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(The audio includes very short clips of two of Aretha’s songs. I believe these to be fair use because they are very short, but if I am wrong on that, the copyright holders can let me know and I will remove them. The text below contains links to the official videos.)
Aretha was the Queen of Soul. She was the woman who demanded respect and felt like a natural woman.
She was in the public eye for decades, but she was also intensely private. She courted the press, but she wanted to be portrayed as happy, healthy, successful, and deeply in love. Her autobiography is short, sweet, and glowing.
The biographies written by others tell a different story. Apparently, she was surrounded by friends, family, and colleagues, who were more than happy to dish the dirt to interviewers. One of her biographers added many disgusting comments of his own about Aretha’s weight, her cleavage, her fashion sense, and her eating habits. It was a vile piece of writing, and I have never in my life been so tempted to take a Sharpie and deface a library book. Small wonder that Aretha didn’t like the press. I’m going to attempt a balance between glowing and vile. We’ll see how I do.
Aretha as a Child
Aretha was born on March 25, 1942, as the fourth child of five. Her father was a Baptist preacher, who would later be allies with Martin Luther King, Jr. According to Aretha, her parents had a lovely relationship both before and after her mother left the marriage in 1948. According to others, C.L. Franklin was a ladie’s man, and he expressed his anger physically. Aretha adored and respected him throughout her life, but not everyone else did. When her mother left, the kids stayed with Dad. But they visited their mother in the summer until she died. So in a sense, Aretha lost her mother twice over by the time she was ten years old.
The Franklin home was visited by many famous people, including famous musicians. Even the neighborhood kids were erupting with musical talent. Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, and Otis Williams, who later became one of the Temptations, all grew up in the same area at the same time as Aretha.
Aretha was still a preteen when she gave her first public performances in her Daddy’s church services. Part of each year, he toured the country as a traveling preacher and Aretha was paid a stipend to be part of the act. Her first recordings are with piano and choir as she sings classic gospel songs like “He Will Wash You Whiter Than Snow” and “Precious Lord,” while the congregation punctuated the music with shouts of “Amen” and “Oh, Lord” (Bego, 14-16).
Ruth Bowen, who later became Aretha’s booking manager, knew her then and said:
“Everyone wanted to mother Aretha. When I first saw her in her father’s church, she looked like a lost child. Her eyes were filled with sadness. She looked afraid. Then when she got up to sing, this sound came out. It was gospel filled with blues. I mean, frighteningly strong blues, beautifully mature blues. After she sang, she sat back down and withdrew into her own little world. I know all the church ladies—especially those looking to get next to her father—were looking to mother her. I had this feeling she had dozens of mothers, but she really didn’t have any at all” (Ritz, 37).
Early Motherhood
It was a world which loved her, but maybe didn’t do enough to protect her, and perhaps it is not too surprising what happened next. Aretha got pregnant. She says she was 14 when she gave birth the first time (Franklin, 59). One of her biographers says 12 (Ritz, 58). She never named the father. She also claims her own father was not “judgmental, narrow, or scolding” (Franklin, 58). Her older brother Cecil says their father took him aside at this time and explained about birth control. He also said his father had a hard time explaining these things to the girls (Ritz, 60).
Perhaps he never found a way to do so because Aretha was pregnant again just a couple of years later. She claims again that her father was lovely about it, but Cecil said their father was not happy, and “he made his unhappiness clear” (Ritz, 61).
Aretha dropped out of high school after the birth of her second son, and she spent the rest of her life feeling insecure about that, especially after all of her siblings did at least some college (Ritz, 62). Motherhood may have ended Aretha’s education, but no one ever thought it should end her career. She continued to travel with her father’s revival show, and at 18 they agreed she was ready for the big time. He took her to New York to see if a recording label would sign her on. Her two sons stayed in Detroit with their grandmother.
The Early Career
Aretha signed with Columbia Records. They saw her as a jazz and blues singer. They didn’t know R&B, which brings me to a point that confused me all the way through Aretha’s story. Just what kind of singer was she? Gospel, jazz, soul, blues, R&B, pop, and rock and roll all claimed her at one point or another. She also had forays into folk, Broadway, and even opera later in life, though I don’t think anyone ever claimed she was the queen of those last three. What I finally settled on was the idea that the distinctions between these genres are very important to their devotees, but a lot less important to people who enjoy a good song but don’t care about any one style and couldn’t articulate the difference between them anyway.
