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Aretha Franklin, The Very Best of The 60s
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Aretha Louise Franklin ( Memphis , March 25, 1942- Detroit , August 16, 2018), universally known as The Queen of Soul , is one of the great musical icons of popular music of the 20th century, after a career full of successes prolonged over six decades.
Daughter of a famous Baptist preacher, CL Franklin , a close collaborator of Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement , she grew up in Detroit , where her father exercised his religious ministry. Aretha demonstrated a precocious musical talent from her childhood and learned to play the piano as a self-taught person. It so happened that several famous gospel musicians of the time, such as Clara Ward , James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson, were close friends of the family, so there was no shortage of positive influences in their beginnings.
At just 14 years old, she recorded her first album, The gospel soul of Aretha Franklin . Her fame as a young prodigy made several record companies compete to sign her, finally signing with Columbia Records in 1961. Despite her youth, Aretha showed her strong character, since the record company wanted to launch her as a jazz singer, considered at that time a more commercial genre than soul and gospel, which she opposed. This motivated, after a couple of albums, Aretha to leave Columbia for Atlantic Records , where they promised her greater artistic independence.
For Atlantic, she would record what is, without a doubt, her most legendary song, Respect , composed by Otis Redding , which definitively established her. Her first three albums for Atlantic, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Arrives (1967) and Lady Soul (1968), which combined her own compositions with others by great artists such as Ray Charles , Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield were massive hits. Today, they are considered soul classics.
As the decade passed into the 70s, Aretha began to include versions of pop and rock songs by groups like The Beatles , The Drifters and Simon & Garfunkel in her albums , and even ventured into disco music. That ability to adapt led him in the following decade to collaborate, for example, with Keith Richards , Elton John or George Michael , and in the nineties with Whitney Houston , Puff Daddy or Lauryn Hill , at the same time that he re-recorded old gospel songs that were so important at the beginning of his career. One of her last hits, already in the new century, was her version of Rolling in Deep ‘s Adele , recorded in 2014 for her forty-fifth album, Aretha Franklin sings The Great Diva Classics .
Aretha Franklin was married twice and was the mother of four children, several of whom have also dedicated themselves to music. It would be endless to mention the awards and honors that were granted to him throughout a career full of success.
In 1987, she was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . In 2005, the prestigious Rolling Stone magazine ranked her 9th among the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”, being the first woman on the list. That same year, President George Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom , the United States’ highest civilian award. In addition, in addition to her undoubted artistic stature, we must highlight her cultural influence on the African-American liberation movement and as a feminist symbol.