became a popular subject for songs for a variety of reasons: its standing as an important university town; it held the State Capitol; it is a major transportation hub; and its place as a center of the music business. In the early twentieth century, Nashville is portrayed as a wonderful place to visit or travel through. After Nashville rose to prominence as "Music City" in the post-World War II years, it is often characterized less hospitably as a place where the dreams of musicians are broken. Yet, on the other hand, there's the jaunty reference to "thirteen hundred and fifty-two" guitar-picking "cats" in Nashville, all of who "can play twice as better than I will."
Chattanooga, like Nashville, is an important transportation center, due both to the railroad hub there and its location on the Tennessee River. The railroad connection, though, has been writ large because of the city's place in Glenn Miller's 1941 million-selling hit, "The Chattanooga Choo Choo."
Memphis is by far the best represented Tennessee city in American popular music. It has an abiding place in popular culture because of its connection to the blues and rock 'n' roll. The city has been home to many important musicians, including W.C. Handy, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Alex Chilton, Aretha Franklin, and Sam Phillips of Sun Records. Memphis continues to be a commonly referenced city up to this day. The Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis maintains a list of over one thousand songs that mention Memphis or prominent places within the city.
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https://www.instagram.com/tilah.so.standoffish/reel/C5GpMeepGWJ/
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Aretha Louise Franklin was born to Barbara and Clarence LaVaughn "C. L." Franklin in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist minister...
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109 likes, 1 comments - tilah.so.standoffish on March 29, 2024: "Aretha Louise Franklin was born to Barbara and Clarence LaVaughn "C. L." Franklin in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist minister and circuit preacher while her mother was an accomplished piano player and vocalist. By the time Aretha turned five, C. L. Franklin had permanently relocated the family to Detroit, Michigan where he took over the pastorship of the New Bethel Baptist Church. As a child, Franklin was noticed forher gospel singing at church. At the age of 18, she was signed as a recording artist for Columbia Records. While her career did not immediately flourish, Franklin found acclaim and commercial success once she signed with Atlantic Records in1966. She recorded acclaimed albums such as I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Lady Soul (1968), Spirit in the Dark (1970), Young, Gifted and Black (1972), Amazing Grace (1972), and Sparkle (1976), before experiencing problems with the record company. Franklin left Atlantic in 1979 and signed with Arista Records. Her success continued with the albums Jump to It (1982), Who's Zoomin' Who? (1985), Aretha (1986) and A Rose Is Still a Rose (1998).Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on theUS Billboard charts, including 73 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles. Her best-known hits include "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)","Respect", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "Chain of Fools", "Think", "I Say a Little Prayer", "Call Me", "Rock Steady", "Day Dreaming","Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)", "Something He Can Feel" just to name a few. 333 Glamping in the City".
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https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5GpMeepGWJ/?img_index=tilah.so.standoffish
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FactBench
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https://musicianofthemonthproject.com/2022/05/15/aretha-franklin/
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en
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Aretha Franklin
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2022-05-15T00:00:00
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American Soul, R&B, and Gospel Singer
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Musician of the Month Project
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https://musicianofthemonthproject.com/2022/05/15/aretha-franklin/
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American Singer, Known as the “Queen of Soul” • 1942-2018 • R&B, Soul, & Gospel
Fast Facts
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FactBench
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https://www.wvlt.tv/video/2024/07/13/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
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Aretha Franklin’s South Memphis home and birthplace purchased
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2024-07-13T00:00:00
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https://www.wvlt.tv
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https://www.actionnews5.com/video/2024/07/13/aretha-franklins-south-memphis-home-birthplace-purchased/
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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/555499/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-memphis-could-become-museum
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en
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Aretha Franklin's Childhood Home in Memphis Could Become a Museum
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2018-08-24T13:45:00+00:00
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Respect.
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en
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Mental Floss
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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/555499/aretha-franklins-childhood-home-memphis-could-become-museum
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FactBench
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/aretha-franklin-dead-queen-soul-was-76-721412/
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Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, Dies at 76
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2018-08-16T07:01:48+00:00
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Aretha Franklin has died at age 76.
|
en
|
The Hollywood Reporter
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/aretha-franklin-dead-queen-soul-was-76-721412/
|
The Queen of Soul is gone.
Aretha Franklin, the sensational songbird whose voice was sweeter than honey to millions, making her an inspirational American icon and one of the most admired vocalists of all time, died Thursday after battling advanced pancreatic cancer. She died surrounded by family and loved ones at her home in Detroit, her publicist said. She was 76.
“In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins knew no bounds,” Franklin’s family said in a statement through publicist Gwendolyn Quinn. “We have been deeply touched by the incredible outpouring of love and support we have received from close friends, supporters and fans all around the world. Thank you for your compassion and prayers. We have felt your love for Aretha, and it brings us comfort to know that her legacy will live on. As we grieve, we ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Franklin died at 9:50 a.m. local time, with the official cause of death “due to advance pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type,” confirmed by Franklin’s oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, but raised in the Motor City, Franklin was firmly rooted in gospel but also excelled in the worlds of jazz, R&B and pop. She collected 20 Grammys — including a lifetime achievement award — covering a span of four decades; was the first woman enshrined into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1987); and, befitting a queen, was named No. 1 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.
She sold more than 75 million records worldwide, according to one estimate, and had 10 Top Ten hits in a roughly 18-month stretch beginning in early 1967. A tireless road warrior, Franklin also sold millions of concert tickets, almost always arriving to shows in her custom bus (she had a fear of flying).
Franklin’s signature song, the 1967 smash “Respect” for her first album for Atlantic Records, became a battle cry for the feminist and civil rights movements. Recorded two years earlier by Otis Redding from a man’s point of view, her righteous reworking pushed “Groovin’ ” by The Young Rascals from the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
“It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher — everyone wanted respect,” Franklin wrote in her 1999 autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots. “It became the ‘respect’ women expected from men and men expected from women, the inherent right of all human beings.”
A list of her other musical gems seems to go on forever: the bopping “Think” (which she memorably performed in The Blues Brothers film); “Chain of Fools,” “Baby, I Love You,” “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” “Freeway of Love” and “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me),” her other No. 1 hit, performed with George Michael.
“You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And Aretha is a gift from God,” Mary J. Blige wrote for Rolling Stone in 2008. “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.”
Born on March 25, 1942, Franklin moved to Detroit with her family at age 4. She sang gospel songs with her sisters Carolyn and Erma in the New Bethel Baptist Church that was built and presided over by her father, the fiery Rev. C.L. Franklin (a renowned gospel vocalist in his own right). Visitors to the church included Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson and Martin Luther King Jr.
Known as “Ree” to those closest to her, Franklin recorded her first album at age 14, and shortly after her 18th birthday, she was signed by renowned Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond, who compared her with another singer he had discovered years earlier — Billie Holiday.
With Columbia attempting to reposition Franklin as a jazzy pop singer, she enjoyed only modest success through seven albums; she notched just one Top 40 single, an update of Al Jolson’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.” But make no mistake, she was remarkable: In 1964, Chicago radio deejay Pervis Spann ceremoniously placed a crown atop her head during a performance at Chicago’s Regal Theater and dubbed her “the new Queen of Soul.”
She switched in 1966 to Atlantic, where she shook up the musical world with the soul masterpiece I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, her Atlantic album debut. Produced by the great Jerry Wexler and recorded at the start at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the disc led off with “Respect.” On the track, Franklin grooves and plays piano as her sisters provide the backing vocals that include the “sock it to me” mantra.
“Every time Aretha began a song, the musicians would shake their heads in wonder,” Wexler wrote in the liner notes for the album, which also included the title track, the first single from the LP, and “Do Right Woman.”
“After each take was completed, they would rush from the studio into the control room to hear the playback. Producers, engineers and musicians alike were entranced by Aretha’s purity of tone, her tremendous feeling for inspired variation and her unparalleled dynamics.”
The soulstress won two Grammys for the song on the way to eight consecutive trophies for best female R&B vocal performance.
Franklin in 1967 released Aretha Arrives, which included “Baby, I Love You,” then followed less than a year later with Lady Soul, featuring “Chain of Fools” (which reached No. 2) and the Gerry Goffin and Carole King-penned “Natural Woman.”