The differences were less important to Aretha too. She wanted hits. Big hits. The genre didn’t much matter. Success did (Ritz, 148). Ray Bryant, who was a musician she worked with at Columbia Records, said “I always figured that Aretha just sang ‘Aretha,’ not pop or jazz. She had her own sound and feeling, which she could carry to whatever they decided to call the finished product” (Bego, 37).
Her six-year contract with Columbia Records was a semi-success. Her debut single “Today I Sing the Blues” was released in October 1960, and it did go up the R&B charts (Bego, 36). She did a few albums and a few singles, and they did sell, but not enough to make her rich or particularly famous. She also sang in a lot of nightclubs. At the beginning, her father was helping her, but soon enough she found a manager named Ted White, and she also married him. Her father did not approve (Ritz, 95), and time would prove her father right. It is true that Ted boosted her career for a while, but he also demanded total control, and he enforced it physically. Plenty of people witnessed him slapping her around (Ritz, 162). Aretha never admitted it, or said much about their marriage at all, but it was obvious to others that she was desperately unhappy.
One thing Ted did manage was a switch to Atlantic when her Columbia contract was up. That was a good move. Atlantic knew how to market her. Within two weeks she was at the top of the R&B charts with “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man.” She also—and this was important for financial success—crossed over to the pop charts, where she competed favorably the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and the Turtles’ “Happy Together” (Ritz, 159). Finally, she was making it.
Respect
The irony was that her relationship with Ted was only getting worse, and that was her situation when she was presented with a song called “Respect.” It was not written for her. The songwriter was Otis Redding. He had already recorded it himself, and it was mildly successful. Aretha’s version was a cover. But it was a cover of her own genius. She came up with the groove and syncopation in the accompaniment. She and her sisters came up with the background vocals “just a little bit” and “sock it to me, sock it to me.” The word play of spelling out the word R-E-S-P-E-C-T and “find out what it means to me” were all improv by Aretha while in the studio.
Where Otis Redding asked for respect, Aretha demanded it. She might as well have been singing it directly to the man who was slapping her down in private and in public.
When Otis Redding heard her version, he laughed in delight and said, “The girl has taken that song from me. Ain’t no longer my song. From now on, it belongs to her” (Ritz, 161).
A wide world of music fans agreed completely. The demand for respect may have held personal meaning for Aretha, but it could not have come at a more appropriate moment in US history. When she recorded it in February of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. had captured the national eye with his protests about African American civil rights and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The National Organization of Women was demanding that employers hire and pay women fairly. As we heard last week, Indigenous people were asking why they were so poor in what should be their own land. Even young white men were asking why they were expected to go to southeast Asia to kill or be killed. And this is just a sampling of the issues. So many people were demanding a little respect that nearly everyone heard themselves in Aretha’s song.
It hit the R&B charts, but it also topped the pop charts by June, and people started calling Aretha the Queen of Soul. Her performance fees quadrupled. It was a dazzling breakthrough, and everything looked great as long as you didn’t know what was going on inside Aretha.
One who did know was her producer Jerry Wexler. At least he knew the general outline of the story, if not the details.
“Sometimes she’d call me at night,” he said, “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… And of course I knew better than to ask… I’d tell her to take as much time off as she needed… ‘Oh, no, Jerry,’ she’d say, ‘I can’t stop recording… We gotta get in there and cut ‘em’” (Ritz, 175).
Actually, Aretha was already notorious for failing to show up at her own recording sessions and performances. This would get her into a lot of trouble later, but at the time she was Atlantic’s golden girl, and they were willing to put up with it. And eventually she would show up with buckets of home-cooked Southern food for the whole band and recording crew, and then she’d wail out another smash hit. That’s how she followed up “Respect” with “Chain of Fools,” “A Natural Woman,” “Since You’ve Been Gone,” and “Ain’t No Way.” This was all within a very short space of time. From February 1967 to February 1960, Aretha had six Top Ten pop singles and three Top Ten Albums. Five of the singles were gold, which means they sold more than a million copies. Two of the albums were Gold, which means they sold more than 500,000 copies. Only Elvis Presley had ever put out so many hits in the space of a year (Bego, 76).
Respected and Moving On
By the end of the summer in 1968, Ted White was out of her life. Aretha appointed her brother Cecil to be her manager instead. That was a needed change, but being suddenly single didn’t mean her problems vanished. She was drinking heavily. She started doing a little better when she began a relationship with Ken Cunningham. Not a marriage. She said that once was enough on that idea (though she later changed her mind). But in the meantime, Ken helped her cut back on the drinking and to eat a little better. It was also an era of Black pride, and Aretha remade herself on that front too: she ditched her sequins for an Afro.
