Aretha Franklin. Illustration by Chris Honeysuckle Ellis.
Aretha Franklin, who died last month in Detroit, where she lived most of her life, was born in a small house in South Memphis in the spring of 1942. Over a six-decade musical career, Franklin wove soul with jazz and blues and gospel and opera. She died having recorded some 20 number-one R&B singles, received 18 Grammys, amassed an estate somewhere between 60 and 80 million dollars (depending on whom you ask), and performed at the funeral of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. An expansive life.
Throughout her career, she insisted on being paid in cash, in full, on the spot. Aretha, the Queen of Soul, was not about to be disrespected.
Aretha’s music could change the atmosphere in a room. In a nation.
The afternoon of August 16th, after hearing news of her death from pancreatic cancer earlier that day, crowds of Memphians began to gather at a little boarded-up house at 406 Lucy. Franklin lived here until she was 2 with her father, the Baptist minister C.L. Franklin, and her mother, Barbara, herself an accomplished singer and vocalist who divorced C.L., then died when Aretha was 10. By evening, a crowd of assembled Memphians had come together to sing, to remember, and to write notes to Franklin on the plywood covering the house’s windows.
The next day, on my way out of town, I took a detour to the house on Lucy, drawn to it like a magnet and a pilgrim at once. Crowds were still processing in and out, everyone a little hushed, quiet on the broadly sunny day. Neighbors sat in lawn chairs on the sidewalk across the street, watching the comers and goers, the photographers and musicians, the single police car, and everyone else who had been pulled to this little house to pay their respects, leave their flowers, add their voices to the chorus bearing witness.
Someone had lashed a tip bucket — cash only, please — next to a teddy bear on the chain-link fence. The house on Lucy is in disrepair, and has been the subject of legal wrangling for years. In 2017, the City erected a historic marker in the front yard; visitors posed for photos with the sign. And added signs of their own: The house was covered quickly with love notes and notes of respect, notes from far afield and close to home, notes of gratitude. As I drove away, a woman danced slowly, solo, in the yard; like Aretha, unafraid to occupy her space, on her time.
A few people, reading later online about the crowds of people who had the audacity to write all over the house, commented about a lack of respect. Just the opposite. The house, whose future remains uncertain, is only a collection of boards. What is certain: the force of the connection those boards symbolize, a connection between this place, this city, and the singer who changed so much.
Aretha’s music could change the atmosphere in a room. In a nation. Her voice was mighty as the Mississippi when women singers were expected to be smaller, silvery, decorative; her work ranged freely and hungrily across genres when artists were expected to stay in their places.
Fifty years ago, in 1968, Aretha Franklin sang in Paris, at the Olympia Theatre. In the recording, she’s on, and the crowd sparks and scintillates with the electricity kindled onstage. Since her death, I’ve been visiting this half-century-ago evening often. It’s in the middle of the album, but the song where I keep starting is “Night Life.” Aretha didn’t write the song — that was Willie Nelson and company — but she wrote herself into it, occupying every inch of the words and chords.
“Oh, the night life,” she sings, spending as much time exploring the vowels as she damn well pleases, “ain’t no good life / Oh, but it’s my life.” All her own.
No one owned Aretha Franklin, not for one moment: not a record label, not a manager, not a city, not her fans. She eluded that sort of eager grasping. As Memphis remembered Aretha this particular week, we did so knowing full well she was never really ours, and respecting her all the more fervently. Memphis claims the King: The Queen was all her own.
