March 25th 1942 August 16th 2018

Upon hearing the death of the great Aretha Franklin this month made me realize we are losing the greats at an alarming rate.  Aretha's music hit me early on in my musical digging.  I was a young teenager when I had Respect on a cassette with other hits from the year of 1967.  The cassette was not long in length if anything it had like thirty minutes of music.  In that thirty minutes.  Aretha's song was the one that jumped out of the speakers.  It was like waking up from a nap and something startled you.  Now you are awake and have it's full attention.  I'm sure she did that to a lot of people.

Aretha's music lasted many decades and first caught my attention on the radio with her and Annie Lennox on the Top 40.  Her voice was as strong as ever and carried an addictive tune to radio airplay more often then I could count.  A women of Aretha's power been around more the twenty years at this point and can still had a huge presence. Respect was the tune that showed the listening audience that the female presence is strong and the tune that I heard with Annie Lennox would have not been made without her powerful words back in 1967.  

As I mentioned in my post on Instagram and the same on Facebook, there are so many albums from her Atlantic catalog to choose from that I could point to and pick.  One album gets more listens then any other.  I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You is the album that every song on the album is a keeper and could have been hits.  It garnered four singles out of the eleven songs on the album.  The title song is one of my favorite songs of the 60's.  

It's an album that even though it's less then thirty-three minutes long, it will be an album that will be played repeatedly without skipping a beat.  It will never get old and turn any frown upside down.  I dig her Atlantic records more then any point in her career.  I just picked up an Gospel area compilation of her music and I'm sure it's just as powerful as this great music from the late 1960's.  

Aretha's music and her presence will be missed greatly.  When I hear her music on the radio it will be a time where we look back and bow to her incredible impact on the world of Popular Music, R&B, Soul and Gospel.  I only wish I was that fly at Fame Recording Studios hearing her blow everybody in the studio's minds.  She is a National Treasure, thanks for the memories!