The story of Aretha Franklin

The preacher's daughter

Aretha Louise Franklin was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1942, in a small family house on Lucy Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, was the son of Mississippi sharecroppers and had started preaching at sixteen. Her mother, Barbara, was a fine gospel singer and pianist. The family moved to Buffalo, New York, when Aretha was two, and in 1946 her father took over New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. When he arrived, its four hundred members were meeting in an old bowling alley. C. L. Franklin became one of the most famous preachers in America, known as the man with the million dollar voice. His recorded sermons sold in huge numbers, and one of them, The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest, was later added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Franklin home in Detroit was a crossroads of Black music. As a little girl Aretha sat on the stairs while visitors like Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington came through, and she was sometimes woken up to sing for them. The gospel stars Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward were close to the family, and the young James Cleveland showed her how to play gospel chords. She never really took lessons. Her father hired a piano teacher, but Aretha hid whenever the teacher arrived, and she learned everything by ear. Smokey Robinson, a friend of her brother Cecil, remembered hearing a little girl's voice from the piano room and finding Aretha there, around seven years old, already playing big grown up chords.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the grand house there was real pain. C. L. Franklin was a chronic womanizer, and his biographer Nick Salvatore documented that back in Memphis in 1940 he had fathered a daughter with a twelve year old girl from his congregation. In 1948, when Aretha was six, her mother left and moved back to Buffalo. The children visited her in the summers. Then on the seventh of March 1952, Barbara died of a heart attack at the age of thirty four. Aretha was not yet ten. Her father called the children into the kitchen to tell them, and she later wrote that the pain was too private to describe. Relatives said it was a sadness she carried for the rest of her life. Her grandmother Rachel moved in to help raise the children.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Soon after her mother's death, Aretha sang her first solo at New Bethel, a hymn called Jesus, Be a Fence Around Me. Her father saw a star in the making and began taking her on the road with his travelling gospel show, where she sang after he preached. Her childhood ended early in another way too. On the twenty-eighth of January 1955, when she was just twelve, she gave birth to her first son, Clarence, named after her father. A second son, Edward, followed in 1957, when she was fourteen. She dropped out of school, and her grandmother and her older sister Erma helped raise the boys. For the rest of her life Aretha refused to discuss those early pregnancies with interviewers.[1] [2]

In 1956, at fourteen, Aretha made her first recordings live at New Bethel for a small Detroit label called JVB, playing piano behind her own voice. Those songs were later released as the album Songs of Faith. The producer Jerry Wexler, who would change her life a decade later, said the voice on those records was not a child's at all but that of an ecstatic high priestess. The gospel circuit exposed her to a world far beyond her years. Ray Charles and Billy Preston both later described the touring gospel scene as wild after dark. At sixteen she went on tour with her father's friend Martin Luther King Junior, who stayed at the Franklin home when he came to Detroit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

New York and the Columbia years

At eighteen Aretha told her father she wanted what Sam Cooke had, a career in popular music. He agreed, and in 1960 she moved to New York, leaving her two sons in Detroit with her grandmother. Several labels wanted her. Cooke tried to bring her to his label, RCA, and Berry Gordy wanted her and Erma for his young Tamla label, but C. L. felt Motown was still too small. A demo reached John Hammond of Columbia Records, the talent scout behind Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Hammond called her an untutored genius, the best voice he had heard since Billie Holiday, and Columbia signed her in 1960. They even brought in the choreographer Cholly Atkins to polish her stage moves.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hammond heard a jazz and blues singer, and Columbia mostly treated her like a supper club act. Her first album came out in early 1961 with the Ray Bryant Combo, and its single Won't Be Long reached number seven on the R&B chart. Later that year her version of the old standard Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody gave her a first real hit, and DownBeat magazine named her a new star female vocalist. But the records wandered between show tunes, standards, blues and novelty pop. In 1964 she recorded Unforgettable, a tribute to Dinah Washington, who had coached her as a girl and who died of a barbiturate overdose in December 1963. Looking back, Aretha said simply that the Columbia records were not really her.[1] [2] [3]

During these years she met Ted White, a Detroit hustler eleven years older than her who owned jukeboxes and dabbled in real estate. They were introduced at Detroit's Twenty Grand club, though White said he had first seen her years earlier at a party at her father's house. After only a few weeks of dating they were married by a justice of the peace while she was on tour in Ohio in 1961. Her father was against it. White became her manager and her songwriting partner, and their son Ted Junior was born in February 1964. The warning signs were there from the start. Aretha later admitted she could see that he drank and chased women, and the Motown producer Harvey Fuqua described White as a pimp.[1] [2] [3]

