WHAT’S THE STORY?

THIRTY years ago this month, Aretha Franklin made history by becoming the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Now 74, she is still the undisputed Queen of Soul and is considered by many to be the greatest singer of post-Second World War popular music.

Franklin has won 18 Grammy awards, the most recent in 2007, sold millions of records, sang at the inaugurations of US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and her music has helped to bridge the racial divide.

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll – the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” Obama said. “You can hear Aretha’s influence across the landscape of American music, no matter the genre. What other artist had that kind of impact? Dylan. Maybe Stevie, Ray Charles. The Beatles and the Stones. The jazz giants like Armstrong. But it’s a short list. And if I’m stranded on a desert island, and have 10 records to take, I know she’s in the collection, for she’ll remind me of my humanity. What’s essential in all of us. And she just sounds so damn good.”

WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?

FOR all her musical success, however, Franklin’s life has been marked by personal hardships. Born in 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, she was deeply influenced by her father, Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, the most well-known black preacher of his era.

He grew up in the Mississippi Delta at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was rampant and black children were often confronted by the horrific sight of murder victims hanging from the trees – a sight described by BB King in his memoirs as the “strange fruit” that made him “feel disgust and disgrace and rage and every emotion that makes me cry without tears and scream without sound”.

A vision telling him to “preach the gospel to all nations” appeared to Franklin when he was 15 and before he was out of his teens he had begun to attract attention as a powerful preacher.

He eventually secured a post in Detroit at the New Bethel Baptist Church and became known as the Preacher with the Golden Voice. He gained fame nationally with a radio show on WLAC and by recording his sermons on albums that sold in their hundreds of thousands.

The family lived at the centre of the black community and Aretha and her three siblings grew up listening to the likes of Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington singing and playing in their home while kids nearby included Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross.

WHAT HAPPENED THEN?

AS Franklin’s fame grew, so apparently did his taste for drink and women and when Aretha was just six, her gospel-singing mother left the family home only to die four years later. “The whole family wanted for love,” remembered family friend Mahalia Jackson.

In the1950, CL Franklin started touring the country using gospel stars in his shows as well as the young Aretha who sang and played piano. At the age of 15 she recorded gospel songs but life on the road also left her with two children by the time she was 18. Her eyes were also opened up to the endemic racism that still held sway in the US, particularly in the south. Martin Luther King was a friend of her father’s and Aretha joined the civil rights movement.

In 1960, when she was still only 18, she moved to New York with the aim of furthering her recording career and signed to Columbia Records but it wasn’t until she moved to Atlantic in the mid-60 that she began to find fame. Think and Respect were released on the Atlantic label and became anthems of black power and feminism.

“Daddy had been preaching black pride for decades 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’,” she said.

DID SHE ACHIEVE MORE?

BY 1968 Franklin was recognised throughout Europe as well as in the US as Lady Soul and a symbol of black pride. She featured on the cover of Time magazine and sang at King’s funeral after his assassination.

Her musical success continued but her personal life became more and more turbulent. Her marriage to her manager Ted White, with whom she had her third child, ended after he hit her in public.

In 1969 her father was arrested for the possession of marijuana and also hit the headlines for allowing a radical black group to use his church for a controversial conference which ended in a gun battle with the police and the death of one officer.

Yet the hits kept coming for Franklin along with the babies and marriages and rumours of alcohol problems and a growing reputation for throwing tantrums. She gave birth to her fourth son in the early 1970s and married actor Glynn Turman in 1978.

A bad experience left her with a phobia of flying that hampered her touring, but in 1980 she signed to Arista and started a new phase by singing in the Blues Brothers movie.

WHAT ELSE?

FRANKLIN'S troubles were far from over, however, and in 1984 her father died following five years in a coma after being shot during a burglary at his home.

She divorced Turman the same year but came back into the public eye with the Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves duet with the Eurythmics and I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me), the Grammy-winning No 1 single with George Michael.

Her sister Carolyn died of cancer the year after she was inducted into the Hall of Fame and around the same time she lost Cecil, her brother and manager. She has continued to record this century, parting with Arista and starting her own label. In 2008 she was ranked by Rolling Stone as the Greatest Singer of All Time.