In June 1968, she became the second African-American woman ever to adorn the cover of Time magazine (the first was tennis star Althea Gibson in 1957).
Between 1970 and ’72, Franklin released Spirit in the Dark, This Girl’s in Love With You, Live at Fillmore West, Young, Gifted and Black and Amazing Grace, one of the best-selling pure gospel albums of all time.
After recording the soundtrack album Sparkle (1976), Franklin left Atlantic for Clive Davis’ Arista Records, where she explored funk music and a more adult contemporary sound. Her 1982 album Jump to It, produced by Luther Vandross, went gold, and Who’s Zoomin’ Who? from 1985 contained the hits “Freeway of Love” and the spunky “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” (with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics).
The title track from 1998’s A Rose Is Still a Rose, written by Lauryn Hill, returned a rejuvenated Franklin to the pop charts. In 2011, she released her 40th studio album, A Woman Falling Out of Love, on her own Aretha Records. In 2014, Davis produced Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics for her.
Franklin, the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, performed “My Country Tis of Thee” at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
Franklin underwent surgery in 2010 after a report said she had pancreatic cancer (she denied she was stricken then) and canceled six months of public appearances. Her last show came in September at The Pavilion in Highland Park, Illinois.
Her death on Aug. 16 comes 41 years after Elvis Presley’s.
She had four sons, one just after she turned 14 and another before she was 17. She had two husbands: Ted White, who replaced her father as her manager and she said abused her, and actor Glynn Turman. Both marriages ended in divorce.
Funeral arrangements are forthcoming.
Asked what is it about music that inspires her, Franklin once said: “If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me, it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.”
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https://www.voanews.com/a/aretha-franklin-dies-/4531164.html
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en
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'Queen of Soul' Aretha Franklin Dies
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2018-08-16T13:59:14+00:00
|
Publicist says Queen of Soul died at her home in Detroit, Michigan Thursday
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Voice of America
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https://www.voanews.com/a/aretha-franklin-dies-/4531164.html
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Aretha Franklin, the American singer known to millions of fans around the world as the “Queen of Soul,” has died at the age of 76.
Franklin passed away Thursday in her hometown of Detroit, where she had been under hospice care after a long battle with cancer.
Born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, Franklin was raised in Detroit, where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a popular preacher. Her talent was recognized at a young age as she played piano and sang hymns at his church services.
Franklin moved into pop and jazz music at age 18 on the Columbia Records label. But her real breakthrough came in 1967 on Atlantic Records, which allowed her to sing with her natural gospel intensity for the first time.
She rocketed to national fame that year with a series of hit singles, including “Chain of Fools,” “A Natural Woman,” and her most famous song, “Respect,” her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was written by singer-songwriter Otis Redding, who died the year it was released in 1967. But Franklin transformed the song into an anthem for blacks and women by rewriting some of the lyrics and adding lines that spelled out the title: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.”
She eventually racked up more than 110 entries in Billboard magazine's charts, the most by any woman in the magazine’s history. In 1987, Franklin became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
She also recorded popular and acclaimed albums such as “Amazing Grace” and “Young, Gifted and Black.”
After a downturn in the late 1970s, Franklin's career rebounded with an appearance in the 1980 film “The Blues Brothers” and a new series of hits, including “Freeway of Love.”
Franklin struggled with weight and health problems, but even in her older years, her soaring voice remained a thing of wonder.
In 2009, she sang at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, thrilling the crowd with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
She made headlines again in 2016 when she sang a four-and-a-half-minute rendition of the U.S. national anthem before a Detroit Lions football game.
Paul McCartney was among those paying tribute to Franklin on Thursday. "Let’s all take a moment to give thanks for the beautiful life of Aretha Franklin, the Queen of our souls, who inspired us all for many many years. She will be missed but the memory of her greatness as a musician and a fine human being will live with us forever," he said on Twitter.
Elton John said "The loss of @ArethaFranklin is a blow for everybody who loves real music: Music from the heart, the soul and the Church. Her voice was unique, her piano playing underrated – she was one of my favourite pianists."
President Donald Trump said "The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, is dead. She was a great woman, with a wonderful gift from God, her voice. She will be missed!"
Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle sent "prayers and warmest sympathies to her family and all those moved by her song."
"Through her compositions and unmatched musicianship, Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade—our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect," the Obamas said in a statement. "Aretha may have passed on to a better place, but the gift of her music remains to inspire us all. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace."
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https://networks.h-net.org/node/79435/discussions/7961516/literature-nobel-era-comparative-theoretical-and-archival
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en
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KONF: Literature in the Nobel Era: Comparative, theoretical, and archival approaches to the Nobel Prize in Literature (25. bis 27. August 2021)
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https://networks.h-net.org/core/misc/favicon.ico
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2021-08-25T12:00:00+00:00
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Literature in the Nobel Era: Comparative, theoretical, and archival approaches to the Nobel Prize in Literature International Symposium (online). August 25–27, 2021
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en
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https://networks.h-net.org/node/79435/discussions/7961516/literature-nobel-era-comparative-theoretical-and-archival
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Literature in the Nobel Era: Comparative, theoretical, and archival approaches to the Nobel Prize in Literature
International Symposium (online). August 25–27, 2021
Convenors: Carlos Spoerhase, Jørgen Sneis, Jacob Habinek, Mats Malm, Sandra Richter.
A cooperation of Bielefeld University, Linköping University, the Swedish Academy, and the German Literature Archive.
Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Swedish Academy.
In 1895, Alfred Nobel famously signed his last will and testament, establishing that most of his fortune should be used to fund a series of prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 1901 the Literature Prize has been awarded to a total of 117 individuals writing in 25 languages.
“The Nobel Prizes for science and literature are all-powerful”, Ludwig Marcuse once observed. He goes on to elaborate: The person who gets one “is no longer a physicist or a novelist” but a “Nobel Prize Winner”. Marcuse certainly has a point. Given the massive amount of attention that the Nobel Prize and Nobel laureates receive in the press all over the world each year, the cultural reach of this award seems to be beyond dispute. Yet the actual workings and various functions of the Nobel Prize remain little known and poorly understood. In what sense and in whose case can a literary award be seen as “all-powerful”? In what ways has the Nobel Prize enabled, informed, or changed the reception of certain authors and their works or even the ways in which we think about or engage with literature altogether? To what extent does the worldwide public awareness of the Nobel Prize coincide with its actual impact on the global literary field in the 20th and 21st centuries, with its ability to shape global discourses and influence the behaviour of authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, agents, translators, journalists, the media, academia, archives, and the reading public?
The study of the Nobel Prize raises a number of methodological questions. How does one approach a subject of such complexity? How does one account for its international scope? The impact of the Nobel Prize seems ultimately to hinge on the significance of certain authors and their works. To what degree does the Nobel Prize mark a turning point in the careers of its laureates or even just such authors who have been publicly associated with it? And vice versa, how does this group of Nobel authors retroactively shape the image of the award? The question of authorship in the Nobel era seems to be a natural starting point in determining the impact of the award. Yet at the same time, it seems fair to assume that “Nobel Prize effects” may take various forms and also involve the very conditions under which literature is written, published, translated, traded with, and read. For this reason, we have opted for an interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretically founded approach to the Nobel Prize in Literature. Taking the collections of the German Literature Archive and the Swedish Academy as a starting point, we also wish to explore how an archival perspective can enrich the historical, critical, and theoretical inquiry into this award.
Our international symposium will bring together scholars in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies, translation studies, sociology, book history and economic history, as well as other areas relevant to the study of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The main goal is to combine critical and archival research with theoretical and methodological reflection, to inaugurate a global network of Nobel Prize scholarship, and to spark innovative collaboration across disciplines.