On the road she built a devoted following. At Chicago's Regal Theater, the WVON disc jockey Pervis Spann placed a crown on her head and declared her the Queen of Soul, a title that would follow her for the rest of her life. By the middle of the sixties she was earning about a hundred thousand dollars a year from clubs and theatres, and she turned up on TV pop shows like Shindig. Still, the hits did not come. Hammond later admitted that Columbia never understood her gospel roots and never brought them out. When her contract ran out in November 1966, she actually owed the label money, because her records had not sold enough to cover what had been spent on them.[1] [2] [3]

Muscle Shoals and Respect

Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records had admired Aretha for years. In late 1966 a gospel disc jockey friend rang him with a tip that she was ready to move, and that November she and Ted White made a deal with Atlantic. Wexler's plan was to stop dressing her up for nightclubs and bring the church back into her voice. He took her south to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, owned by Rick Hall, where a white rhythm section had backed Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge. On the twenty-fourth of January 1967 she walked in, quiet and reserved, to meet musicians who called her Miss Franklin. Then she sat at the piano and struck one chord, and every player in the room reached for his instrument.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song was I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, written by Ronnie Shannon, a friend of Ted White's. At first the band could not find the groove, until the keyboard player Spooner Oldham came up with a little riff on a Wurlitzer electric piano, and everything clicked. Within a few hours they had the take. Wexler said he could hardly believe it was that good, and Oldham said he knew right then he was working with a genius. Then the day fell apart. There was drinking in the studio, a row between White and a trumpet player, and that night a fist fight between White and Rick Hall at the motel. By morning Aretha and her husband were gone, with the second song, Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, only half finished.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Wexler refused to give up. He flew the Muscle Shoals musicians to Atlantic's studio in New York and finished the record there, without Ted White. Aretha brought in her sisters Erma and Carolyn for harmonies and completed Do Right Woman in early February. Because the tape machines in Alabama and New York ran at slightly different speeds, the piano on that track sounds faintly sharp, something Chips Moman always regretted. The single I Never Loved a Man came out on the tenth of February 1967. The writer Peter Guralnick remembered people dancing on a frosty Boston sidewalk as it played from a record shop speaker. It went to number one on the R&B chart, reached the pop top ten and sold a million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Valentine's Day, the fourteenth of February 1967, she recorded Respect. Otis Redding had written and released it in 1965 as a man's demand for respect when he came home from work. Aretha had been singing it in her shows for some time, and she reworked it with Erma and Carolyn in her small apartment on Detroit's west side. They turned it into a woman's demand, added the famous spelled out chorus and new call and response parts for the backing singers. In the studio she taught the band her stop and start rhythm, played the piano herself, and King Curtis blew a tenor saxophone solo over chords borrowed from Sam and Dave. The co-producer Arif Mardin said he had never known a studio day like it. It felt like a festival.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Released on the tenth of April 1967, Respect went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts and reached the top ten in Britain. That July, as Detroit burned in a riot that left forty three people dead, the song sounded to many listeners like a cry for Black dignity and for women's equality at the same time. Aretha herself kept it simple. She said it was the right song at the right time, and that wanting respect was only natural. Otis Redding took it with good grace. At the Monterey Pop Festival that summer he introduced it as a song a girl had taken away from him. It won Aretha the first two of her eighteen Grammys, and in 2021 Rolling Stone ranked her Respect the greatest song of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lady Soul

