Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, is featured in the April 2021 issue of National Geographic. The article is a wonderful read and a reminder of where profound and transforming genius and leadership are often found - in wounds, urgency, and search for a better world. My natural inclination in music is toward classical but I appreciate and am lifted up by all kinds of music and I can't listen to Aretha without a spine-tingling realization that she had much to say to all who will listen. Two documentaries produced after her death in 2018 attempt to portray the origin and depths of her music, National Geographic's Genius - Aretha and RESPECT, a popular release in 2020.
The April 2021 National Geographic quotes a biographer who recalled making the mistake of asking her about her earliest childhood memories. "Her whole life, she kept it very secret what was happening with her life, from the romantic to the personal," Ritz said. "you couldn't get any information out of her. She suppressed anger. She suppressed her confusion. The one vehicle she used to express it all was her music. Because it was suppressed, it was extravagantly expressed... Some of us go and pay the psychologist or psychiatrist and shut the door. She does it by opening her mouth on stage. This is her psychotherapy. Her catharsis.
I wonder how many other extravagant expressions of life experience, aspiration, and disappointment have been lost. So many of these could well have profoundly shaped our world through passionate conviction and statements of how things should be. Take a moment to listen to Aretha as she probes the depths of our shared life experience in RESPECT or I Dreamed a Dream from President Bill Clinton's inauguration, when the words shifted to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s everlasting words, "I have a dream."
