A queen remembered

In the days following her death on Aug. 16 from pancreatic cancer, Aretha Franklin was alternately eulogized as the “Queen of Soul” and upbraided as a self-absorbed diva. (Her funeral occurs today in Detroit.)

The praise vastly outweighed the excoriation and focused on her indomitable voice, her string of iconic late-’60s hits, and her longevity. (Her final album of original material, Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics, came out in 2014, 58 years after the recording of her first, Songs of Faith.)

The upbraiding focused on her adolescent pregnancies, her unhappy marriages, her propensity to leave promoters and fans in the lurch by canceling concerts and other professional obligations at the last minute, and her weight.

Both perspectives were accurate. They were also connected.

The daughter of the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a Detroit-based, superstar Baptist preacher with many famous friends and a latitudinous attitude toward sexual morality, Franklin grew up in a feverish atmosphere combining faith, celebrity, and hedonism. Her mother, fed up with C.L.’s womanizing, left the family when Aretha was 6 and died three years later.

A surer-fire recipe for perpetual insecurity would be hard to imagine.

By the time Franklin was 15, she’d given birth to two children, delegating their rearing in large part to friends and family members when the music business, having caught wind of her pyrotechnic talent, began calling.

She subjugated whatever guilt she may have felt as an absentee mother in the same way that she subjugated her other miseries—by refusing to address them publicly (her 1999 autobiography was widely dismissed as frustratingly superficial), by picking fights with any female vocalist whom she considered even remotely competitive (sometimes turning duets into “cutting contests”), by spending (and dressing) ostentatiously, by refusing to fly, by chain smoking (she quit in 1991), and by “comfort eating.”

She also threw herself into making indelible music, recording at least half a dozen classic gold- or platinum-selling albums, not counting the classics-filled compilations Aretha’s Gold (1969), 30 Greatest Hits (1985), and Greatest Hits: 1980-1994 (1994). Her numerous Grammy awards, her 1987 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, her 1994 Kennedy Center Honor, and her 2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom attested to the esteem in which her peers held her.

Little if any of what’s been written about Franklin in the last few weeks, however, has touched on her live albums Amazing Grace and One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, expansive, jubilant gospel projects that found her unleashing her entire melismatic arsenal in the service of the Lord. Were they the only albums that Franklin had ever recorded, they would’ve left listeners no choice but to conclude that the Queen of Soul was a fervent Christian believer.

Amazing Grace came out in 1972 at the height of her chart-topping success, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptismin 1987 in the wake of her mid-’80s renaissance. Neither, in other words, was released under a bushel. Amazing Grace even went double platinum, becoming the best-selling album of her career.

By comparison, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism underperformed. (It peaked at 106.) And no matter what one thinks of the music or the cameos by Mavis Staples and Joe Ligon, the preacherly interludes totaling over half an hour impede the flow.

But sometimes, as in the case of Jesse Jackson’s fiery sermonette, they accelerate the flow instead. And while the Rev. Cecil Franklin’s claim that his sister’s “Christian commitment to carry the gospel to every creature is unquestionable” may strain credulity, in this context it resonates like a fait accompli.