Wexler kept the hits coming. One day in 1967 he pulled up beside the songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin on Broadway, rolled down his limousine window and asked them for a song called A Natural Woman for Aretha. They wrote it that night after putting their children to bed, and gave Wexler a co-writing credit. It reached number eight. Don Covay's Chain of Fools, which Wexler had first thought of for Otis Redding, went to number one R&B and number two pop, held off the top only by John Fred and His Playboy Band. Both songs landed on Lady Soul, released in January 1968, which spent sixteen weeks at the top of the R&B album chart. Cissy Houston's group the Sweet Inspirations sang behind her, and Eric Clapton played guitar on one track.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Now followed in June 1968 with Think, a song she wrote with Ted White. It became one of the few major hits she owned as a writer, so it paid her far more than the songs she borrowed. The same album had I Say a Little Prayer, a Bacharach and David song first recorded by Dionne Warwick. Aretha and the Sweet Inspirations were singing it for fun during rehearsals when everyone realised it could be a hit. Released as a B side, it climbed into the top ten and became her biggest British hit of the sixties. That February she had won her first Grammys, including a new award for best female R&B vocal performance, which she then won eight years in a row.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the sixteenth of February 1968, Detroit held a day in her honour, and Martin Luther King Junior came to give her an award from his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Less than two months later he was shot dead in Memphis, and at a memorial for him Aretha sang Precious Lord, Take My Hand, King's favourite hymn. Her support for the movement was practical as well as musical. Jesse Jackson said she helped pay for civil rights tours and campaigns, and she had it written into her contract that she would never play to a segregated audience. Files released in 2022 showed that the FBI had kept watch on her benefit concerts for King's organisation, labelling them communist infiltration events.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Fame did not protect her at home. In May 1967 she fell off a stage in Columbus, Georgia, and broke her arm. That same year, Time magazine later reported, Ted White roughed her up in public at the Regency Hyatt House hotel in Atlanta, and Mahalia Jackson said it was not the first time he had been violent. When Time put Aretha on its cover in June 1968, the story praised her genius but also exposed the abuse. Her publicist Ruth Bowen said she was drinking to numb the pain of the marriage. Aretha separated from White in 1968 and divorced him in 1969, and her brother Cecil, a Baptist minister, took over as her manager.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1968 she toured Europe for the first time. At the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam the audience covered the stage with flower petals, and in London she played the Finsbury Park Astoria and the Hammersmith Odeon. Back home, trouble kept coming. In March 1969 her father rented out New Bethel to a Black separatist group, and a shootout with police left an officer dead and the church scarred with bullet holes. In December 1969, at Aretha's Detroit home, Ted White shot Charles Cook, the younger brother of Sam Cooke, in the groin while Cook was visiting her. And that year a Virginia singer named Vickie Jones was threatened into touring Florida as a fake Aretha, until Franklin's lawyers exposed the scheme.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

From Spirit in the Dark to Amazing Grace

A new man came into her life, her road manager Ken Cunningham, and in April 1970 she gave birth to their son Kecalf. There were dark spells too. In 1970 she walked off a stage in St. Louis partway through Respect, and the promoter announced she had suffered a nervous breakdown. Wexler said her sudden disappearances were frequent. Yet in the studio she was at a peak. Spirit in the Dark, recorded in Miami and released in August 1970, gave her the number one R&B hit Don't Play That Song, and a title track that Wexler described as church right in the middle of a smoky nightclub. When the activist Angela Davis was jailed that year, Aretha said she would pay her bail if it came to that.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In March 1971 Wexler booked her into the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the temple of the hippie rock scene, and she became the first R&B act to headline there. She admitted she was not sure how the hippies would take her. Backed by King Curtis and his band the Kingpins, with Billy Preston on organ and Bernard Purdie on drums, she won them over with her own hits and her versions of Bridge Over Troubled Water, Eleanor Rigby and Love the One You're With. When she learned that Ray Charles was in the crowd, she brought him onstage to trade vocals on Spirit in the Dark. Charles said afterwards that she turned the place into church. The live album went to number one on the R&B chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Five months later came a shocking loss. Late on the twelfth of August 1971, King Curtis was stabbed in a fight with a man named Juan Montanez outside an apartment building he owned on West Eighty Sixth Street in Manhattan. He died early the next morning, and Montanez later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Atlantic Records closed its offices for the funeral, where Aretha sang Never Grow Old, a song from her first gospel album. Her hits kept coming. Spanish Harlem went to number two on the pop chart. Rock Steady was one she wrote herself. And Day Dreaming, with Donny Hathaway on electric piano, was a song she confirmed decades later on Oprah Winfrey's show had been about Dennis Edwards of the Temptations.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In January 1972 Aretha went back to church. Over two nights, the thirteenth and fourteenth, she recorded live at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts district of Los Angeles, with her old mentor James Cleveland at the piano and the Southern California Community Choir behind her. On the second night her father spoke from the pulpit about the little girl who used to sing in his living room, and later tenderly wiped the sweat from her brow as she sang Never Grow Old. Clara Ward sat next to him, and Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones watched from the back. The double album Amazing Grace sold more than two million copies in America and remains the best selling live gospel album of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grief followed quickly. Mahalia Jackson died about two weeks after the recording, and Aretha travelled to Chicago to sing Precious Lord at her funeral. A year later Clara Ward, her childhood role model and her father's longtime companion, died after a series of strokes, and Aretha and her father both sang at her funeral in Philadelphia. The Amazing Grace concerts had also been filmed, by the Hollywood director Sydney Pollack. But his crew never used clapperboards, so no one could match the pictures to the sound, and Warner Bros. shelved the footage. The film that captured Aretha at the height of her powers would sit in a vault for decades.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losing the thread