Program
Wednesday, 25 August 2021
14.30 Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy / Sandra Richter, Director of the German Literature
Archive: Welcome
14.45 Carlos Spoerhase, Jørgen Sneis, Bielefeld: Introduction: Literature in the Nobel Era
15.15 Break
15.30 Gisèle Sapiro, Paris (keynote lecture): The symbolic economy of the Nobel Prize and its role in the making of World
Literature
Moderation: Carlos Spoerhase, Bielefeld
16.30 Break
16.45 Fabien Accominotti, Madison, Wisconsin: Consecration as a Population-level Phenomenon
Phillipa K. Chong, Hamilton, Ontario / Vaughn Schmutz, Charlotte, USA: (Nobel) Winner takes all? The Nobel Effect
on Literary Reputation and Reviews
Jacob Habinek, Linköping: Disembedded Autonomy: The Social Structure of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Moderation: Jørgen Sneis, Bielefeld
17.45 Break
18.00 Public Evening Program (in German) with Nobel laureate Herta Müller
Thursday, 26 August 2021
10.00 Alexander Bareis, Lund: Most ideal – the Aesthetic Standards of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Methodological and
Theoretical Perspectives
Rebecca Braun, Galway: Celebrating Literature? What Modes of Authorship Do to Literary Prizes
Tim Sommer, Heidelberg: Archival Economies: Valuing the Papers of Twenty-First-Century Nobel Laureates
Moderation: Günter Leypoldt, Heidelberg
11.00 Break
11.15 Nils Hansson, Düsseldorf: The Enactment of Physician-Authors in Nobel Nominations
Stevie Marsden, Derby: If they gave the Oscar to Books: Understanding Literary Prize Hierarchies
John Raimo, New York: Anti-Nobels: The Prix International des éditeurs and the Prix Formentor, 1960–1968
Moderation: Jacob Habinek, Linköping
12.15 Break
14.00 Clara Lévy, Paris: Patrick Modiano and the Nobel Prize in Literature
Jiřina Šmejkalová, Prag: Nobel Prize as a Cold War Product (?): The Case of Jaroslav Seifert
Stefanie Leuenberger, Bern: Awarding the Nobel Prize in 1919: The Case of Carl Spitteler
Moderation: Madeleine Brook, Marbach
15.00 Break
15.15 Alexander Nebrig, Urs Büttner, Düsseldorf: Nobel Prizes for Literature and the International Book Market
Nadine Rahner, Freiburg: Analogies and Differences: Analysis of the Publishing Peritext in German Editions of
Selected Works by Pasternak, Sholokov, and Solzhenitsyn
Jana Rüegg, Uppsala: Prestigious Publishing: The Swedish Publishing of Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature
1970–2016
Moderation: Jørgen Sneis, Bielefeld
16.15 Break
18.00 James English, Philadelphia (keynote lecture): The Nobel and the Economics of Literary Prestige in the 21st Century
Moderation: Günter Leypoldt, Heidelberg
Friday, 27 August 2021
10.00 Michael Ka-Chi Cheuk, Hong Kong: The Nobel Prize as Censorship
Takashi Inoue, Tokyo: Japan and the Nobel Prize in Literature
Afrida Aainun Murshida, Gangtok, Sikkim: Metaphor of Nationalism in Indian Nobel Laureates’ works: Comparing
Tagore and Naipaul
Moderation: Carlos Spoerhase, Bielefeld
11.00 Break
11.15 Pablo Faúndez Morán, Valparaiso: Transformations surrounding the Nobel Prize: The case of Gabriela Mistral
Coletta Kandemiri, Windhoek: Of “greatest benefit on humankind”: The Pragmatic Autopsy of African Nobel Prize
Winners in Literature
Hülya Yildiz, Ankara: The Road To Nobel: A Comparative Study of Two Nobel Contenders
Moderation: Madeleine Brook, Marbach
12.15 Break
14.00 Kerstin Bohne, Oldenburg: The Relevance of Translations in the Awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Sandra Richter, Astghik Antonyan, Dîlan Çakir, Giovanna Carlesso, Jie Han, Maria Kraxenberger, Katharina Reeb,
Achim Schmid, Merisa Taranis, Xiaocui Qiu, Stuttgart: Is there a Nobel Effect? Translations after the Nobel Prize
Kathrin Yacavone, Köln: Photographic Author Portraits: A Visual Pantheon of Literary Nobel Prize Laureates
15.00 Break
15.15 Pieter Vermeulen, Leuven (closing lecture): The Indie Nobel? Stockholm, New York, and the Geography of Value
Moderation: Mats Malm, Gothenburg
16.15 Carlos Spoerhase, Jørgen Sneis, Bielefeld: Outlook: Nobel Prize Scholarship
18.00 Public evening program with Michael Krüger, Anders Olsson and Jan Bürger
Moderation: Jan Bürger, Marbach
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Redaktion: Constanze Baum – Lukas Büsse – Mark-Georg Dehrmann – Nils Gelker – Markus Malo – Alexander Nebrig – Johannes Schmidt
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nobel-Prize
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Nobel Prize | Definition, History, Winners, & Facts
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1999-11-05T00:00:00+00:00
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Nobel Prize, any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed by Alfred Nobel.
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en
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/favicon.png
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nobel-Prize
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Nobel Prize
award
Recent News
July 22, 2024, 6:21 AM ET (ABC News (U.S.))
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Nobel Prize, any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual achievement in the world. To browse Nobel Prize winners alphabetically, chronologically, and by prize, see below.
In the will he drafted in 1895, Nobel instructed that most of his fortune be set aside as a fund for the awarding of five annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” These prizes as established by his will are the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Nobel Prize for Peace. The first distribution of the prizes took place on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. An additional award, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden and was first awarded in 1969. Although not technically a Nobel Prize, it is identified with the award; its winners are announced with the Nobel Prize recipients, and the Prize in Economic Sciences is presented at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.
After Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation was set up to carry out the provisions of his will and to administer his funds. In his will, he had stipulated that four different institutions—three Swedish and one Norwegian—should award the prizes. From Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confers the prizes for physics, chemistry, and economics, the Karolinska Institute confers the prize for physiology or medicine, and the Swedish Academy confers the prize for literature. The Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo confers the prize for peace. The Nobel Foundation is the legal owner and functional administrator of the funds and serves as the joint administrative body of the prize-awarding institutions, but it is not concerned with the prize deliberations or decisions, which rest exclusively with the four institutions.
The selection process
The prestige of the Nobel Prize stems in part from the considerable research that goes into the selection of the prizewinners. Although the winners are announced in October and November, the selection process begins in the early autumn of the preceding year, when the prize-awarding institutions invite more than 6,000 individuals to propose, or nominate, candidates for the prizes. Some 1,000 people submit nominations for each prize, and the number of nominees usually ranges from 100 to about 250. Among those nominating are Nobel laureates, members of the prize-awarding institutions themselves; scholars active in the fields of physics, chemistry, economics, and physiology or medicine; and officials and members of diverse universities and learned academies. The respondents must supply a written proposal that details their candidates’ worthiness. Self-nomination automatically disqualifies the nominee. Prize proposals must be submitted to the Nobel Committees on or before January 31 of the award year.
Britannica Quiz
A Nobel Prize for Literature (Mostly) Quiz
On February 1 the six Nobel Committees—one for each prize category—start their work on the nominations received. Outside experts are frequently consulted during the process in order to help the committees determine the originality and significance of each nominee’s contribution. During September and early October the Nobel Committees have accomplished their work and submit their recommendations to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the other prize-awarding institutions. A committee’s recommendation is usually but not invariably followed. The deliberations and the voting within these institutions are secret at all stages. The final decision by the awarders must be made by November 15. Prizes may be given only to individuals, except the Peace Prize, which may also be conferred upon an institution. An individual may not be nominated posthumously, but a winner who dies before receiving the prize may be awarded it posthumously, as with Dag Hammarskjöld (for peace; 1961), Erik Axel Karlfeldt (for literature; 1931), and Ralph M. Steinman (for physiology or medicine; 2011). (Steinman was named a winner several days after his death, which was unbeknownst to the Nobel Assembly. It was decided that he would remain a Nobel laureate, since the purpose of the posthumous rule was to prevent prizes being deliberately awarded to deceased individuals.) The awards may not be appealed. Official support, whether diplomatic or political, for a certain candidate has no bearing on the award process because the prize awarders, as such, are independent of the state.
