Original subtitles

They called her the Queen of Soul...

..but Aretha Franklin was far more than that.

Singer, civil rights icon, inspiration to millions.

The dozens of million-selling records and countless awards

were nothing compared to her stature

as a woman of mesmerising musical grandeur and vocal elegance.

She soared above all others

and made it look seemingly effortless.

Aretha Franklin's death at the age of 76

leaves the world an emptier place.

But she leaves behind a legacy that will always command respect.

You couldn't get any better than Aretha Franklin.

I remember when I first heard her on the radio,

1967, I think it was

and I was driving from the north of England

and it played this girl singing.

I'd never heard a voice like it before

and then they back announced it.

They said, "Aretha Franklin."

Her arrival felt like a musical meteor.

She struck and everything changed.

Permanently.

The sound of the record, Ain't Never Loved A Man The Way That I Love You,

there was a gospel feel to it

that you didn't hear on pop radio.

You know what I mean? It didn't SOUND like a pop record.

Great records change the world, or seem to.

That was like Good Vibrations or Strawberry Fields Forever

or The Four Tops' Reach Out I'll Be There.

It was one that seemed to make the world tilt on its axis

because that record brought gospel into pop music front and centre.

And all of us, you know, every last one of us who has

opened our mouths to sing, has done so learning at her feet.

I'd never heard a person on record

sound like Aretha Franklin.

A lot of people come from the church, you know,

and then they get into pop music, but then they change slightly.

There's flavours of it with singers.

You can hear where they've come from,

but she brought the church with her.

She didn't compromise.

She sang...

I think every song she ever sang

was like she could have sang that in church.

In hearing her voice,

you're hearing the history of African-American music

and you're hearing how important the gospel music is on influencing,

the African-American music, on influencing all popular music today.

# And it starts with me. #

Aretha wasn't just ANY church singer.

Her father was the Reverend CL Franklin,

one of the most prominent Baptist preachers in America

and a key figure in the civil rights movement.

The cloud will be lifted!

Yes, it will!

Ooww!

Ooww, yeah!

Her mother died when she was nine.

By that age, Aretha was already performing and touring with

her father's church choir.

She was pregnant at the age of 12 and again at 14.

She'd lived a life before she got to record.

You know, I mean, she had a child when she was very young.

Well, two when she was a teenager,

and I think she learned about life quickly.

So, erm, that showed in the way she sang.

I don't think you can sing with that kind of feeling

if you haven't lived.

We knew she had gone through adversity.

She had children, very, very young.

She lost her mother very young

and that was always in the arc

of what Aretha didn't have to say but what was in the sound.

So, in many ways, especially for women of my generation, those

of us who came through the '70s and the late '60s, she invented us.

As a black woman, it has to be said, as a woman who came from church

the same as me, she just spoke so directly to me.

I think she's had more influence on other female singers

than maybe any singer, I think.

That's the way I feel about it.

She is royalty

especially when I think about black culture and what she means

for a lot of the young black women

and singers of my generation and before.

She was the first, the first ultimate songstress.

The teenage mother with the golden voice was signed to a major label

in 1960 at the age of 18,

but six years at Columbia Records

failed to give her a single top 20 hit.

In 1966, she made the magic move to a new label, Atlantic.

When she recorded for Columbia she did some great recordings,

but they hadn't clicked.

Because she was so versatile that she sang a lot of different things.

You know, she did things on Columbia that were...

There was jazz there and all kinds of influences she had taken onboard,

but when she got with Atlantic, she went back to church.

No other singer did this to me.

You just heard her sing and it was like...

It WAS like church, even if she was doing a pop song.

It was just like, "I own you."

She may have come from the church, but her next single Respect was

a vocal hand grenade that defined the subversive spirit of the 1960s.

Respect was the one that made it clear that she was talking

about more than just relationships or even just about God.

She was talking about the world, and about the way society was evolving.

She was talking about civil rights and feminism.

She made her statements through the music.

She sang R-E-S-P-E-C-T at a time when African Americans

were getting none, you know.

That was her statement,

and it was a statement that reverberated around the world.

And people heard what she was saying loud and clear.

