Aretha Franklin came to New York a nobody — and left a legend.
The iconic singer was a shy 18-year-old mother of two, little known outside the gospel world, when she arrived in the Big Apple in 1960 and signed with Columbia Records.
Franklin’s stunning vocal chops immediately garnered rave reviews — but it took years of hard work to achieve the commercial success she longed for.
Initially living in and out of cheap hotels and leaving her young kids back home in her native Detroit, the young singer cut her teeth at local jazz venues like the Village Vanguard and Village Gate.
“When Aretha Franklin sat at the piano and sang the blues, the audience at the Village Vanguard erupted into applause,” Billboard wrote in a review of her debut New York performance.
“The gal singer, who as had one single disk so far on the Columbia label has a fine strong voice that bears emotional fruit when it is channeled into the material she knows and feels best.”
But she struggled to find her niche, both on vinyl and on stage.
“She blew me away… The one thing she lacked, though, was taste in material,” jazz singer Carmen McCrae is quoted as saying in the 2014 biography “Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin” of one Vanguard show.
“She sang some seriously stupid s–t. Maybe she was looking for a teen hit, but she did at least four or five songs that were crap.”
The teen also wasn’t the most reliable performer — missing gigs and press appearances, according to the book.
Franklin’s profile grew somewhat with TV appearances and shows alongside greats like Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Count Basie and Duke Ellington — but her career still didn’t take off until she left Columbia and switched to Atlantic Records in 1966.
The next year, she traveled to Alabama to record — but went AWOL after an altercation with a white horn player and only agreed to finish the sessions back in New York, according to the biography.
The resulting album, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” shot her into super-stardom — with its hit single “Respect” rocketing to number 1.
By the end of the year, Franklin was starring in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Franklin stayed in Gotham through the peak of her career — returning to record and play Madison Square Garden, the Apollo and on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” — finally moving to LA in 1975.
After news of her death broke Thursday, fans who remembered seeing the legendary diva in her heyday flocked to the Apollo with flowers.
“I saw her here a couple times when she performed at the Apollo Theater. You could hear her voice before she even got on stage,“ said local Erin Spencer, who gave his age only as “old enough to remember.”
“It was magical, it was mystical, it was out of this world. You could feel her heart, you could feel the rumble. She could calm you down with her voice.”
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