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https://english.elpais.com/news/mario-vargas-llosa/
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Mario Vargas Llosa in EL PAÍS English
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"Ediciones EL PAÍS"
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2024-01-20T16:00:51+01:00
|
All the news about Mario Vargas Llosa published in EL PAÍS. Information, articles and breaking news about Mario Vargas Llosa
|
en
|
https://static.elpais.com/dist/resources/images/favicon.ico
|
EL PAÍS English
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https://english.elpais.com/news/mario-vargas-llosa/
|
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘I dedicate my silence to you’: Vargas Llosa returns to Peru with his last novel before retiring
After a writing career of over 60 years, the Nobel Prize winner says goodbye with a story in which fiction is inserted into an essay about criolla music as a magical national solution for the country’s disunity and inequality
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa dedicates latest novel to Patricia, his cousin and ex-wife
Martín Bianchi|Madrid|
Set in the Nobel laureate’s native Peru and written while he was still with Isabel Preysler, ‘Le dedico mi silencio’ will be released on October 26
literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature’s history of snubs and long-forgotten winners
Shaped by the political and literary climate of the time, the award does not assure a spot in the literary canon and often overlooks exceptional authors
WRITERS
When Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel García Márquez
The writer Jaime Bayly novels the blow that broke the friendship between the Nobel Prize winners
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Mario Vargas Llosa: ‘I have no regrets’
Manuel Jabois|Madrid|
The Spanish-Peruvian author and Nobel laureate spoke with EL PAÍS at his home in Madrid ahead of his induction into the prestigious Académie Française
Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa inducted into Académie Française
Marc Bassets|Paris|
The Spanish-Peruvian writer is the first to access the hallowed institution without having ever written in French. The ceremony was attended by former Spanish monarch Juan Carlos
CELEBRITY COUPLES
Why Paul Mescal and Phoebe Bridgers’ rumored breakup broke the internet
The actor and singer’s relationship unfolded over Twitter and Instagram, and the internet is in mourning after their alleged separation. We analyze the reasons why
CELEBRITY NEWS
Celebrity couples: The breakups, rekindled romances and new partners of 2022
Andrea Jiménez|Madrid|
Last year, Shakira and Gerard Piqué announced their shock separation, while Australian actress Rebel Wilson confirmed her relationship with Ramona Agruma
CELEBRITIES
Isabel Preysler and Mario Vargas Llosa split up after eight years together
The businesswoman confirmed the breakup in brief statements to ‘¡Hola!’ magazine: ‘We have decided to end our relationship definitively’
POLITICAL CRISIS IN PERU
10 presidents of Peru, more than 20 years of instability
Inés Santaeulalia|Lima|
With the exception of a couple of interim presidents who held office briefly, the rest of the country’s modern leaders have suffered tragic fates, including jail terms, exile, or death by suicide
ELECTIONS IN COLOMBIA
Mario Vargas Llosa on Colombia elections: ‘They have voted badly. Let’s see what Petro does’
The Nobel Prize winner underscores that the country has a legal framework that the new president, a former guerrilla fighter, must respect
PANDORA PAPERS
Mario Vargas Llosa was listed in 2015 as titleholder of an offshore company
A US investment bank briefly used a firm in the Nobel Prize-winner’s name to manage his assets. The Peruvian author declared his portfolio to the Spanish tax authorities when he became a resident in 2017
Interview
Mario Vargas Llosa: “Political correctness is the enemy of freedom”
Besides writing prize-winning fiction, the Nobel Laureate has fought tirelessly for civil liberties. With his new book, ‘The Call of the Tribe,’ he promotes liberal thought and pays tribute to seven authors who embrace it. We talk to him about liberalism, intellectual blindness and the dangers facing democracy today
INTERVIEW
Vargas Llosa: “My hope is that the government has enough energy to prevent a coup”
El País|Madrid|
The Nobel Prize winner says that the planned Catalan referendum is “illegal, anachronistic and absurd”
Literary feud
Vargas Llosa breaks his silence over friendship with García Márquez
Javier Rodríguez Marcos|San Lorenzo de El Escorial|
Nobel laureate discusses ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ at Spanish open university course in Madrid
THE EFFECTS OF THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
The terror of the children
In part two of this special report, Nobel literature prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa describes Israeli defense forces’ system to “prevent terror by sowing panic” among Palestinian children and youths
THE EFECTS OF THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
The condemned villages of the West Bank
Nobel literature prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa offers a first-hand account of life in the Palestinian villages as they struggle against Israeli occupation
LITERATURE
Mario Vargas Llosa: the ‘Rolling Stone’ of Spanish-language literature
Juan Cruz|Madrid|
Around 400 guests celebrate the Nobel winner’s 80th birthday at a Madrid ceremony
Venezuela’s Globovisión censors TV interview with author Vargas Llosa
Alfredo Meza|Caracas|
Program host Shirley Varnagy resigns in protest, joining 50 others who have recently left station
Vargas Llosa backs Caracas student protests against Chavismo
Ewald Scharfenberg|Caracas|
“Your dead, your tortured men and women and your battles are ours, too,” the Nobel laureate said during a visit to Venezuela
INTERVIEW
“It would be a tragedy if the arts became mere entertainment”
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa talks about his latest book, Civilization as Entertainment In it, he examines the way the arts have been reduced to chaos
Vargas Llosa snubs Cervantes Institute job
El País|Madrid|
Peruvian author tells king: Thanks, but no thanks
Vargas Llosa thanks Argentina’s president for opposing speech ban
Correo El País Semanal|Buenos Aires|
Intellectuals had wanted to block writer’s book-fair address
Vargas Llosa and his censors
El País|Madrid|
Franco’s Bibliographic Orientation Section took offense at many of the 2010 Nobel-winner’s early works, forcing him to tone down what they described as “obscene” language
|
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wrong_mix_range_award_00063
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FactBench
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3
| 94 |
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-bombardment-of-abo-spitteler-birnbaum/
|
en
|
The Bombardment of Åbo – HFS Books
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https://hfs2.tenandtwo.io/api/image/products/the-bombardment-of-abo-spitteler-birnbaum
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This farcical tale tells how the British bombing of a Finnish port city changes the life of the Russian governor, his wife, their cook, and the cook's Finnish fiancé. The story takes place during a Nordic offshoot of the Crimean conflict, known as the Åland War, in which a British-French naval force...
|
en
|
HFS Books
|
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-bombardment-of-abo-spitteler-birnbaum/
|
This farcical tale tells how the British bombing of a Finnish port city changes the life of the Russian governor, his wife, their cook, and the cook's Finnish fiancé. The story takes place during a Nordic offshoot of the Crimean conflict, known as the Åland War, in which a British-French naval force attacked military and civilian facilities on the coast of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1854–1856. The location of the novella is Åbo, today’s Turku, where soldiers in the Russian garrison enjoy life, Cossacks dance and drink, and the governor’s wife is preoccupied about her cook’s marriage to a local lad, against which the governor and the English admiral devise a plot.
After studies in Swiss and German universities, Carl Spitteler worked in Russia between 1871 and 1879 as the private tutor in the family of a Finnish general. In the process he came to know Finnish and Baltic noble families in Saint Petersburg and Finland. He published this story in 1889, and went on to become, in 1919, the first Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The Bombardment of Åbo is an ironic Western gaze on life and culture in the Tsarist Empire. Spitteler’s deeply held pacifism breaks through his otherwise sarcastic description of the characters and episodes in the novella.
|
|||
wrong_mix_range_award_00063
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FactBench
|
3
| 82 |
en
|
File:Carl spitteler 1905.jpg
|
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/static/apple-touch/commons.png
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This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.
