The songs on her first records for Atlantic—“Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools”—were the resolution of her apprenticeship. Leaving behind the American Songbook for a while and finding just the right blend of the church and the blues, she was now celebrated as the greatest voice in popular music. “Respect” and “Think” became anthems of feminism and black power and stand alongside “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Busted,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.” “Daddy had been preaching black pride for decades,” she told the writer David Ritz, “and we as a people had rediscovered how beautiful black truly was and were echoing, ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.’ ”
At the same time, Franklin found that the strains of life as a star, as a mother, as a daughter to her tempestuous father were at times unbearable. Ted White, her first husband—they married in 1961 and divorced eight years later—was a jumped-up street hustler who abused her. In 1969, when her father let a radical organization called the Republic of New Africa use the sanctuary at New Bethel, the night ended in a bloody gun battle between the group and the Detroit police. The next year, she came out onstage, in St. Louis, and started singing “Respect” but then walked off, unable to continue. The promoter announced that Franklin had suffered “a nervous breakdown from extreme personal problems.” She soon recovered enough to perform, but she rarely seemed unburdened, except in the studio and onstage.
“I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Wexler wrote in his memoirs. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
Franklin’s vulnerability has brought with it an intense desire for control that often leads to still more anguish. When it came time to do an autobiography, she enlisted Ritz, a skilled biographer and ghostwriter who had produced fascinating books with Ray Charles, Etta James, Bettye LaVette, and Smokey Robinson. He found her a singularly resistant subject. She insisted on stripping the book of nearly anything gritty or dark. Published in 1999, it reads like an extended press release. “Denial is her strategy for emotional survival,” Ritz told me. It was only at the microphone, in her music, he concluded, that Franklin felt in command. There are reports that she has, in recent years, been struggling with cancer, but her friends say she’d never admit to such a thing, “not even on her deathbed.”