After Amazing Grace, the magic became harder to find. In 1973 she worked with Quincy Jones on the album Hey Now Hey, which flopped despite Angel, a lovely ballad written by her sister Carolyn. Stevie Wonder's Until You Come Back to Me put her back in the pop top ten. Privately that year was hard. After she moved into a Manhattan townhouse, Carolyn said Aretha was so off balance that the family had no choice but to get her to a hospital. Aretha was furious when it was reported, and pressed Jet magazine to run a story denying the rumours. Her sister Erma said the breakdowns never kept her down for long, because her commitment to her career was as strong as steel.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A younger generation was arriving. Natalie Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole, broke through in 1975 with songs that sounded so much like Aretha that the press called her the new Aretha, and Franklin claimed some of them had been offered to her first. At the 1977 Grammys, Cole beat her for best female R&B vocal performance, a category Aretha had once owned. Aretha's nominated song, Something He Can Feel, came from Sparkle, a 1976 film soundtrack written and produced by Curtis Mayfield. It was her last gold album of the decade. Wexler had left Atlantic by then, and later records like Sweet Passion, Almighty Fire and the disco flavoured La Diva sold poorly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1975 she moved to Encino in Los Angeles with Ken Cunningham, who helped her cut back on drinking. She lost forty pounds and told Jet she was happy. That relationship ended, and in April 1978 she married the actor Glynn Turman, star of the film Cooley High, at her father's church in Detroit. C. L. performed the ceremony and the Four Tops sang. She became stepmother to Turman's three children. Her sister Carolyn later hinted that behind the happy magazine stories there were career clashes in the marriage. In 1979 Aretha received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but her records were stalling, and that year she left Atlantic after twelve years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came the worst news of her life. Shortly after midnight on the tenth of June 1979, while Aretha was performing at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, burglars broke into her father's house in Detroit. C. L. fired at them, and one of them shot him twice at close range, in the knee and the groin. He lay bleeding before help came, and he fell into a coma. After six months at Henry Ford Hospital he was brought home with round the clock nursing, but he never regained consciousness. In 1982 Aretha moved back to the Detroit area to help her siblings care for him. Her marriage to Turman did not survive the distance. They separated that year and divorced in 1984, though they remained friends.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Arista and the comeback

In 1980 she signed with Clive Davis at Arista Records. Rolling Stone later wrote that if anyone could restart her stalled career, it was Davis, with his golden ear for radio hits. That same year she stole a scene in The Blues Brothers, playing the owner of a soul food cafe and belting out Think. She was used to singing live, not miming, so the scene took several takes. In November 1980 she sang at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in front of the Queen Mother. Her first Arista albums were transitional, but her version of Hold On, I'm Comin' won her first Grammy in six years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Davis then brought in Luther Vandross, a lifelong fan who had seen her at the Apollo as a boy. Their first meeting was stiff. Vandross said Miss Franklin wanted to know whether Mr. Vandross had any songs suitable for her, and he realised he had to audition. He did have one, Jump to It. In 1982 the title track became her first pop top forty hit in six years, and the album spent seven weeks at number one on the R&B chart, her first gold record since Sparkle. Around this time came a flight that changed her life. On a small propeller plane home to Detroit, the turbulence frightened her so badly that she never flew again, and she never performed outside North America again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty-seventh of July 1984, C. L. Franklin died, five years after the shooting, without ever waking up. His funeral at New Bethel was among the largest Detroit had ever seen, and Jesse Jackson spoke first. Aretha poured herself back into music. Because she would not fly, the producer Narada Michael Walden recorded backing tracks in California and brought the tapes to Detroit for her vocals. The 1985 album Who's Zoomin' Who? gave her Freeway of Love, with Clarence Clemons on saxophone and a pink Cadillac in the song, and Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves with Eurythmics, who had first wanted Tina Turner. MTV played her videos constantly, and it became her first platinum album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1985 the Michigan state legislature declared her voice a natural resource. In 1986 she recorded I Knew You Were Waiting with George Michael, who had once been too nervous even to write a song for her. They cut it in two days in Detroit, and Michael said he was freaking out behind the microphone while she treated him as an equal. Released in January 1987, it went to number one in America and Britain, her only British number one, and won them a Grammy. In 1987 she also became the first woman ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That year she went home to New Bethel to record a gospel album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The late eighties brought more loss. Her sister Carolyn, who had helped shape Respect and written Ain't No Way and Angel, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987. Aretha moved her into her home in Bloomfield Hills and hired full time care. Carolyn had gone back to college at Marygrove in Detroit, and when it was clear she would not live to graduate, the college granted her degree at her bedside, where she received it in cap and gown. She died on the twenty-fifth of April 1988, aged forty three. Her brother Cecil, Aretha's manager for twenty years, had fought a freebase cocaine addiction and then lung cancer. He died in December 1989. Aretha said no one could ever replace him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The queen in her later years