That song became a kind of shout of protest

and a shout of triumph at the same time.

There was a sense within it of...

..of exaltation in a triumph that hasn't happened yet

but you knew was going to happen.

And partly was going to happen because she was singing that way.

It was so powerful.

I feel she didn't have to kind of stand on a soapbox and,

you know, pontificate because everything she was doing was

through the power of that voice, in song.

And what a voice!

And what a performer!

You know, not dance moves and things like that,

just she sang with her very fibre of her being.

Everything sang with her.

And that was statement enough, I think.

And whereas Detroit is proud of its native daughter

and whereas she's everybody's soul sister,

therefore I, Jerome P Cavanagh, Mayor of the city of Detroit,

do hereby proclaim Friday February 16th

as Aretha Franklin Day.

Respect made Aretha the most globally recognised female

face of the civil rights movement.

But what was perhaps most remarkable about the woman behind this

giant voice was her shy, quiet and subdued demeanour off the stage.

Black women, especially of Aretha's generation,

and mine to a lesser extent but certainly of hers,

we're taught to be quiet because your life was unprotected.

It was unprotected at home, it was unprotected outside.

You were unprotected in society in general.

So there is a kind of quietness.

She does enough, for me, just with her voice.

And I know a lot of her fans may think, "What do you mean?

"How do you know she wasn't a good..."

I don't know what she was like,

because she never allowed us in really, did she?

With Aretha, I mean, it surprised me how quiet she was.

Singing the way she sang.

But I think she put it all in there.

She realised that for her to communicate, I think,

cos I know the feeling...

You know, in order to communicate, sing, if you can.

So she'd come along the stage and she'd sing about loss,

she'd sing about love,

she'd sing about joyousness, she'd sing about,

you know, a guy who turned her on.

She'd sing about all these things.

She could take other people's music and turn it into her music,

and so she gave us a bridge by which we could function in a society

that was always basically trying to keep us quiet, keep us down.

And she actually gave the landscape for the feelings,

our feelings to be expressed.

Aretha became that voice.

She embodied how so many black women were feeling at the time.

That's why she's so often quoted,

"You better give me some R-E-S-P-E-C-T!"

You know, people quote those lyrics all the time.

She empowered people to speak out.

In that voice, you're hearing all of that humanity and love

and experience coming out.

And I think that's the reason

that her voice communicated with so many people.

She was doing all of that with her voice,

and that was easy for people to digest and relate to,

you know, in three and a half minutes of a record.

She's telling this guy, she's not pleading with him and saying,

you know, "You never loved me."

No, when she sang it she's telling him,

"You'd better get this because I know what I'm talking about."

So... But she was like the dominant person.

She wasn't asking, she was telling.

And I think...

Yeah, that's a big difference. She was telling.

I'd just like to add that so much of what informed the way she sang,

as opposed to other astonishing singers, was the way she played.

Her touch was so rhythmical and melodic...

..and, you know, free-flowing.

# Oh, darling... #

It was like she was ad libbing as she was playing,

as well as the vocals.

It was only certain things that, you know, signatures.

Don't Play That Song For Me, you've got that signature riff,

and then outside of that there's so much intricate stuff going on.

She used the piano both as a writing tool - she wrote this very

beautiful song called Without The One That You Love,

which I'd recommend people look up -

and you can hear it's like, kind of...

It's like Church piano playing,

which has clearly led to the song, you know,

and then you hear her playing on all those songs, piano playing,

and it kind of rocks along or it has great soul and spirituality

and love to it because it comes out of the Church.

And it was the perfect accompaniment for her,

so she was at one with the piano, and I would say

she's probably one of the piano players that's most influenced me.

As Aretha neared the peak of her commercial appeal, one of her

many TV appearances put her alongside our very own Tom Jones.

So, I think it was, like, 1970 when she came on the show.

She seemed like she was a shy person until she sang.

It was like, my God! This sound that's coming from this woman is...

..is unbelievable for somebody so quiet before she starts to sing!

You know, I've got a big voice and I project, you know...

..but I didn't have to hold back or anything.

But with her, you didn't have to hold back. She wanted...

