09/20/18

She was proud to be The Queen of Soul. Rivals to her crown were tartly taken down.

Once she had sung a song she owned it, and that was that. Yet the last thing she wanted, offstage, was stardom.

Young Aretha hid behind drinking and smoking; mature Aretha retreated to her kitchen to find comfort in banana pudding, wrapping her ballooning body in ever more satiny and sparkly gowns.

She did crochet, and refused to fly. I've been in the storm too long.

All she thought and felt was on display on stage. No one needed to climb the wall she'd built around herself.

Someone, though, could see through that wall. He knew the things about her others only kept guessing at, such as the multiple causes of her sadness.

He saw the bruises she covered up. When she teased journalists that she didn't understand when they said her songs were raunchy, she wasn't lying.

The delivery might sound sexy, but they weren't about a man. In her music she slipped into the zone, just as she had when she began at New Bethel Baptist, wobbling on her little chair.

When she sang You make me feel like/A natural woman, head arched proudly back, one hand patting her hair, she was singing to God, just as when she screamed out her passion as a sinner cleansed by the blood of the Lamb: When my soul was in the lost and found/You came along to claim it. And when she threw out her arms wide under the spotlights, it was not to thank the fans who clamoured for her as much as to say, Precious Lord, take my hand.