You must also include a United States public domain tag to indicate why this work is in the public domain in the United States. Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Jamaica has 95 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the rule of the shorter term. Honduras has a general copyright term of 75 years, but it does implement the rule of the shorter term. Copyright may extend on works created by French who died for France in World War II (more information), Russians who served in the Eastern Front of World War II (known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia) and posthumously rehabilitated victims of Soviet repressions (more information).
|
||||||||
wrong_mix_range_award_00063
|
FactBench
|
0
| 38 |
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv
|
en
|
OpenRefine/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv at master · OpenRefine/OpenRefine
|
https://opengraph.githubassets.com/b45b8eb7975f6b6478ef991fb041c7b04fe731933f6011f37262c7e8cfe47685/OpenRefine/OpenRefine
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https://opengraph.githubassets.com/b45b8eb7975f6b6478ef991fb041c7b04fe731933f6011f37262c7e8cfe47685/OpenRefine/OpenRefine
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OpenRefine is a free, open source power tool for working with messy data and improving it - OpenRefine/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv at master · OpenRefine/OpenRefine
|
en
|
GitHub
|
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv
|
Skip to content
Navigation Menu
|
|||
wrong_mix_range_award_00063
|
FactBench
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1
| 54 |
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv
|
en
|
OpenRefine/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv at master · OpenRefine/OpenRefine
|
https://opengraph.githubassets.com/b45b8eb7975f6b6478ef991fb041c7b04fe731933f6011f37262c7e8cfe47685/OpenRefine/OpenRefine
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https://opengraph.githubassets.com/b45b8eb7975f6b6478ef991fb041c7b04fe731933f6011f37262c7e8cfe47685/OpenRefine/OpenRefine
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[] |
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OpenRefine is a free, open source power tool for working with messy data and improving it - OpenRefine/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv at master · OpenRefine/OpenRefine
|
en
|
GitHub
|
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/tests/data/nobel-prize-winners.csv
|
Skip to content
Navigation Menu
|
|||
wrong_mix_range_award_00063
|
FactBench
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1
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https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1919/spitteler/facts/
|
en
|
Carl Spitteler – Facts
|
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1919 was awarded to Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler "in special appreciation of his epic, <I>Olympian Spring</I>"
|
en
|
NobelPrize.org
|
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1919/spitteler/facts/
|
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1919
Residence at the time of the award: Switzerland
Prize motivation: “in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring”
Language: German
Carl Spitteler received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1920.
Prize share: 1/1
Life
Carl Spitteler was born in Liestal, Switzerland. Although he studied law and theology, he declined a position as a pastor to dedicate himself to writing. He worked as a tutor in Russia between 1871 and 1879 before returning to Switzerland. He gave up teaching in 1885 and devoted himself to writing poetry and a career as a journalist. In 1892, he settled in Luzern.
Work
Carl Spittler published his first collection of poems, Prometheus und Epithemus (1881), under the pseudonym of Carl Felix Tandem. Between 1900 and 1905, he wrote the epic poem “Olympic Spring,” an allegory written in iambic hexameter. The work mixes fantastic, naturalistic, religious, and mythological themes. The novel Imago (1906) influenced Jungian psychoanalysis as Jung based his use of “imago” on Spitteler’s novel.
|
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wrong_mix_range_award_00063
|
FactBench
|
0
| 22 |
https://www.abebooks.com/books/nobel-prize-in-literature-winners
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en
|
Nobel Prize in Literature winners
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2022-09-21T00:00:00
|
The Nobel Prize for Literature is the world’s most important international literary honor. Browse the complete list of winning authors since 1901.
|
en
|
https://www.abebooks.com/favicon.ico
|
AbeBooks
|
https://www.abebooks.com/books/nobel-prize-in-literature-winners
|
The Nobel Prize for Literature is the world’s most important international literary honor. Alfred Nobel - the Swedish scientist, engineer, and inventor - left his fortune to establish awards for physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, peace, and literature.
The prizes began in 1901, and the first winner for literature was the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme. The winner is decided by a committee consisting of members from the Swedish Academy, which was founded in 1786. The Swedish Academy features 18 people of note – such as writers, scholars, and historians - who have the role for life. The prize is awarded for a writer’s overall body of work although individual works of importance have been cited at times.
Past winners include Annie Ernaux, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, José Saramago, Pablo Neruda, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909.
The Nobel Prize looks for excellence in more than just fiction. Non-fiction authors (Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell), poets (such as T.S. Eliot), playwrights (such as Harold Pinter and Nelly Sachs), a short story writer (Alice Munro), and even a singer/songwriter, Bob Dylan, have been honored.
The 2023 winner is Jon Fosse, one of Norway’s most prominent and celebrated playwrights and novelists. His works, often marked by their minimalist style and deep existential themes, explore the interior lives of rather solitary characters. He published his first novel, “Red, Black,” in 1983, and his debut play Someone Is Going to Come followed in 1992. His work A New Name: Septology VI-VII was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and his other major works include Melancholy; Morning and Evening and Aliss at the Fire.
|
||
wrong_mix_range_award_00063
|
FactBench
|
3
| 2 |
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Spitteler
|
en
|
Carl Spitteler | Nobel Prize, Symbolist Poetry, Swiss Literature
|
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Carl Spitteler was a Swiss poet of visionary imagination and author of pessimistic yet heroic verse. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919. Spitteler was a private tutor for eight years in Russia and Finland. After he returned to Switzerland in 1879, he made his living as a teacher
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Spitteler
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Carl Spitteler (born April 24, 1845, Liestal, Switz.—died Dec. 29, 1924, Lucerne) was a Swiss poet of visionary imagination and author of pessimistic yet heroic verse. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.
Spitteler was a private tutor for eight years in Russia and Finland. After he returned to Switzerland in 1879, he made his living as a teacher and journalist. He contributed articles to Der Kunstwart and was an editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1892 a legacy enabled him to settle in Lucerne and devote himself to creative work.
Britannica Quiz
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Spitteler’s first great poetic work was the mythical epic Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881). His second great work (which won him the Nobel Prize) was the poetic epic Der olympische Frühling (1900–05; revised 1910; “The Olympic Spring”), in which he found full scope for bold invention and vividly expressive power. The last years of his life were given up to rewriting his first work. Tighter in composition than the early version and, like Der olympische Frühling, in rhyming couplets, it appeared in 1924 under the title Prometheus der Dulder (“Prometheus the Long-Suffering”).
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https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/1919-1910/
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All Nobel Prizes in Literature
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All Nobel Prizes in Literature
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NobelPrize.org
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https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature
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The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 116 times to 120 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2023. Click on the links to get more information.
Find all prizes in | physics | chemistry | physiology or medicine | literature | peace | economic sciences | all categories
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 will be announced on Thursday 10 October, 13:00 CEST at the earliest.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1919
“in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1918
“No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1917
“for his varied and rich poetry, which is inspired by lofty ideals”
“for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1916
“in recognition of his significance as the leading representative of a new era in our literature”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1915
“as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1914
“No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913
“because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1912
“primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1911
“in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1910
“as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories”
To cite this section
MLA style: All Nobel Prizes in Literature. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Wed. 24 Jul 2024. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature>
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/26/in-from-the-cold
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In From the Cold
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2005-12-26T00:00:00
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The return of Knut Hamsun.
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https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico
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The New Yorker
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/26/in-from-the-cold
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I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that’s when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again.
I knew what that was about, of course. During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator; he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. It was baffling: how could the man who wrote “Hunger,” “Mysteries,” and “Pan”—those surpassingly original books—have had any sympathy for Nazis? Hamsun was not some bitter second-rater. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and, unlike other Fascist sympathizers, such as Céline and Pound, he had a deep and lasting grip on his public, that of an enchanter. Singer admitted to being “hypnotized” by him; Hesse called him his favorite writer; Hemingway recommended his novels to Scott Fitzgerald; Gide compared him to Dostoyevsky, but believed that Hamsun was “perhaps even more subtle.” The list of those who loved his sly, anarchic voice is long.
Half a century after Hamsun’s death, his politics and, especially, his wartime behavior remain confounding. But, with the recent publication, in Norway, of a two-volume biography by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, of nearly a thousand pages, he no longer seems quite so elusive. And, if there is not yet a Hamsun revival, certainly a Hamsun reëmergence is under way. Books that were never available in English, such as a bizarre journal about a half-imagined journey to the Caucasus (“In Wonderland”), some of the short stories, the “wanderer” novels of middle age, and even some early journalism, have recently appeared in translation, along with new editions of his most famous books. Two competing English versions of both “Hunger” and “Pan” are available, and last month Penguin issued a fresh translation of “Victoria.” In Norway and Denmark, early editions of Hamsun are fetching ever-higher prices, though these are mostly the books he wrote long before the rise of Fascism.
The Scandinavian countries, in a period of less than a century, produced an extraordinary body of literature; an abbreviated list includes Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Jens Peter Jacobsen, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and Sigrid Undset. None of them were so beguiling as Hamsun, though, whose works include twenty novels, six plays, two volumes of poetry, and three collections of stories. Most compelling are the early novels, and, in particular, “Hunger”—a sort of hallucinatory “New Grub Street,” overheated, half-crazed, and funny.
