Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title "The Queen of Soul”, is dead. Aretha Franklin who
Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title “The Queen of Soul”, is dead. Aretha Franklin who died at 9:50 a.m. at her home in Detroit, surrounded by family and friends, died at the age of 76 of advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type. Her death comes three days after a source close to her told CNN’s Don Lemon that the singer was in hospice care. 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. The singer’s final public performance was last November, when she sang at an Elton John AIDS Foundation gala in New York.
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’, a song 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. She won 18 Grammy awards, including the honor for best female R&B performance for eight straight years. Perhaps more than any other soul star, Franklin’s voice embodied the music’s debt to gospel.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, she 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. 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.
Aretha Franklin was twice divorced, had brushes with the law and was shrouded in secrecy. She was the mother of four sons, giving birth to the first at 15 and the second at 17. Franklin battled health issues in recent years, struggling with weight gain and associated ailments.
