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Respect: The Valentine’s Day Session That Changed Everything
Respect: The Valentine’s Day Session That Changed Everything On Valentine’s Day, 1967 — February 14, a Tuesday — Aretha Franklin walked into Atlantic Studios in New York City, sat down at the piano, and asked her producer a question: “What’s the next song?” The engineer, Tom Dowd, told her the plan. Aretha started singing it…
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Aretha Franklin: The Heart Behind the Hits
The world knew Aretha Franklin’s voice — that titanic, church-shaking instrument that could turn three letters into a revolution. What the world didn’t always see was the heart that powered it: a woman who put her money, her safety, and her reputation on the line for the freedom struggle, who raised four sons away from…
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The Night Aretha Franklin Sang Opera: How the Queen of Soul Saved the 1998 Grammys
Ten minutes into the live telecast of the 40th Annual Grammy Awards, the phone rang in producer Ken Ehrlich’s bunker beneath the stage at Radio City Music Hall. On the line was the evening’s headliner, the most famous tenor on earth, calling to say he could not sing. What happened over the next two hours…
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The Untold Story of Aretha Franklin: The Queen Who Turned Pain into Glory
On a winter morning in January 1967, a 24-year-old singer walked into a ramshackle studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and sat down at a piano. She had no written arrangement, no rehearsed band, nothing but a song in her head and a lifetime of church behind her. Within twenty minutes, the musicians in the room…