Word: aretha
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PLAYING THE QUEEN Aretha Franklin was asked last week what actress could play her in a film version of her life story. "Maybe Natalie Cole?" she mused. "Toni Braxton has a resemblance to me at a younger age. I love Vivica Fox...and I really love Brandy." On a scale of 1 to 10, here is how we rate that race...
...long, critics, taking the public with them, have looked to rock and gangsta rap to fill the pantheon of pop heroes. But there was a time when auteurs had soul, when Marvin was asking what's going on, when Stevie was singing songs in the key of life, when Aretha was demanding respect. This season, with the ascension of a new generation of neo-soul stars, the past may be present again, and, to paraphrase Fanon, the future may be opening...
...particularly impressed by the profile of "the Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin. You explored her legendary career in depth and noted her ties to gospel music. Not to disparage the excellent essay on black female blues singers, I do have one quibble. The true liberators of black female singers were the great gospel women. Their vocal and physical expressions were a potent, yet separate, part of the patriarchal church. Mahalia Jackson once said, "Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help." And she also commented, "Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings--spreading...
...funny, but has melancholy, magic-drained eyes. The twice-divorced diva's life has sometimes had the hard, sad stomp of a blues song: in 1979 her father was shot by burglars, fell into a coma and died. Producer Jerry Wexler once wrote, "I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows...anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura...
Perhaps no one employed this strategy with more profound results than the incomparable Billie Holiday, who paved the way for an entire generation of black women vocal stylists, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and R.-and-B. singers like Aretha Franklin. Although Holiday, who counted Bessie Smith among her most important musical influences, was not a blues singer per se, her music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained...