Happy Birthday, Queen
Someone stole my “Aretha Franklin Amazing Grace” CD. It was Christmas. Family members and a dear friend were unpacking the car. We were laughing in the cold, arms full, happy together — and one of us left the door unlocked. It happens.
And then, because we live in the city, maybe someone was watching, or just coming down the street, popping door handles. Click. And then they sit down and grab quarters from the ashtray and CDs from the glove box.
Years before, from right here on the block, someone had stolen our whole car. Our first Dodge minivan: forest green, boxy, manual shift.
Who steals a stick-shift minivan?
In a week, we got it back, minus seats — but more importantly, minus my fave homemade cassette tape! Leontyne Price singing for the last time her signature role in Verdi’s Aida at the Met, recorded from the live broadcast on PBS. I knew all too well the familiar regret; not just theft, but pure waste: No one would ever buy that old, scratched Aretha CD without a cover. Just like no one would have bought my amateur Aida cassette tapes with bad breaks at the flip and my handwritten notes.
So, I lost the Aretha CD that kept me company for thousands of miles. Not that I need it now: I can play Aretha’s album and Leontyne’s performance through the phone’s Bluetooth. And more than that, because Sabrina Owens, niece-executor of Franklin’s estate, gave the go-ahead, we can now see the film of Aretha’s 1971 in-church “Amazing Grace” recording session. But objects connect to our lives now with moments in the past. For me, that CD connected me to one charmed night, a live performance of Aretha herself.
Also Christmas season: December 29, 2014, at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. My friends, Becky and David, had gotten sick and generously offered up their seats, meaning that I had a chance to take our daughter Zoë, a budding pop-culture scholar, to see the Queen of Soul. Our seats were not together. Next to me was a man who said that his kids had laughed at the idea of going with him to an “old-people’s concert.”
“No,” I said disbelieving, “This is Aretha.”
He wondered whether Aretha could make it in today’s music industry. With videos, he said, she’d have to look like Beyonce. With that voice, I said, that musicianship, that savvy she would absolutely soar now— as she did then. In fact, my daughter and I had been admiring her style. We’d watched YouTube interviews and clips, while I made dinner, played songs on blast to get hype. We savored the photos.
“She was gorgeous!” Zoë said.
We had vowed that if she came out for an encore, we would both scream together: “Nessun Dorma!” Every now and again we’d look at each other across the rows and raise our eyebrows. Yup. We’d do it!
When the concert began I worked to slow my mind and hold onto the exquisite feeling of following her voice: listening, yes, but also running after, like when you fall in love. Sometimes she sang; sometimes she sat down to the piano and played, or played and sang; sometimes she talked to us. Each song and story came out with gusto: a full-on concert at 72. Her latest album then was Aretha Sings the Great Diva Classics, and she sang one classic after another, uptempo, ballads, bluesy riffs. The God of desert places peeked out from under the bling.
At the end, the Queen of Soul said she’d gotten her start at a little club on Broad Street and was so glad to have come back to Philadelphia. Then she tip-tipped offstage. The band kept playing. Her rich, deep-river voice spoke to us from a backstage mic. We’d have this evening to remember, she said — we were all standing now, staring toward the side of the stage where she’d disappeared in the glistening white gown that my daughter said she wears to confound phone cameras.
Now we’d have — and she broke into Streisand’s “Memories,” using the saw-edge of her late-concert, post-Obama inauguration voice. The hopeful lilt of gospel aerated the song’s compacted sentiment. We’d remember, all right: when we danced at weddings, cried at funerals, made love with partners or with people we shouldn’t, when we said good-bye at retirement dinners, prayed alone in the car, or drove home from hospitals. I’m remembered as I sat in front of the computer that brought me the world in our global pandemic.
And then, the band struck up the Anne Get Your Gun staple “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Aretha peeked out wearing a red Santa cap with the white ball hanging just to one side. Her voice cut through the sentimentality, sly and smart and true. It was true about life and faith, stupidity and lust and sin and hope, truth and voice so big they splashed over the sides of most any damn song. And I got to take it in with my daughter, home from college, wearing her seamed Christmas stockings and her new lip piercing.
While I worked at #VoteThatJawn, as I am doing again for Election 2024, with young people who are at turns tired of US politics and amped up to get their young voices into it; as I write and rewrite librettos, I meditate on voice, their voices, my own, writing stories that America does not always want to hear. And I return to Aretha, whose voice epitomizes complex soul with absolute accessibility. Each time she sings, I hear something new.
God save the queen.