You know, you had to give it as much as you could

in order to stay with her.

She was putting it all out there. Boom.

She was a joy to work with.

Aretha had enjoyed a five-year period where she couldn't put

a foot wrong musically.

But in the 1970s, Aretha's career would take a commercial nosedive.

Right after Rock Steady in 1971, the hits became few and far between.

Soul music, you know,

in general sort of changed when it got into the '70s.

Those records in the '60s were raw.

You know, they were...

You could hear everything and it was right in your face.

But then in the '70s it became more mechanical,

you know, recording-wise.

Sounds changed. She did some of the records.

She had some success with later sounds,

but they didn't sound as good, vocally, as before.

She was still sounding great, but the sound of the records, no.

It's a shame.

I think the attempt to move with a trend as opposed to

in spite of it is probably what made things kind of fall to the wayside.

She didn't need to move with where the trend was.

But, you know, I think labels sometimes...

Artists sometimes don't always understand that,

and feel the need to stay current

without realising that exactly as they are is perfect.

Oi, shut up, woman! # You better think

# Think about what you're trying to do to me

In 1980, she made a comeback thanks to a glorious cameo in a movie

paying homage to '60s soul.

But it didn't resurrect her chart career.

Chart salvation was awaiting Aretha from an unlikely source - Britain.

In the 1980s, a new generation of pop stars inspired by Aretha

invited her to duet with them, and they put her back on top.

It began with the Eurythmics in 1985...

..and culminated in 1987 when a duet with George Michael became

Aretha's first number one chart hit for 16 years.

It was the last she would ever have in her lifetime.

Pop artists of the '80s were throwaway to me, honestly.

A lot of them were throwaway. Some of the songs were...

But Aretha still managed to add a little bit of that Church in her pop songs.

She still did. And I didn't begrudge her...

Anyone who begrudged her her period in the '80s

and who tried to wipe the '80s as if it didn't happen,

I thought she was really important for R&B, for pop and for soul music.

Aretha became a stranger to the pop charts in the 1990s,

but her stature rose in ways

that made commercial success seem irrelevant.

Once again, she was the Queen Of Soul.

President Obama's inauguration was obviously being streamed

around the world, and it was already the biggest moment, you know,

politically, that I had witnessed, and we just watched the whole thing.

And then the great lady opens her mouth.

Aretha Franklin represented the triumph of African American culture.

All the things that those hundreds of thousands

of slaves went through...

..and what happened to them, and what happened to their

descendants and what they made of it...

..and the astonishing gift that they presented to the world

as a result of it, which changed...

..changed the lives of many of us.

It was so clear that...

..being there to sing for such a wonderful point in world history

meant everything to her, and it all just came out in the voice.

Ah, actually got quite choked up there!

In my lifetime, I never, ever thought I'd see a black president.

Erm, I did think I'd see Aretha Franklin there, though.

It was like, "This is what I was born to do." You know?

There's a new president, you know,

he's a black guy and I'm here and they've called on me and it was right,

and I don't think anyone could begrudge her that moment.

She stole the show.

In 2015, she produced one last defining moment.

Some of her later performances,

the last one that was trending around the world,

you know, hashtag Aretha, was at the Kennedy Center.

In the presence of the Obamas and Carole King...

It was just extraordinary.

Starts at the piano and midway through is up,

coat gets shrugged off and she's gone, like...

..like a supernova.

Even when I start to think about this performance, my eyes well up.

We all knew what was happening.

We probably can't describe it in words but everybody felt it,

it's a universal thing.

We're experiencing something of the divine,

to the point where the most powerful man in the world

is reduced to tears, like a baby.

And we're sharing it with him.

And that is the Aretha that will stand through the ages.

Like Shakespeare, you know, like other great artists - van Gogh...

Aretha will be exactly that.

Immortality is hers.

She may be gone now, but Aretha's legacy will never leave us.

There'll be no other Aretha Franklin.

She's the essence of soul.

If you like anybody with a soulful voice,

you will acknowledge she is the best, the greatest.

The greatest. The greatest!

Here lies the greatest singer that ever lived.

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