The early nineties were uneven. Albums chasing the new jack swing sound sold poorly, though one featured Elton John and Whitney Houston, the daughter of her old backing singer Cissy Houston, who called Aretha Aunt Ree. In 1993 the house track A Deeper Love, from Sister Act 2, topped the dance chart. At Bill Clinton's inaugural celebrations that January she sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables, and Clive Davis recalled how she changed the words on the spot to I have a dream, in honour of Martin Luther King. In 1994 she was named a Kennedy Center honoree. In 1998 Lauryn Hill wrote and produced A Rose Is Still a Rose, which became her last pop top forty hit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came one of the great moments in awards history. At the Grammys in February 1998, about ten minutes into the live show, the producer Ken Ehrlich learned that Luciano Pavarotti was too ill to sing Nessun dorma. He remembered that Aretha had sung the aria for Pavarotti at a charity gala two nights earlier. He ran up two flights of stairs at Radio City Music Hall and found her in her dressing room, eating chicken. He asked if she would like to sing twice that night. Without hesitating, she said she could do it. Pavarotti's arrangement was in a different key from hers, so she worked it out with his conductor from a cassette of his rehearsal. She went out and stopped the show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new century brought honours and more grief. Her sister Erma, the first singer to record Piece of My Heart, died of cancer in September 2002, and their half brother Vaughn died weeks later. In 2004 Aretha announced she was leaving Arista, and in 2005 President George W. Bush gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When Luther Vandross died that year she travelled by bus to his funeral in New York, and her version of A House Is Not a Home, one of his signature songs, won a Grammy on a tribute album. In 2006 she sang The Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl in Detroit. And when Beyoncé introduced Tina Turner as the queen at the 2008 Grammys, Aretha publicly called it a cheap shot.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twentieth of January 2009 she sang My Country, 'Tis of Thee at Barack Obama's inauguration, and her grey church hat with its giant bow became a sensation, though she later told Larry King she was not happy with her own performance. In late 2010 she cancelled concerts to have surgery on an undisclosed tumour. She denied reports that it was pancreatic cancer and later lost eighty five pounds. In January 2012 she announced she would marry her longtime friend Willie Wilkerson, a former Detroit firefighter, then called it off three weeks later. She also fought the release of the Amazing Grace film, suing its producer Alan Elliott in 2011 and winning an emergency injunction against a festival screening in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

There were late triumphs. Her 2014 album of diva classics included a cover of Adele's Rolling in the Deep, which made her the first woman with one hundred entries on Billboard's R&B chart. On the sixth of December 2015, at the Kennedy Center Honors for Carole King, she sat at the piano and sang A Natural Woman while King rocked in disbelief and President Obama wiped away a tear. Near the climax she let her fur coat drop to the floor, an old gospel gesture. She called it one of the greatest nights of her life. Her last full concert was at the Ravinia Festival near Chicago on the third of September 2017. Her last public performance was that November, at Elton John's AIDS Foundation gala in New York.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Homegoing and legacy

