Aretha sang.
As in, that girl can SANG.
Aretha played the piano like a bad mother shut your mouth, honing her gospel piano chops in the black church just as so many others did before her. Lesser musicians marvelled at what a good improviser she was, but that’s what happens when you come home from school to find Art Tatum playing the baby grand in your living room and you stand there watching him for hours.
The Queen of Soul. (No apologies to Beyoncé and Tina Turner)
Aretha also played the tuba? Well, unless the internet is a liar...
And she wore. that. hat. at Obama’s inauguration.
This is a heartbreaking day for people my age, for whom Aretha Louise Franklin is an irreplaceable part of the soundtrack of our lives.
The only consolation is that she was able to fight off pancreatic cancer much longer than medical professionals thought possible.
She sold 75 million records and was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She won a total of eighteen Grammys, including a record setting eight years in a row for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance from 1968 to 1975.
But even though she is best known as a recording artist, at the end of her life she stunned the world over and over again with heart-stopping live performances.
Grammy telecast producer Ken Ehrlich loves to tell the story of how she did the unthinkable in 1998 (source1, source2):
Pavarotti came to rehearsal the day before, but he didn’t sing. He did not come to the dress rehearsal the day of the show, either, but that wasn’t unusual -- we try to get everybody to the dress rehearsal, but it doesn’t always happen. The show was on the air at 8 o’clock, and at about 8:10 my assistant came to me under the stage with this little torn-off piece of paper and said, ‘You’ve got to call this number, it’s Pavarotti’s home.’
It surprised me because we were already on the air. He wasn’t supposed to perform until about two hours into the show, but he should have been in the building. So I called him, and he said, ‘I cannot sing for you tonight, my voice is bad. I will sing for you next year.’
I said — to myself, not to him — ‘That’s great, but what the f#ck am I going to do now?’ I’ve got a four-and-a-half minute hole to fill in a live broadcast with a 65-piece orchestra and a 30-piece chorus. It was killing me.
And then, I remembered that two nights before, Aretha had sung ‘Nessun Dorma’ for Pavarotti at MusiCares.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever left my post underneath the stage, but we had to do something. So I literally ran up two flights of stairs in Radio City Music Hall to this cramped little broom closet of a dressing room. I don’t have a lot of fear when it comes to these kinds of things, but I was desperate, and desperation breeds boldness. I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘I have a problem. Pavarotti is not going to sing tonight. How would you like to sing twice?’
Without any hesitation, she said to me, ‘OK, Ken, I can do that.’
I had a cassette of Pavarotti singing it from his rehearsal. It was three keys away (!) from how she had done it. Today, there are apps where you can automatically transpose musical scores from one key to another instantaneously, but that technology did not exist in 1998. Pavarotti’s conductor was there, and he came in and sat with her, and they went over it again and again.
Nobody on the floor knew about this, not the crew, not the director. I thought it could set everybody in a panic.
Aretha had never even seen the staging for this performance, which was probably as big a group of musicians as I had ever put on a Grammys stage for one number. So when we walked to the side of the stage and she saw the orchestra and these 30 singers, she gripped my hand and said, ‘This is gonna be fun.’
And then she went out and killed it.
Everybody was shocked, surprised and thrilled. Everybody knew that she was the Queen of Soul, but you had no idea that she could do this. It was a genuine shock. There was this thunderous applause that followed the performance. Everybody knew that she was incomparable.
We were bonded for life by that incident. The next morning I called her, and she was over the moon. She said, ‘I never expected the response that I got. I will never forget last night.’
watch it fast… someone keeps taking these videos down, and this is a rare copy of the entire performance
Vincerò... pretty much sums it up.
Sure, the purists hated it, and some of the low notes at the very beginning were wobbly [8.17.18 update—after I found the whole performance, those low notes sounded better than I remembered them], but who else has the gonads to sub for freaking Pavarotti on short notice in front of a billion people on live television?
Aretha also lived long enough to tear the roof off the sucker less than three years ago with a jaw-dropping performance at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, giving Carole King heart palpitations and making Barack Obama wipe tears from his eyes. From the first soulful piano chord to the effortless mink drop, she showed the doubters and haters she still had it.
For the millions of folks who only know her from the Blues Brothers, or from hearing Respect on the oldies station, here is a two hour Spotify playlist from someone who followed her career for all six decades of her professional life.
By the way, younguns, a “playlist”, like the Hamilton cast album, it is in a specific order for a reason, and the intended emotional effect will be lost if you play it on shuffle. Don’t play it on shuffle!
I apologize to those who don’t have Spotify. Here are the songs in a list:
Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
See Saw
Baby I Love You
I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
Runnin Out Of Fools
Chain Of Fools
Dr. Feelgood
Rock Steady
Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)
Since You’ve Been Gone
Don’t Play That Song
Think
Come Back Baby
Something He Can Feel
Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves
I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
The House That Jack Built
Spanish Harlem
Dark End Of The Street
Day Dreaming
Freeway Of Love
Good To Me As I Am To You
I Say A Little Prayer
Baby, Baby, Baby
Respect
Ain’t No Way
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Drown In My Own Tears
Rolling In The Deep
Call Me
(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman
Angel
She had an extensive catalogue of gospel recordings as well, and even though I won’t share that playlist here out of respect for the secularists and atheists on the blog, few can deny she had a gift for music that had the ability to touch something indescribable beyond all understanding.
This 2016 New Yorker article is a good background piece for those who don’t know her life story. David Remnick is an incredibly good writer, but he was smart enough to give Billy Preston the last word, and for good reason:
“She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the sh!t out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best f@ckin’ singer this f@cked-up country has ever produced.”
Aretha was quirky. She was afraid to fly. She wouldn’t stay in a building over eight stories high. On stage she was the epitome of power and confidence, but she wrestled with personal struggles that could have felled a lesser oak. Her mother died when she was 10. She had her first child at the age of 12—and we can only imagine what sadness hides behind that story. She ate and starved and fought with body issues and insecurities for decades, and suffered through emotionally and physically abusive relationships and marriages. Yet, like all great artists, somehow she channeled all that pain and passion into something the world has never heard before and will never experience again.
Now the “lady of mysterious sorrow” has gone to that place where there is no death, neither sorrow nor crying, but the fullness of joy with all the saints. Through many dangers, toils and snares, she has already come. ’Twas grace that brought her safe thus far. And grace shall lead her Home. I’ve spent all day listening to her music, crying and laughing and singing along in unison and harmony—the only way I can think of to honor her. It doesn’t seem like much for all she has meant to me. But it’s all I have to give so I have to trust that it is enough.
All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song.
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
Terry Gross Fresh Air from 1999: audio link and transcript here.