A hint of the novel’s existence came in 1888, when one of its four sections appeared in a short-lived Danish literary journal called Ny Jord (“New Ground”). The author was listed as “Anonymous,” but the tiny Dano-Norwegian literary community quickly learned his name. Hamsun, not yet thirty, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with, and more so when, a year later, he published his first book, “From the Cultural Life of Modern America,” a rude, amusing, and occasionally stupid attack on the New World, which the critic Georg Brandes (Nietzsche’s early champion) praised highly. When “Hunger” came out, in 1890, Hamsun informed reviewers that he was trying something different; he was not, he insisted, interested in marriages and balls—the book was not really a novel at all. Rather, as he told a friend, “What interests me are my little soul’s endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body.”
Hamsun’s narrator, a writer, is a careful cataloguer of his own psychological states—no victim but, like Hamsun himself, a subversive, generational voice. Not a great deal happens, and yet from the first line—“It was in that time when I walked around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one can leave without being marked by it”—the novel’s oddly joyful desperation never flags. Poor, ambitious freelance writers in Western cities may no longer be starving, but certainly they suffer the same humiliations as Hamsun’s narrator: editors pay them very little, make them wait endlessly for a reply, and are indifferent to their enormous God-given talents. More than once, Hamsun’s famished hero finds that his “nervous state had gotten out of hand,” as when, at one point, he is unable to sleep:
Suddenly I snap my fingers several times and laugh. What the hell was this! Ha! I imagined I had found a new word. I sit up in bed and say, It’s not found in the language, I have invented it—Kuboå. It does have letters like a word—sweet Jesus, man, you have invented a word . . . Kuboå . . . of enormous grammatical importance. The word stood out sharply against the darkness in front of me. I sit with open eyes, amazed at my discovery and laughing for joy. Then I start whispering: they might be spying on me and I intended to keep my invention a secret. I had crossed over into the pure madness of hunger.
The first section ends with the narrator in a state of near-bliss after getting ten kroner for a feuilleton, but his over-all situation does not seem likely to improve. The novel breaks grammatical rules, tenses skip around, and the narrator seems increasingly unhinged. By the end, when the narrator boards a ship, it is as if Hamsun had parted the curtain of the nineteenth century and were peering into the absurdities of the twentieth.
“Hunger” was a literary sensation, although the critical response was mixed. Hamsun naturally hoped that Brandes, a voice of modernism, would become an ally, but Brandes found the book monotonous, a judgment so painful to Hamsun that he wrote to him, saying, “I don’t feel completely alone without you—but without your understanding, it’s useless for me to continue.” He believed that Brandes hadn’t read enough of the novel: “If we add it up I don’t think you’d find more psychical emotions in ‘Raskolnikov’ than in my book.” Brandes and others, however, were beginning to realize that Hamsun not only was an uncomfortable fit with his time but was in many ways an impossible, perhaps even a dangerous, figure.
Knut Hamsun—baptized Knud Pedersen—was born in 1859 in rural central Norway. Three years later, the family moved to Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, to work at Hamsund, a farm that belonged to his uncle. Hamsun did not attend school until he was nine, and then not for very long; his childhood was isolated and miserable. His uncle, whom he later described as “a confirmed bachelor, stingy and hot-tempered,” beat him with a ruler and otherwise abused him; but he was also in charge of the local library, and Hamsun more or less taught himself Norwegian, which then, in its written form, was almost identical to Danish. His modest background and his lack of formal education were points of both great sensitivity and pride; in a letter to Brandes many years later, he asked, “What does someone like me know—born a peasant-farmer, without a degree in anything, unable to afford to sit and read philosophy?”
In his precocious late teens, Hamsun had two clumsy stories published in very limited editions, and, on the strength of this, he asked a wealthy Norwegian merchant named Erasmus B. K. Zahl for financial backing. He was, he wrote, “no one’s favorite, with nothing but ordinary schooling,” and yet “I’ve managed to bring my knowledge-thirsty soul a little higher than my just-as-unprivileged equals.” To Hamsun’s shock, Zahl sent him sixteen hundred kroner, then worth about four hundred dollars. Still, the money didn’t go very far, and Hamsun struggled to survive, mostly in Copenhagen, which at the time was the center of cultural gravity in Scandinavia. In the eighteen-eighties, he twice made his way to America. He stopped in New York, where he was amazed by an elevated railway that went “up in the air, above the people’s houses,” but he stayed mainly in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He also spent eight months in Chicago as a cable-car conductor, and worked on a large farm in the Dakota Territory, a setting for several early stories. Hamsun’s opinion of the country was mixed. He saw it as overwhelmed by materialism and excessive patriotism, and at one point he wore a black ribbon in support of four anarchists sentenced to hang after the Haymarket bombing, in Chicago. But he admired the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And he admired Mark Twain, whom he saw give a lecture in New York, and from whom he certainly learned a great deal about the use of the vernacular. Hamsun went home in the summer of 1888 and never returned.
A year after the publication of “Hunger,” Hamsun set out on the lecture circuit in Norway, brazenly attacking the older literary generation; a particular target was Ibsen, who was then sixty-three and had just returned after twenty-seven years abroad. When Hamsun spoke in Kristiania (now Oslo), Ibsen had a front-row seat, and was joined by, among others, the composer Edvard Grieg, the Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and a young concert pianist, Hildur Andersen, who had become Ibsen’s consort. Half an hour into the talk, as Kolloen describes it, Hamsun let loose, accusing Ibsen of bringing a “coarse and spurious” psychological understanding to the stage. Ibsen, for his part, just sat there, impassively. (He is believed to have had Hamsun in mind when he wrote “The Master Builder,” published the following year. The play is about an aging architect who is terrified of being outdone by the new generation. “I’ve begun to grow afraid—so awfully afraid—of the young,” he says.)
Hamsun was by then the very portrait of a young artist, complete with pince-nez; a contemporary described him as “dangerous for all women, interesting and striking.” One gets glimpses of this in his second novel, “Mysteries” (1892) —an apt title for one of his oddest and richest books. Everything about it is a little mysterious, from the moment “a stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a remarkable, eccentric charlatan who did a lot of curious things.” It’s not clear why Nagel is there or what he’s getting out of staying. He falls obsessively in love with Dagny Kielland, a clergyman’s daughter, and has an affair with an older woman; he carries a violin case, but there’s almost certainly no violin inside. He is probably borderline insane, and definitely suicidal; although the novel has a third-person narrator, it is every bit as inflamed as “Hunger.” Hamsun’s able English-born biographer Robert Ferguson quotes Hamsun’s own description of the book: “The hero of ‘Mysteries’ is a poseur, a pathological phenomenon, who is part madman and part genius”—which sounds very much like the author. The novel is somewhat disjointed; irrational monologues alternate with discussions of Marx or Tolstoy or Ibsen, whose plays, not surprisingly, are dismissed by Nagel as “dramatized wood pulp.”
The reviews, again, were mixed; one critic said that Hamsun “hadn’t given up the sickly hallucinations of ‘Hunger,’ ” and he was labelled an opportunistic copier of modern Russian literature. Today, one can recognize in “Mysteries” the shape and spirit of the modern novel, produced at a time when the modern novel did not yet exist. Hamsun’s next two books, “Editor Lynge” and “Shallow Soil,” were romans à clef—the first about an unloved newspaper editor and the second a disparaging look at the artistic community in Kristiania—and deserve the obscurity into which they have fallen. But then came “Pan,” published in 1894, a short, sexy, lyrical novel filled with hints of the supernatural. Hamsun, in his flawed English, described “Pan” with considerable accuracy in a letter to its German publisher, Albert Langen: “Think of the Nordland in Norway, this regions of the Lapper, the mysteries, the grand superstitions, the midnight-sun, think of J. J. Rousseau in the regions, making acquaintance with a Nordlands girl—that is my book.” It’s told as a memoir by one Thomas Glahn, who has moved to the northern woods with his dog, Aesop, and becomes romantically entangled with Edvarda, the daughter of a rich local merchant. Glahn, with his “animal eyes,” is, like Nagel, drawn to irrational acts.
At one point, Edvarda compares Glahn unfavorably with a rival, a lame physician. “Even if you were lame, on top of everything, you couldn’t hold your own against him,” she insists. Glahn later begins to brood:
No, even if I was lame on top of everything, I couldn’t hold my own against the Doctor, could I? I definitely wouldn’t be able to hold my own against him; those were her words. . . . Standing in the middle of the floor, I cock my gun, place the muzzle against my left instep, and pull the trigger. The shot pierces the middle of my foot and goes through the floor. Aesop gives a short, frightened yelp.
