Farewell, the Queen of Soul and a great American

At the risk of sounding sentimental, the Herald would like to use this space not for the usual discussion of some policy or world event but to pay tribute to the Queen of Soul,
Aretha Franklin who died aged 76.

She was among the most influential artists of the past 100 years who took the already powerful tradition of African American music and reinvented it for all women.

Aretha Franklin in 2009 at Barack Obama's inauguration.

Aretha Franklin in 2009 at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Hers was a universally recognisable voice of a strong woman whose power lay not in her sex appeal to men but in herself.  Every female performer since then, from Madonna to Taylor Swift, owes her a huge debt and ordinary women all over the world from Memphis to Mosul can recognise themselves in her music which is still played 50 years after her first huge hit song Respect.

Others will pay tribute to her extraordinary voice and technical artistry in songs like Natural Woman and Think but the Herald would like to note that she was a quintessentially American success story.

As the first black American president Barack Obama said on Friday: "In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect."

There is no other country in the world which could take a figure from such a downtrodden and painful margin of society, make her a financial success and place her at the very centre of its culture.

Ms Franklin's life was the story of both female and black empowerment. She was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1942 and her family joined what Americans call the Great Migration, fleeing the slavery and segregation of the south to look for jobs and freedom in the north.

As a woman she was doubly victimised, falling pregnant for the first time at the age of 12 and suffering through abusive marriages.

Her mother died young and her father, a black preacher, settled in Detroit in the 1950s. Growing up in Motown put her at the origin of African-American music's incredible conquest of first the US and then the world. Gospel and jazz and the blues had existed for decades but for the first time in the 1960s, African Americans, like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, recorded their own music and broke into mainstream white mass culture in their own right.

Ms Franklin took this often sexist tradition and gave it a broader appeal. The song Respect shows her conscious understanding of what she was doing. Her version is a cover of an unremarkable rhythm-and-blues song by Otis Redding, in which a man returning home to his wife whines and demands the "respect" he feels he deserves in exchange for handing over his salary. Aretha Franklin cheekily changed the lyrics and turned it into a celebration of something else. In her song, it is the woman not the man who is laying down the laws and has "all of the money".

Ms Franklin's stardom coincided with the headiest period of the Vietnam War and the US Civil Rights movement. Her hometown Detroit was the scene of bloody race riots in 1967. She went on tours with Dr Martin Luther King as he demanded an end to segregation in the south and was shocked when he was assassinated in 1968. At times she took career risks. She offered to post bail in 1970 for black American activist Angela Davis, who was arrested on trumped-up terrorism charges.

She was much less explicit about her role in the feminist movement arguing that songs like Respect expressed the universal dignity of all humanity.  She was surprised how women have seized on her songs as anthems.

She found commercial success, selling 75 million records, and was the first woman in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for what that is worth. She sang to kings and queens and presidents.

It is easy to focus on the bitter internal divisions in the US or on its foreign policy failures.  Ms Franklin's career, however, is a tribute to America's cultural dynamism, entrepreneurialism and its ability to reinvent itself. No other country could have produced her. It is a land of opportunity and freedom.

President Donald Trump has sometimes appeared to deny this American story. Even he, however, issued a tribute to Ms Franklin: "She was a great woman, with a wonderful gift from God, her voice."

Ms Franklin, who famously hated flying, may never have visited Australia but our country’s own belief in equality, independence and a voice for all people means we will mourn her passing as our American friends do. God bless America.

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