Word: franklin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...about soul. This is about that glorious mezzo-soprano, the gospel growls, the throaty howls, the girlish vocal tickles, the swoops, the dives, the blue-sky high notes, the blue-sea low notes. Female vocalists don't get the credit as innovators that male instrumentalists do. They should. Franklin has mastered her instrument as surely as John Coltrane mastered his sax; her vocal technique has been studied and copied by those who came after her, including Chaka Khan in the '70s and Whitney Houston...
...Franklin's influence has only grown in the '90s. The dominant divas of this decade--Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton--are all, musically speaking, Sunday-school students of Aretha's. The queen still rules: early this year Franklin co-starred in a Divas Live benefit concert on the cable channel VH-1 with some of the most popular young female singers of the '90s, including Carey and Celine Dion. The younger stars were blown offstage by the force of Franklin's talent...
Like Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Franklin helped bring spiritual passion into pop music. In 1961 she signed with Columbia, which tried to turn her into a singer of jazzy pop. In 1966 she switched to Atlantic, delved into soul, and began to flourish. Unlike many of her performing peers, Franklin took a strong hand in creating her own sound. Her guiding principle with producers, she says, is "if you're here to record me, then let's record...
From the moment she sang Respect--that still famous call for recognition and appreciation--Franklin helped complete the task begun by Billie Holiday and others, converting American pop from a patriarchal monologue into a coed dialogue. Women were no longer just going to stand around and sing about broken hearts; they were going to demand respect, and even spell it out for you if there was some part of that word you didn't understand. As Franklin declares on Do Right Woman--Do Right Man: "A woman's... not just a plaything/ She's flesh and blood just like...
...hear Franklin's voice is to hear many voices: she sings not just for black women but for all women. Her pop hit Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves (1985) was a duet, notably, with a white singer, Annie Lennox. Franklin sings not just about the female condition but about the human one. I Say a Little Prayer (1968) and Love Pang (1998) are existential soul, capturing heartache juxtaposed with workaday life--brushing your teeth, drinking morning coffee. By singing of such things, she exalted the mundane, giving a voice, a powerful one, to everyday folks and events...