“Pan” is like that; Glahn and Edvarda torment themselves as much as they torment each other—Glahn does things like tossing one of Edvarda’s shoes into the water “whether for joy at her being so near or from some urge to assert myself and remind her of my existence.” Among the surprises of the book is its structure, which includes an epilogue, “Glahn’s Death,” told by a second narrator, who seems to belong to another novel entirely. No matter; Glahn’s narrative and Glahn’s death somehow belong together. Hamsun wrote to Langen that “every chapter is a poem, every line worked hard on,” and every page, he thought, was “havey of thoughts and fantasi.”
Hamsun’s next novel, “Victoria,” an overwrought, dazzling, painfully class-conscious, and lugubrious romance about a miller’s son who loves an aristocrat’s daughter, came four years later—just after Hamsun married Bergljot Bech, the daughter of a socially prominent Norwegian family—and was Hamsun’s first real financial success. It was six more years before his next novel, the slight “Dreamers,” appeared, and after that Hamsun’s career began to take a somewhat different path.
Ingar Sletten Kolloen is the first Hamsun biographer to have full access to the Hamsun archive, and in Norway his book set off intense discussion about the writer’s collaboration and about his treatment by the authorities after the war. Kolloen is particularly good on Hamsun’s personal life: his second marriage, roiled by jealousy and fury, to the actress Marie Andersen, when he was forty-nine and she was twenty-seven; and his relationship with his children, a daughter with Bergljot and two sons and two daughters with Marie. One gets glimpses of Hamsun’s interest in world affairs, but it is a rather narrow interest: a belief in the destiny of Germany, and, for reasons that no one has ever quite figured out, a hatred of England. Robert Ferguson notes that Hamsun had nurtured this prejudice from his youth, and one can only suppose that a few personal encounters helped him form a view of an entire nation; as Kolloen and others have remarked, the British were to Hamsun what the Jews were to the Nazis. Englishmen appear in arrogant walk-on roles in several of his books. In the middle of “In Wonderland,” Hamsun recalls a Munich streetcar ride: “A little girl . . . falls, gets in between the horses and is trampled, hurt. But we manage to pull her out alive. Meanwhile the Brit is smoking his pipe. When it’s all over and the driver delays a moment before going on, the Brit looks at his watch in irritation,” and asks for a refund of his fare. In two novels, “Benoni” and “Rosa,” a caricatured Englishman meets and then marries Edvarda, the girl from “Pan,” and in “The Last Joy,” from 1912, Hamsun couldn’t contain himself: “England will soon have to establish old folks’ homes for its children, most likely. It unsexes its people with sports and fixed ideas; if Germany hadn’t kept it in a state of perpetual uneasiness, it would have turned to pederasty in a couple of generations.” Possibly, these views became amplified over the years—during the First World War and afterward—for another, more selfish reason: England never really went for Hamsun’s books, while the German reading public adored him from the start.
In the new century, Hamsun seemed to mourn his life in the previous one; in the spring of 1907, he delivered a lecture, “Honor the Young,” in which, nearing fifty, he denounced the Fourth Commandment and, with it, his parents’ generation. (Kolloen notes that Hamsun was so busy with this lecture that he didn’t have time to travel to Hamarøy for his father’s funeral.) After “The Last Joy,” as if acknowledging that he was no longer a reliably youthful narrator, Hamsun abandoned the first-person voice entirely; with “Segelfoss Town,” in 1915, he began to write bloated two-volume novels, set in small towns populated by tramps, peddlers, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats. By far the most successful of these was “Growth of the Soil,” published in 1917—an epic saga about the tribulations and joys of Isak, a farmer-settler, and Inger, a woman with a harelip with whom he makes a life.
“Growth of the Soil” was a worldwide sensation; in Norway, a first printing of eighteen thousand copies sold out in about three weeks—an extraordinary number in a country with a population under three million—and almost from the day of publication there were rumors that Hamsun would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When no literature prize was awarded in 1918, the betting was that he would get it in 1919, when he turned sixty, but that year the Swedish Academy chose a Swiss, Carl Spitteler, known for his four-volume “Olympian Spring.” When Hamsun won, in 1920, it was chiefly because of “Growth of the Soil,” which the Academy saw as a lesson of “heroic struggle.” The book has its share of darkness—a central event is the murder of an infant—but it was above all a celebration of simple rural virtues. It also may strike readers today as the sort of self-important novel that the young Hamsun would have mocked. “The long, long path over the marshes and into the woods—who has been there?” it begins portentously. “Man, a man, the first one who was there. There was no path before him.” Hamsun by then no longer enjoyed public appearances, and he went almost reluctantly to the ceremony, in Stockholm, where, in a curious echo of his “Honor the Young” pronouncements, he said something very sad and very strange: “What I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry—to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave. . . . Today riches and honors have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth.”
In the nineteen-seventies, a Dane named Thorkild Hansen wrote “Processen mod Hamsun” (“Hamsun’s Trial”), a three-volume study that more or less concluded that Hamsun’s Nazism was a result of old age (Hamsun was eighty-one in April of 1940, when the Germans invaded); of deafness (even the radio was relatively useless to him); of isolation (he was living at Nørholm, his estate in southern Norway); and of the influence of his wife, Marie, whose enthusiasm for Nazi Germany is well documented. Robert Ferguson’s 1987 biography more or less endorsed the idea that Hamsun never fully understood the vileness to which he lent his name, a comforting view to people like me, who not only loved Hamsun but could not believe that his sympathies for the occupiers went very deep. (The excellent 1996 movie “Hamsun,” in which Max von Sydow plays the elderly Hamsun, takes this view.) But Kolloen shows that it was more complicated than that.
As Hamsun’s opinions became all too public during the nineteen-thirties, he seemed to realize that the artist and the polemicist needed to be separated if both were to thrive. In 1936, when Hamsun was seventy-seven, his last novel, “The Ring Is Closed,” was published, and reviewers noted with some relief that it was, simply, a novel—that, despite everything, the artist had remained true to his art. But his admirers had watched with some alarm as his politics evolved; many found it unforgivable when, in the mid-thirties, he attacked the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who had been tortured and imprisoned by his fellow-Germans. Even worse, he supported Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian defense minister who founded the pro-Fascist National Union Party, in 1933. Though that could be tolerated, barely, as a nasty idiosyncrasy, everything changed after the Germans invaded on April 9, 1940, and Hamsun urged his countrymen to throw down their weapons and coöperate.
The Nazi occupiers became increasingly pitiless, and increasingly clever at manipulating their trophy, Hamsun, who several times tried to rescue individual countrymen, almost always without success. When Hamsun’s publisher, Harald Grieg, asked for his help in winning the release of a writer whom the Gestapo had arrested, Hamsun arranged a meeting with Josef Terboven, the Reich Commissioner in Norway. Terboven shuffled papers and toyed with Hamsun before saying no; they parted with mutual loathing. The Oslo newspapers, though, showed pictures of Hamsun in a seemingly cheerful meeting with the Reich Commissioner, and Hamsun certainly realized that he had been used.
Hamsun did not endorse Hitler’s racial policies, and, as Kolloen points out, he was in friendly contact with Jews all his life, including Georg Brandes and his favorite publisher, Christian Kønig. Still, he was a man of his time and once suggested, not precisely in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, that it might benefit everyone if the Jewish people had their own country. Two of Hamsun’s children—his son Tore, an artist, and his daughter, Ellinor, who studied acting—lived in Berlin in the late nineteen-thirties, although not, apparently, with much enthusiasm for what was going on. When Hamsun visited them in February of 1938, they were living in a Jewish neighborhood, and had Jewish friends. Tore was particularly close to Max Tau, a publisher, who had met the Hamsuns in Oslo; with Hamsun’s help, Tau was rescued from the Nazis.
