The soul singer was an architect of the civil-rights movement as much as a witness to it.<\/b>
\nIf the Great Migration could be condensed into a single personal narrative, it might be Aretha Franklin\u2019s. Born in 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, to a traveling, womanizing preacher and a gospel-singing mother, Franklin was whisked north by the same currents that brought millions of black souls to the great industrial and financial centers of the country. Settling with her father in Detroit, she received just about as formal a training in gospel music as was possible back then, singing in her father\u2019s church and on revival tours, and learning from Mahalia Jackson, who stopped in to check on the Franklin household at times.
At 18, Franklin cast off the gospel and embarked on a pop career that would span nearly six decades, spawn a legion of hits, garner countless awards, and see her enshrined as the Queen of an art she helped build. Fifty years ago, she received an award for excellence from Martin Luther King Jr. Four years later, she sang \u201cPrecious Lord, Take My Hand,\u201d his favorite song, at Mahalia Jackson\u2019s funeral. Almost four decades after that, Franklin serenaded President Barack Obama and the rest of the country with \u201cMy Country ‘Tis of Thee\u201d at his inauguration. There were generations in her church hat.
Franklin\u2019s 76 years on Earth bookended a grand arc of tumult, letdowns, progress, setbacks, terror, and hope in American history. That in itself might not be a remarkable feat so much as a reminder that all black people older than 53 have seen and lived through hell. But Aretha\u2014and that first name is sufficient, as it was in black churches and parlors for half a century\u2014was an architect of a movement as much as a witness to it. She toured with the actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to raise money for King\u2019s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, when the organization was in dire financial straits and was attempting to embark on a Poor People\u2019s Campaign. She was an activist who strained to keep a movement going even after King\u2019s assassination, and who worked to support the Black Panthers and attempted to post bail to free the activist Angela Davis from jail. She loved black people. In this country, that simple fact was radical enough.
And now Aretha is dead.
It seems we are burying more and more of the old royalty these days. That\u2019s the way of the world, and in the liberative and redemptive tradition of the Black Gospel, the passings of the elders are ultimate moments of freedom and joy as much as times for sadness. But still, Aretha\u2019s death is a loss, and it should prompt reflection. What does it mean to bury the Queen of Soul?
Aside from the revivals that come about every few years, soul is mostly a thing Americans look back on and remember fondly. In recalling a romantic and powerful era of American history, soul is a bit like Latin: an inert progenitor language once spoken by people who somehow seemed larger and more full of life than the models made today. In Aretha\u2019s runs, Sam\u2019s grandeur, Otis\u2019s gravelly urgency, and the splendor of Stax horns, there\u2019s some element of impossibility to a youngish observer like myself. It\u2019s as if the exodus that produced Aretha became music itself, and for a time produced songs and sounds that can be approached, but never truly replicated.
Part of that uniqueness comes from the fact that soul was also so tightly tied to uprising. More than just a temporal coinciding of a popular trend with the civil-rights movement, soul was another corridor of the movement. If spirituals, jazz, gospel, blues, and R&B were the first musical conduits of black resistance, soul proved to be the conduit when that resistance finally broke through.
Both the civil-rights movement and soul have often been critically misunderstood. The contributions of women\u2014in particular the vibrant organizing for sexual autonomy and freedom from gender violence that built the organizing arms of the black freedom movement \u2014are often elided in civil-rights histories centered on a handful of great men. And historians of soul often focus heavily on the difficult and prominent men at its forefront, on the (perceived) electric masculine energies of Delta guitars and rock covers. But Aretha stood as a corrective to both, and tied them together. Her activist drive proved effective when the money ran dry. Her canon of anthems encompassed racial, gender, and sexual freedom, and properly located the hard knot of women at the center of the movement. Her complete mastery of gospel located one of the taproots of soul in the choirs, and with the hundreds of women powerhouses in their ranks who\u2014unlike her\u2014had never been allowed to pursue careers in the secular world.
Aretha proved to be a capable monarch. At her zenith, her main power was in transformation, in taking less potent songs and breathing fire into them. Through sheer force of will, she transformed Otis Redding\u2019s \u201cRespect\u201d from a pleading ballad to a civil-rights staple, a slogan for struggles at the intersection of blackness and womanhood that predated the famous \u201cI Am a Man\u201d signs of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers\u2019 Strike. Her barn-burning single \u201cThink,\u201d with its chants of \u201cFreedom\u201d during the bridge, continued on the theme. Just a few months after King\u2019s death, Aretha commandeered Dionne Warwick\u2019s \u201cI Say a Little Prayer,\u201d a composition that the jazz artist Roland Kirk would himself commandeer a year later and fashion into an explicit tribute to King.
Those transformations are what made soul what it was, as well. The literal meaning of the genre\u2019s name speaks to its purpose. That purpose was taking the animus of a divine creator from gospel and pouring it into the music of the world. It took the black experience, with all its urgency and certainty of overcoming, and transliterated it into the vernacular. Soul was and is a revolutionary art, and Aretha belongs in the broader conversation about this country\u2019s revolutionary heroes with any provocateur or patriot who ever lived.<\/p>\n

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