For those of you who may have thought my earlier piece on Aretha was over the top, please see this tribute from the latest issue of the major opera monthly magazine Opera News by the editor in chief, Paul Driscoll.
Diva Self-Respect
By F. Paul Driscoll
I wish all aspiring singers—male as well as female, working in every genre of music—would spend some quality time listening to Aretha Franklin. Franklin, who died on August 16 at the age of seventy-six, was deservedly ranked as one of the greatest singers of her time, an artist whose magnificent voice and nonpareil power of expression made her a cultural icon. Franklin’s most popular nickname was “The Queen,” a fitting title for a woman who ruled every stage on which she stood with absolute power. But for me, Franklin defined the concept of diva—the artist as a goddess who made her audiences see and hear music through the prism of her unshakable self knowledge. Franklin arrived on the music scene when she was in her teens, a total original incapable of imitating anyone; she settled into stardom in her mid-twenties and stayed there for the next half-century, secure in the knowledge that she had no equals.
Nobody, before or since, could sing the way Aretha Franklin did. When Franklin took on a song, she didn’t interpret it—she reinvented it. Most of Franklin’s signature numbers date from the beginning of her relationship with Atlantic Records, which started in 1967, with the release of I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. The tenth studio album for Franklin, who was not quite twenty-five when it was issued, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You was full of pure gold, including Franklin’s exhilarating, career-defining performance of Otis Redding’s “Respect.” With a few lyric changes and her red-hot sense of her own self-worth, Franklin turned “Respect”—a song written by a man, designed for a man to sing—into an anthem of female self-empowerment.
My favorite of Franklin’s early Columbia albums is Yeah! (1965), on which she covers numbers by Cole Porter, Erroll Garner and Harold Arlen, among others. Franklin’s ninety-second zip through Steve Allen’s smart-alecky This Could Be the Start of Something is the essence of her interpretive gifts: she sings it with palpable glee, as if she couldn’t wait to share the jokes. Like all true divas, Franklin makes every word sound brand-new—as if it had been written just for her.
F. Paul Driscoll
Editor in Chief
Opera News
November 2018