• Available eBook version
Aretha Franklin
Natural woman
Sebastian Danchin

Like Elizabeth Taylor, Caroline of Monaco or Placido Domingo, Aretha Franklin is part of that international jet-set whose every last movement, carefully staged, is the stuff that the dreams of a huge swath of humanity are made of. Torn between envy and admiration, gossip columnists describe her extravagant outfits, without forgetting her excess pounds… and whisper the latest rumors, maintaining her reputation as a capricious, distant and solitary diva. The contrast is all the more stunning for those who actually knock at her door. Barefoot, in a sweatshirt and shapeless pants, like any middle-class housewife just back from the supermarket, she heads instinctively to the kitchen to make a banal cup of coffee, with the sounds of a soap opera coming from a wide-screen TV in the background. Understanding Aretha Louise Franklin’s character requires decrypting this duality, and a search for the familiarity dissimulated behind the official polish of the public persona. This ambiguity is the extension of her musical heritage: behind the haughtily proud allure of the soul diva, carried by the intuitive spirituality of her education at the foundations of gospel, hides a blues-singer, historian of a thousand and one humiliations in black America and the tragic daily life of African-American women. The daughter of Reverend Franklin — star of the gospel circuit and follower of Martin Luther King Jr. — managed to become the standard bearer for a generation without being able to free herself from the heritage of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, which made of her an eternally consenting victim of male predators who cared little for her romantic illusions. An existence on the edges of the tragic, the sensual and the spiritual that perfectly defines the genre that she has reigned over for nearly forty years: soul music. Influenced by her father, a man of the cloth, a businessman and a ladies’ man who inculcated a retrograde sense of hierarchy between the sexes while preaching racial tolerance, this feminist icon from the 60s spent a good part of her life suffering from machismo... Thrown into the arena of show business at the tender age of fourteen, when she was soon to be a teen-aged mother; garnering top billing at 25 and reduced to the role of has-been at 35, she never gave up, and has achieved the status of a living myth on the strength of her creativity alone. Focussing on concrete elements from her personal and professional life, banning voyeurism, this portrait allows readers to better understand her motivations, to grasp the ups and downs of her career and to shed light on her work. At the end of the day, the figure that appears in this book, with its novel-like twists and turns of fate, is that of a rare artist, above and beyond her fame and fortune (Aretha remains to this day the most prize-winning singer in the USA, and the one who sold the most 45s, long before Madonna, Olivia Newton-John or Whitney Houston). By displaying the details of her complicated existence, the author reveals the capacity for resistance of an artist as tenacious as she is proud, a diva of daily life, a woman of flesh and blood and desire who finds her real relevance far from the sequins and the bright lights; one with a love of the simple and the natural that earned her, way back in 1967, at the beginning of her fame, the nickname natural woman.

Aretha Franklin -
  • Available material :
    Finished copy

  • Buchet/Chastel
  • Musique
  • Biographies
  • Publication date : 01/11/2018
  • Size : 14 x 20,5 cm, 16,99 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-283-03274-9
Backlist of the author
  • Aretha Franklin -
    Available eBook version
About the author