But this isn't about accolades; this is 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 in the '80s.

And 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 me — and not you."

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 a man." Respect also became a civil rights anthem. "For black women, Aretha is the voice that made all the unsaid sayable, powerful and lyrical," the writer Thulani Davis once observed. "She was just more rockin', more earnest, just plain more down front than the divas of jazz ... Aretha let her raggedy edges show, which meant she could be trusted with ours."

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June 28, 1968

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