Aretha Franklin, who died this week in Detroit, where she lived most of her life, was born in a small house in South Memphis in the spring of 1942. The Queen of Soul, Franklin’s decades of music wove soul with jazz and blues and gospel and opera. She died having recorded some twenty number-one R&B singles, amassed an estate somewhere between sixty and eighty million dollars (depending on whom you ask), and having performed at the funeral of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
She insisted on being paid in cash, in full, and on the spot. Aretha was not about to be disrespected.
Photos by Anna Traverse
The afternoon of August 16, after hearing news of her death from pancreatic cancer earlier that day, crowds of Memphians began to gather at the little boarded-up house at 406 Lucy where Franklin lived until she was two 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, there was a crowd of assembled Memphians who had come together to sing, to remember, and to write notes to Franklin on the plywood covering the house’s windows.
By the next day, 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 of love, inspiration, admiration, and of course, respect.
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Someone had put up a tip bucket – cash only, please -- next to a teddy bear hung 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 added a historic marker in the front yard; visitors posed for photos with the sign.
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 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.