Aretha was also pregnant again, but that created problems of its own. Her career was going gangbusters, and she had engagements in Vegas for the first time, but she cancelled at the last minute. She said it was because of morning sickness, and the booking agent said she didn’t have to sing in the morning, only at night. I was all prepared to rise in outrage against this ignorant man, who clearly doesn’t know that morning sickness is misnamed and does not confine itself to the morning, only to find out that the booking agent was a woman. A childless woman, who probably also didn’t know anything about morning sickness. Anyway, my sympathy was with Aretha on this one, but it was a legal mess (Ritz, 197-212). And it was not the first or the last time. Aretha was gaining a reputation for being unreliable and very difficult to work with.
In 1972, Aretha returned to her gospel roots with an album called Amazing Grace. I say album, but it was actually a recorded, live church service. There were some church people who worried that this was turning their sacred service into some Hollywood event. But to the participants, that is not what it was. Aretha was working with James Cleveland, a man known as the King of Gospel, and he said:
“There’s a notion out there that the black Baptist church is all about hysterical people waving their hands and jumping up and down in the aisles. There surely is joy in the way we celebrated God’s grace, but the service itself is, above all else, sacred. It is no joke, no show, no sham. We worship Christ in complete and absolute sincerity—and the music, born out of our genuine love of a caring God, carries that same sincerity” (Ritz, 252).
Aretha said less, but she agreed. She was world famous for secular music, but she wrote in her memoir that “I never left church. And never will. Church is as much a part of me as the air I breathe” (Franklin, 150).
Amazing Grace was a phenomenal success. It was to be Aretha’s best-selling album of all time, even beating out the one with “Respect” on it. Many people in the music business say it was her finest work. Her brother said it was “the sacred moment in the life of black people.” By now, Martin Luther King was dead. So was Malcolm X. The Vietnam War continued on and on. The world was a bewildering and frightening place. The Amazing Grace album, Cecil said, was Aretha leading us back to God (Ritz, 258).
Producer Jerry Wexler said it differently:
“I’m a hard-core, card-carrying atheist. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in art. And though it might sound like hyperbole, my assessment of Amazing Grace is that it relates to religious music in much the same way Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel relates to religious art” (Ritz, 258).
On the back of such success, Aretha signed a new contract with Atlantic. This time her terms were six million dollars, a substantial pay raise from the $25,000 they had given her at the first contract (Ritz, 270). But her next album was a dud. It happens. Even to the best of us.
Aretha retreated into a winter of depression and cancellations, but typically, she didn’t want the press to know. Her booking agent tried to tell her that a mental health challenge was not something to be ashamed of and also that hiding it was pointless. “Who doesn’t know that you have the blues, Aretha? …You’re a blues singer. You’re supposed to have the blues” (Ritz, 274).
I am not at all convinced that this was helpful.
Aretha pulled out of it eventually, but there was trouble ahead for years. Her relationship with Ken broke down over conflict with Cecil, who was both her brother and her manager. She misjudged and rejected several songs that were offered to her that went on to be big hits for other rising stars, like Natalie Cole. She alienated her sisters by foiling their own plans for solo careers. She wanted to be the only famous Franklin sister. The disco craze swept the music world, and Aretha resisted because she personally disliked the style. Her new records just weren’t selling like the old ones, and she was in danger of fading. Then the worst of all happened: her beloved father suffered a burglary, which ended in a shootout, which ended in a coma, from which he would never recover. In the midst of all this, Aretha got married again and then divorced again. Overall, the 70s were a rough decade for Aretha.
In the 1980s, Aretha switched recording labels again, and again it was the right move. She had a role in the movie Blues Brothers, and albums like Who’s Zoomin’ Who? put her back on the top of the charts.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Most importantly for her inclusion in my series was the formation of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That institution is not as old as I originally assumed. Rock and roll as a genre dates to the 1950s (maybe even the 1940s), but the industry executives didn’t start talking about a Hall of Fame until 1983, and they didn’t give out any awards until 1986. Since then, every year a few hundred designated producers, academics, and journalists vote on who to induct. They are not looking for the breakout talent that year. They are looking for long-lasting achievement, which is why you aren’t eligible until you have songs that are at least a couple of decades old.