In August 2018 the news broke that Aretha was gravely ill in her apartment at Riverfront Towers in Detroit, under hospice care. Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson and her former husband Glynn Turman came to say goodbye, and Willie Wilkerson stayed at her bedside. She died at home on the morning of the sixteenth of August 2018, at the age of seventy six. The cause was a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, a rarer form than the most common pancreatic cancer. Barack Obama said she had helped define the American experience. In New York, fans put up tributes at two subway stations called Franklin, and the transit authority later added permanent signs beside the station names reading simply Respect.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Thousands filed past her casket at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where Rosa Parks had once lain in repose. On the thirty-first of August her homegoing service at Greater Grace Temple lasted most of the day, with Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Jennifer Hudson, Chaka Khan and Ariana Grande singing, and Bill Clinton speaking. More than a hundred pink Cadillacs joined the procession, in tribute to Freeway of Love. There was controversy too. The officiating bishop apologised for the way he held Ariana Grande onstage. And the Reverend Jasper Williams Junior used a fifty minute eulogy to attack single mothers and the Black Lives Matter movement, which her family called offensive and distasteful. She was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, near her father and siblings.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

At first it seemed she had left no will, even though her lawyer said he had urged her for years to make one. Then in 2019 her niece found three handwritten wills at her home. Two from 2010 were in a locked cabinet, and one dated March 2014 was in a spiral notebook under the sofa cushions. Her sons split over which should count. In July 2023 a jury in Oakland County, Michigan, ruled that the 2014 couch will was valid, a win for Edward and Kecalf over their brother Ted White the Second. Her eldest, Clarence, who has special needs, had a separate settlement. By then an estate once estimated at eighty million dollars had been revalued at about six million, dragged down by years of unpaid taxes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Her legacy only grew. In 2019 she received a special Pulitzer Prize citation, the first individual woman to be given one. The Amazing Grace film was finally released after her family agreed to it, and critics hailed it. In 2021 came two dramatizations. National Geographic's Genius series starred Cynthia Erivo, though her family said they were never consulted. The film Respect starred Jennifer Hudson, whom Aretha had chosen for the role herself. That same year Rolling Stone ranked her Respect the greatest song of all time, and the magazine has twice named her the greatest singer who ever lived. Clive Davis, who worked with her for nearly four decades, died in June 2026 at ninety four.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin and C. L. Franklin. Her father was her first manager, her first producer and the centre of her world. He took her on the road at twelve, backed her move to New York and married her to her second husband at his own church. He was also a womanizer who had fathered a child with a twelve year old girl, and Aretha adored him anyway. After burglars shot him in 1979, she moved home to help care for him until he died in 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Ted White. Ted White was her first husband and manager from 1961, a Detroit hustler who co-wrote Think and Dr. Feelgood with her and negotiated her move to Atlantic. He was also violent. Time reported he roughed her up in public in Atlanta, and his fight with Rick Hall wrecked her first Muscle Shoals session. She left him in 1968 and divorced him in 1969. Their son Ted Junior later played guitar in her band.[1] [2] [3]

Aretha Franklin and Jerry Wexler. The Atlantic producer who made her the Queen of Soul in fact as well as name. Wexler signed her in 1966, sent her to Muscle Shoals and produced her greatest run of hits. He called her Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows. Years later, hearing her glossy eighties records, he complained that he heard her screaming rather than soaring. She in turn remembered his habit of waiting a day before deciding whether a take was a hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Clive Davis. Davis signed her to Arista in 1980 when her career had stalled, and paired her with Luther Vandross, Narada Michael Walden and George Michael to bring her back to the charts. They worked together for nearly four decades and he became her confidant over long restaurant dinners. Her sister Erma blamed him for what she called the divafication of Aretha. Davis died in June 2026, aged ninety four.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Aretha Franklin and Carolyn Franklin and Erma Franklin. Her sisters sang behind her on Respect, Natural Woman and many more. Carolyn wrote Ain't No Way and Angel and helped rework Respect, while Erma recorded the original Piece of My Heart. Both struggled to escape Aretha's shadow. Aretha once stopped speaking to Carolyn for months after she told an interviewer the family feared Aretha would not survive their father's death. Carolyn died in 1988 and Erma in 2002, both of cancer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and James Cleveland. The King of Gospel was part of her life from childhood, when he served at New Bethel and showed the little girl how to play gospel chords. Twenty years later she chose him to lead the Amazing Grace concerts, and he played piano, sang and acted as master of ceremonies with his Southern California Community Choir. Their reunion produced the best selling live gospel album of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Clara Ward. The gospel star Clara Ward was the singer who most inspired Aretha to sing, and she was also her father's romantic partner from around 1949 until her death, though Aretha preferred to see them simply as friends. Ward sat beside C. L. at the Amazing Grace recording in 1972. When she died in January 1973, Aretha and her father sang at her funeral.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Glynn Turman. The actor Glynn Turman, known for Cooley High and later The Wire, married Aretha in April 1978 at her father's church, and she became stepmother to his three children. They separated in 1982 when she moved back to Michigan to care for her father, and divorced in 1984. They stayed friends, and he was among those who visited her on her deathbed in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Aretha Franklin and Ken Cunningham. Her road manager became her partner after her divorce from Ted White, and in April 1970 they had a son, Kecalf. Cunningham encouraged her sense of Black pride and helped her curb her drinking. The couple moved to Encino in Los Angeles in 1975 but never married, and they parted on friendly terms not long after the move.[1] [2]