Hamsun’s meeting with Hitler—re-created by, among others, Thorkild Hansen, Ferguson, and Kolloen—took place at Berghof on June 26, 1943, a time when the war was going badly for the Germans. Hitler, then fifty-four and heavily medicated, was not in top form. Nor was Hamsun; he had suffered at least one minor stroke and his hearing had worsened. After Hitler asked Hamsun about his writing habits, adding that he personally preferred working in the evening, he took Hamsun to his study, where they were served tea, and it was agreed that Egil Holmboe, a Norwegian, would do the translating. (Hitler’s usual interpreter, Ernst Züchner, took notes behind a curtain.) Hitler apparently hoped that the writer would inspire him, cheer him up, and perhaps talk about genius, a theme that always interested him. “I feel, if not entirely connected to you, that my life resembles yours very much in certain ways,” Hitler said at one point. But Hamsun had no desire to talk about writing, or art, or genius. He wanted to talk about politics, and about the viciousness of the Occupation. In particular, he wanted Hitler to fire Josef Terboven. He began by complaining that Terboven was clamping down on Norwegian shipping routes, and when Hitler tried to cut off this line of discussion Hamsun went on, “Furthermore, the Reich Commissioner on several occasions has said that in the future there won’t be any place called Norway.”
“Unlike other occupied countries,” Hitler told Hamsun, “Norway has got its own government.”
“Everything that happens in Norway is being decided by the Reich Commissioner!” Hamsun replied, and he tried to explain that Terboven was ruining Hitler’s reputation. Eventually, Hamsun did something unheard of: he interrupted Hitler. The Reich Commissioner’s methods “don’t work with us, we can’t stand his Prussianness,” Hamsun said. “And then the executions! We’ve had it!”
Züchner, behind the curtain, knew that Holmboe had not translated the last outburst. When Hitler began to speak, Hamsun interrupted again: “Terboven doesn’t want a free Norway, but a protectorate—that’s the prospect he gives us.” Then he had a question: “Will he ever be recalled?”
Hitler tried to close the subject, saying, “The Reich Commissioner is a warrior, he’s only there for war-related duties.”
Soon Hamsun began to weep. “It’s not that we’re against the Occupation,” he told Hitler. “We’ll need that for a while. But that man is destroying more for us than Hitler can rebuild!” Again, Holmboe didn’t translate the riskiest part of the outburst. Rather, he turned away from Hitler and warned Hamsun, “Don’t talk about that! We have the Führer’s promise.”
It wasn’t over yet. Hitler began to talk about production, more panzer divisions, and new, secret weapons. While he was speaking, Hamsun tried several more times to break in, saying that he hadn’t come all this way for the honor of it. When Hitler repeated that one could see Germany’s good will in the fact that Norway had its own government, Hamsun, in despair, interrupted and said, “We’re talking to a wall!” Holmboe, Kolloen writes, didn’t translate that, either.
Before leaving, Hamsun said, “We believe in the Führer, but his wishes are being twisted.” He added, “It’s not the right sort of change in Norway. It will all lead to a new war.” That, too, went untranslated, but by now Hamsun had said enough for Hitler to say, “Shut up! You don’t understand a thing!” Hitler walked out and Hamsun wept again; he was particularly upset that Hitler hadn’t personally said goodbye. Later, Hitler screamed at his aides, “I don’t want to see that sort of person here anymore!”
Hamsun’s reputation was in ruins; not only had he seen Hitler but, in a sickeningly misguided moment earlier that year, he had given Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal. His postwar fate was already under discussion. In November, 1944, in Moscow, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, discussed Hamsun’s case with Terje Wold, the Norwegian justice minister in exile, and Trygve Lie, the foreign minister in exile. The author of “Victoria” and “Pan” was too great an artist to be treated like a common Nazi, Molotov said, and, at such an advanced age, should be allowed to die a natural death. Wold replied, in English, “You are too soft, Mr. Molotov.”
Norway was liberated in May of 1945, and the Norwegians were unforgiving toward collaborators. Terboven committed suicide before he could be shot; Quisling and other National Union leaders were executed by firing squad in October, and thousands were imprisoned, including Marie Hamsun, who got a three-year sentence and a fine. Hamsun faced treason charges, but no one knew quite what to do with the nation’s greatest writer, now almost eighty-six.
Hamsun was arrested, and in the next three years he was moved to a nursing home, to the main psychiatric clinic in Oslo, and then back to the nursing home. There are many photographs from this period, and in them Hamsun looks frail, even spectral, and sometimes puzzled. He was examined by doctors and psychiatrists, and many Norwegians took comfort in a psychiatric finding that Hamsun, though sane, was “permanently impaired” mentally. At least one newspaper reported that he was senile. Hamsun himself was offended at the idea that anyone thought his faculties were diminished. “There was nothing the matter with me, I was just old and deaf!” he later insisted. True, his eyesight was failing, and he’d had two cerebral hemorrhages, but so what? His faculties, he said, “had been severely impaired precisely by my stay at the psychiatric clinic.”
During this period, Hamsun formed an acute hatred for the clinic’s chief psychiatrist, Gabriel Langfeldt, who had taken an interest in his case. The psychiatrist, he observed, had come equipped “with his textbooks and his learned tomes,” while the novelist “had created several hundred figures—created them internally and externally like living people, in every psychological state and nuance, in dream and action.” But Hamsun hated Langfeldt mainly because he was conducting a parallel investigation with Marie Hamsun. Parts of the conversations with Marie, which touched on the most intimate issues of the Hamsuns’ marriage, became part of the public court record. For Marie, this was an unconscionable betrayal of privilege; for Hamsun, the ultimate betrayal was Marie’s, and he declared that he never wanted to see his wife again.
Hamsun, meanwhile, was up to something else: for the first time in years, he was writing—and keeping that a secret even from people he knew. “You’ve too often suggested to me that I write a book,” he wrote to a friend late in 1946. “It won’t happen. What can you expect of me now? I’m a wreck, and I’m well into my eighty-eighth year.” Hamsun knew that people regarded him as a traitor—he was shunned when he asked a boy to take a postcard to the mailbox. But his manuscript was no apologia, even though he said of his wartime polemics, “No one told me that what I was writing was wrong, no one in the entire country.” When a magistrate asked about “the murders, the terror, the torture,” Hamsun said that he hadn’t been allowed to read newspapers. What about Terboven, “who took direct orders from Hitler, and tortured and butchered the Norwegian people for five years?” Were the Germans a civilized people? “I didn’t reply,” Hamsun wrote. He challenged the authorities to find “any attack on the Jews” anywhere in his collected writings. Mainly, however, Hamsun had other subjects in mind.
The manuscript was published in 1949, when Hamsun was ninety, with the title “On Overgrown Paths,” and it accomplished what he most wanted—to demonstrate his artistry and to avenge himself on Langfeldt, who appeared by name in the book, over the objections of Hamsun’s longtime publisher. The “overgrown paths” referred to Hamsun’s youth, and in returning to that time he did so in a first-person voice he hadn’t used for nearly forty years. Hamsun, Robert Bly has said, “has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler’s”; and, as he had done in youthful stories like “A Quite Ordinary Fly of Average Size,” Hamsun closely observed his new surroundings, including nurses and patients and a fellow from Hamarøy who “carried his shoes over his shoulder and walked barefoot,” and whose sad love story runs through the book. Hamsun recalls talking about homesickness during a visit to Helsinki fifty years earlier; he had learned the word “homesick” in America, and he transports himself to the Dakota Territory: it is the eighteen-eighties, and he has just met a farm girl named Bridget, who calls him Noot, and seems “stuck on me” until an Irishman, Patrick, comes along. Patrick falls for Bridget, but she gets involved with an elderly Austrian baker named Kleist, who makes Bridget his apprentice. And so on, until there is another, abrupt shift of mood. “It’s three years since I was arrested, and here I sit,” Hamsun writes, adding, “All of us are on a journey to a land that we’ll reach soon enough.”
The Norwegian courts fined Hamsun four hundred and twenty-five thousand kroner (then about eighty-seven thousand dollars), and he was allowed to return to Nørholm, where he went into a slow, steady decline. In the spring of 1950, urged by her children, Marie, who was then sixty-eight, came home, and, after a four-year separation, all that Hamsun said to her was “You’ve been gone a long time, Marie. All the time you’ve been gone, I’ve had no one to talk to but God.” Few were willing to forgive him then for his wartime behavior, and it is impossible to do so today. Yet one can still watch, fascinated, as the writer makes his final turn in “On Overgrown Paths.” He seems to be reaching for what he had called “the gift of youth,” and in those last pages it is as if he had managed, however briefly, to retrieve it. ♦
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