In 2015, Aretha Franklin invited me and a few others to join her in Philadelphia as she sang for Pope Francis. I was certainly thrilled to see the pontiff up close. But, I must confess, after many years of friendship, I was still more excited to watch the Queen of Soul. Even at 73, Franklin could trap lightning in her mouth at a moment’s notice and shout down fire to earth.
Just the mention of Aretha Franklin’s name conjured transcendent sonic fury. She came to it honestly. Her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was one of the most storied preachers of his day. His rhetorical genius made its way onto dozens of recordings that were treasured possessions in many black homes.
I grew up in Detroit, where the Reverend Franklin lived, but I first sampled the minister’s words on my grandfather’s Alabama farm. I was barely 6 years old and I sat, transfixed, by the record. Franklin was a down-home preacher whose sermons showcased his earthy squall, which could resolve in dramatic whisper. He was a master of the chanted sermon, where words are put under pressure of music and speech bursts into song.
The young Aretha learned from her father and turned into a gospel wunderkind.
If Aretha got her gift from her father, I inherited my love for Aretha from my mother. When she migrated to Detroit from Alabama in the mid-1950s, my mother frequented the New Bethel Baptist Church where C.L. Franklin held forth every Sunday.
She told me how, after the Reverend Franklin mesmerized the congregation with his poetic homilies, his teenage daughter would rise behind him to ratchet up the spirit. Her uncanny aptitude was so compelling that the congregation knew that greatness and the Spirit rested in double portion on this fearless young woman. One can hear her gargantuan gift on her first gospel recording, at age 14, “Never Grow Old.”
When it came time for her to switch from sacred to secular, to head for the soul music charts after she had brilliantly charted the path of the soul in gospel music, she confronted brutal blowback from some black believers.
They thought that she had betrayed her first love and her true calling. But they were wrong. After experimenting with numerous genres, from blues to jazz, Aretha Franklin found a bigger canvas on which to sketch her artistic vision, which drew both from ancient soul passions and progressive moral possibilities. Thus, she transformed Otis Redding’s punchy “Respect” into a timeless anthem for racial pride and a cry of feminist recognition. Her church got larger, her congregation composed of millions of people in search of a soulful vision of spiritual direction beyond sanctuary doors.
When she returned to the world of gospel in 1972, and again 15 years later, her embrace of the phrases and emotion of the sanctuary put at ease those who may have feared that she had somehow lost it, or that God had somehow forsaken her. Her father let the world know, in spirited remarks on her 1972 album, “Amazing Grace,” that his daughter “never really left the church.” And clearly it had never left her.
During her remarkable career, Ms. Franklin made sure to incorporate her concern for social justice and redemptive politics as she performed at civil rights fund-raisers for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and to benefit the efforts of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. She offered to post bond for the jailed revolutionary Angela Davis in the early ’70s, going against the wishes of her father. In her statement at the time she said: “I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.”
Adorned in a spectacular hat, Ms. Franklin famously sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at the first inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009.
I was blessed to know Aretha Franklin personally, and she would sometimes call me to discuss current events. She had a crisp comprehension of the political machinations of our time. She reveled in the achievements of the first black president and registered grief at the polarization under his successor.
Her sense of humor was sharp. I cracked up each time she recalled how Dr. King, as a guest in her father’s home, encountered the family maid one morning who laid out the options for breakfast. “There are scrambled eggs, and grits, and soychig,” Ms. Franklin recalled the maid saying. Having discerned that she was offering her unique pronunciation of sausage, Dr. King, without missing a beat, replied that he’d have the eggs and grits, “and some of that soychig.” We both laughed until tears streamed down our faces.
I hungered for personal knowledge of her father’s artistry on the pulpit. My close study of his craft led Ms. Franklin to invite me on stage with her in Atlanta in 2012 to offer an appreciation for his formidable oratorical talents. She took great pride in her father’s command of black sacred speech, and she was especially grateful that a younger generation took note of his epic gifts.
As we stood on stage, we both realized, as we remarked later, that we were a long way from Detroit. We both fiercely loved Detroit, and Detroit, in turn, was exceedingly proud of her. She was a fearless evangelist for a city that was often spurned for its embrace of unapologetic black identity and leadership.
The Baptist church that we both sprang from eventually took great delight in her reign as the most dominant force in American music. The preacher in me believed that hers was the best way to tell our story to a world that might never darken the doors of a church but was sorely in need of a dose of the Spirit.
Aretha Franklin had a famous fear of flying. But now, like one of her compositions, she has ascended to a heavenly domain in which she passionately believed and to which her immortal art, both in the church and beyond, always pointed.
Michael Eric Dyson is the author, most recently, of What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America, a Baptist minister and a contributing opinion writer.