The 1986 inductees included Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ray Charles, and Sam Cooke. If you notice a certain lack of gender disparity in that list, you are right. There were no women, and that is not because the early history of rock and roll had no women.
For example, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who pioneered the use of heavy distortion on the electric guitar in the 1940s. It was the very sound that later became a hallmark of rock and roll and a serious influence on people like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. For this reason, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is sometimes called the original rock and roll artist, and sometimes the Godmother of Rock and Roll.
There was also Ruth Brown, whose hits in the 1950s basically built Atlantic Records long before Aretha ever signed with them. There was Etta James and LaVern Baker and Wanda Jackson, and I’m only listing the early ones. There were plenty of women to choose from, but nope, no such honors for them in 1986.
In 1987, the committee mended their ways a little to include one (and only one) woman. They chose Aretha Franklin.
Aretha doesn’t say much about it in her own book. Just a couple of sentences about how gratified she was (Franklin, 220). Her agent expressed more surprise when she said: “I didn’t even know Aretha sang rock and roll. I thought she was an R&B singer, or a jazz singer, or a gospel singer” (Ritz, 436). The agent did say that Aretha was delighted to be the first woman in the hall of fame. She said “Well, the doors are open, girls!” (Bego, 207).
Cecil expressed a little of the same surprise as the booking agent. He said that Aretha “saw it as a huge honor. She thought that they would have chosen Ruth Brown or Etta James. Maybe it was because they were seen as rhythm and blues and not rock and roll. We’d always seen rock and roll as the white version of R-and-B… But an honor is an honor” (Ritz, 372).
It is possible that the Hall of Fame folks were counting Aretha as rock and roll because she had done plenty of covers of rock and roll songs. It’s also possible they were just not purists on the definitions of the genre, and they’re really honoring success. Their website did not say.
Staying Relevant
As honored as she was, Aretha did not attend the induction ceremony. She sent Cecil in her stead. That was because she had recently developed a crippling fear of flying after a couple of turbulent rides.
As far as I can tell she never flew again, and this had a crushing effect on her career. She could not perform worldwide if she would not fly to a venue. Within the North America, she could travel by custom bus, but she was even quite nervous about that, especially if the weather was sketchy or the distance was long. Her reputation for unreliability became a chronic condition. She was forever agreeing to concerts and events in far-flung destinations because she was totally getting this under control. And then when it came time to board the plane, she just couldn’t do it. As you can imagine, the event planners were not amused. The cancellation fees and the lawsuits cost a fortune.
I fully understand that this made Aretha very hard to work with. I do not fully understand the press and biographers who made snide comments about her fear of flying, her love of greasy foods, and her weight problems. These things were easy to make fun of in a way that dismissed her as weak and spineless. But her biographers said a great deal less about the challenges she did overcome: She was once a heavy drinker. She was once a chain smoker. When she decided to quit those habits, she did it cold turkey and successfully (Ritz, 412). Does that sound weak and spineless to you? To me, it sounds like a huge personal success, and that success is not eliminated just because there were other issues she did not resolve to other people’s satisfaction.
One thing she did manage to do was stay relevant through the 1990s and into the 21st century and that was no small task. Once MTV was in full swing, a singer had to have video. And as an audio-only podcaster, I know exactly how draining that concept is, which is why I don’t do it. Aretha wasn’t great on the video front either. But she was repeatedly invited to sing at the White House, and that put her on the national stage.
She wowed the world by adding opera classics like “Nessun dorma” into her repertoire and filling in for Luciano Pavarotti on last minute notice when he was supposed to sing it. It is true that she sounded nothing like Pavarotti and very little like any opera singer. But she was proving to the world that even something as straight-laced as the opera could be sung, Aretha-style.
She also had a personal triumph when universities began granting her honorary doctorates (Ritz, 394). That healed something in a woman who had dropped out of high school as a unwed teenage mother.
She continued to record right up until 2014 when she released a cover of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”. She was 72 years old and had been singing professionally for 60 of those years.
The Queen of Soul died in 2018 at the age of 76.
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Selected Sources
Bego, Mark. Aretha Franklin : The Queen of Soul. New York, Skyhorse Publishing, 2018. (This is the vile one. I don’t recommend it.)
Franklin, Aretha, and David Ritz. Aretha: From These Roots. Villard Books, 1999.
Ritz, David. Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin. Little, Brown, 28 Oct. 2014.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Inductees. 2026, https://rockhall.com/inductees/classes/. Accessed 16 Aug. 2026.