Aretha Franklin and Cissy Houston and Whitney Houston. Cissy Houston's Sweet Inspirations sang on many of Aretha's classic Atlantic records, and Cissy still backed her on television in 2014. Aretha became an honorary aunt, not a godmother as often reported, to Cissy's children, and young Whitney called her Aunt Ree. Whitney later sang on Aretha's 1989 album Through the Storm and picked her to record for the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Rick Hall. The owner of FAME Studios hosted the session that launched her, then got into a fist fight with Ted White that ended it after one day. Hall admitted he made a terrible mistake going to their motel. Wexler swore never to work with him again and later helped Hall's own musicians open a rival studio. Yet Aretha later publicly credited Hall with the turning point in her career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole. When Natalie Cole arrived in 1975, the press billed her as the new Aretha, and a rivalry began. Franklin claimed some of Cole's early hits had first been offered to her, and in 1977 Cole beat her for the Grammy in the category Aretha had once owned. The tension eased with time. Cole later covered Day Dreaming, and Aretha sang Cole's Inseparable as a tribute after Cole died.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Aretha Franklin

• An asteroid is named after her. In 2014 asteroid 249516 was named Aretha in her honour. It joined a long list of tributes that also includes a Detroit street, a post office and a stretch of Michigan freeway.[1] [2]
• The State of Michigan officially declared her voice a natural resource in 1985. The Michigan legislature gave her voice that status in 1985. Two years later she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2]
• She voiced a computer in a Brave Little Toaster sequel. In the 1997 animated film The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue, Aretha provided the voice of a homebuilt computer. It sits in her filmography alongside The Blues Brothers and an episode of Murphy Brown.[1]
• She sang America the Beautiful at WrestleMania, twice. Aretha opened WrestleMania III in 1987 with America the Beautiful, and returned twenty years later at WrestleMania 23, chosen to reflect that event's all grown up theme.[1]
• She sang the theme song of the sitcom A Different World. In 1987 Aretha provided the vocals for the theme songs of two TV shows, A Different World and Together.[1]
• She once walked out of a Vogue photo shoot. In the sixties she walked off a Vogue session when she noticed that all the other models were white, according to her Guardian obituary.[1]
• She demanded her fee in cash before going on stage. Even in her seventies, stacks of hundred dollar bills sat in her dressing room before shows. The cash went into her handbag, which often sat on the piano within her sight while she performed.[1]
• She bought a theatre seat for her mink coat. When she went to see Diahann Carroll in Sunset Boulevard in Toronto, she bought two seats, one for herself and one for her fur.[1]
• Eric Clapton played guitar on Lady Soul. The Cream guitarist is credited on the track Good to Me as I Am to You. Bobby Womack and Joe South also played guitar on the album.[1]
• Chain of Fools was first meant for Otis Redding. Don Covay wrote it in his youth while singing gospel with his family. Wexler had asked Covay for songs for Otis Redding, heard the demo, and gave it to Aretha instead. Joe South played the tremolo guitar intro.[1]
• Her Grammy streak for female R&B vocal performance lasted eight straight years. She won the first eight awards ever given in the best female R&B vocal performance category, from 1968 through 1975, and eighteen Grammys in all from forty four nominations.[1]
• A singer was forced to impersonate her on tour. In 1969 Vickie Jones was threatened into performing in Florida as Aretha. A judge had her sing in court and ruled the audience had not really been cheated. Later someone impersonated Vickie Jones.[1]
• Steely Dan name checked her in Hey Nineteen. The 1980 Steely Dan single Hey Nineteen, from the album Gaucho, mentions the Queen of Soul by name.[1]
• Her father once banged on Sam Cooke's hotel door looking for her. As a teenager on the gospel circuit she was talking with Sam Cooke in his Atlanta hotel room when her father knocked. She later joked that his knock changed the course of history.[1]
