But it’s also because that’s what the old I’ve-earned-it-now-I’m-gonna-wear-it gospel stars often did: they wore the mink. When she wears a fur coat onstage, it’s partly to keep warm and prevent her voice from closing up. Her greatest concern is husbanding her voice and her energies. Sometimes, Franklin will switch things up and pull out a jazz tune-“Cherokee” or “Skylark”-but that is rare. Barnum, to assemble her usual rhythm section and backup singers and pair them with some local union horn and string players, and run them through a three-hour scan of anything Franklin might choose to sing: the hits from the late sixties and early seventies-“Chain of Fools,” “Spirit in the Dark,” “Think”-along with more recent recordings. She leaves it to her longtime musical director, a seventy-nine-year-old former child actor and doo-wop singer named H. The Queen does not rehearse the band-not for a casino gig in Windsor, Ontario. Pervis Spann presided over a coronation in which he placed a crown on Franklin’s head and pronounced her the Queen of Soul. “Indeed, we feel that if the idea of aristocracy is more than mere class conceit, then these surely are our natural queens.” In 1967, at the Regal Theatre, in Chicago, the d.j. “There are certain women singers who possess, beyond all the boundaries of our admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love,” Ralph Ellison wrote in a 1958 essay on Mahalia Jackson. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice, sang “Nessun dorma” for him. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop.
You are not going to disrespect her.”įranklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. “There is the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. King, get ripped off,” a close friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. “It’s the era she grew up in-she saw so many people, like Ray Charles and B. The cash goes into her handbag and the handbag either stays with her security team or goes out onstage and resides, within eyeshot, on the piano. She collects on the spot or she does not sing. On the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush, were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. “For a time up there, I just couldn’t hear myself right,” she said. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. Lowery” to fix the levels once and for all. Feedback had pierced a verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she sat down at the piano to play “Inseparable,” a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a “Mr. “What was with the sound?” she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation. She did not wear the expression of someone who has just brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls. Late on a winter night, Aretha Franklin sat in the dressing room of Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino, in Ontario.
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