• She played Aunt Em in The Wiz. In 1995 Aretha played Aunt Em in the Apollo Theater revival of The Wiz, the soul version of The Wizard of Oz.[1]
• She scored a number one record in every decade from the sixties on. An unheard 2008 performance of Never Gonna Break My Faith, released for Juneteenth in 2020, topped Billboard's gospel chart, giving her a number one in every decade since the 1960s.[1]
• Keith Richards had to bargain to get her to play piano. For her 1986 cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, Richards agreed to come to Detroit because she hated travelling, on one condition, that she play piano on the track.[1]
• Think was the only one of her big hits she wrote herself. Her lawyer said she earned little in radio royalties from Respect, because those go to the songwriter, Otis Redding's estate. Think, co-written with Ted White, was her own.[1] [2]
• She nearly lost her Detroit mansion over unpaid property tax. She bought a brick house beside the Detroit Golf Club in 1993 and nearly lost it in 2008 over back taxes. After her death it sold for just three hundred thousand dollars.[1]
• A jail inmate once posed as an FBI agent to extort her. Her declassified FBI file records a Cook County jail inmate who pretended to be an agent and demanded a million dollars from her, one of three documented threats.[1]
• Her Freeway of Love video was shot at a club she co-owned. The black and white video was filmed at Club Tattoo on Woodbridge Avenue in Detroit, which Aretha co-owned. Willie Wilkerson later had a cameo in her Jimmy Lee video.[1] [2]
• She met Willie Wilkerson by signing his leg cast. In the mid eighties they lived in the same Detroit apartment complex. She called him over to sign his cast, and he stayed in her life until her death.[1]
• Willie Wilkerson learned of his own engagement from the news. Her security chief said Aretha announced their engagement publicly in January 2012 before telling Wilkerson, who found out the next day when friends called to congratulate him.[1]
• Dinah Washington's funeral was held at her father's church. New Bethel hosted the funerals of Dinah Washington in 1963, the Supremes' Florence Ballard in 1976 and the Temptations' David Ruffin in 1991.[1]
• The rival studio born from her aborted session was once a coffin showroom. After the FAME fight, Wexler helped Rick Hall's rhythm section open Muscle Shoals Sound Studio at 3614 Jackson Highway, a concrete building that had been a coffin showroom.[1] [2]
• Pollack shot about twenty hours of Amazing Grace footage. The director used sixteen millimetre cameras that kept starting and stopping without clapperboards, leaving roughly two thousand pieces of film to be synced by hand decades later.[1] [2]
• Carolyn Franklin once recorded under a false name. Before writing hits for Aretha, Carolyn recorded a handful of songs under the alias Candy Carroll, without success, and later worked at the post office while writing on the side.[1]
• Her 2009 inauguration hat became part of an estate dispute. The grey hat with its giant bow, worn at Obama's inauguration, got its own social media following and was later listed among the assets in the civil dispute over her estate.[1]
• She thought a million people joined the 1963 Detroit march. The Walk to Freedom her father organised was officially counted at about a hundred thousand. Aretha, who was not there, insisted from her concert experience that it was far bigger.[1]
• She held the record for most Hot 100 hits by a woman for forty years. Her record for the most songs on the Billboard Hot 100 by a woman stood for four decades until Nicki Minaj passed it in 2017.[1]
• Time chose her as its woman of 1968. When Time created retrospective women of the year covers in 2019, it picked Aretha Franklin for 1968.[1]
• Mavis Staples said young Aretha once waited with a baseball bat. Mavis Staples, who toured with her as a teenager, recalled Aretha hiding behind a tree with a bat to knock her own sister on the head, as proof that she was tough.[1]
• Obama's party tip was to open with Rock Steady. Asked about Aretha in 2016, President Obama said she would be on his desert island list and advised anyone deejaying a party to open with Rock Steady.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.