“Testing, can you hear me?” [playing piano] “I don’t want nobody.” The simple thing about Aretha Franklin is she was a great singer, a singer who could do anything. “The moment I wake up …” She could do rhythm and blues, she could do jazz, she could do opera. She could do country, probably. They started calling her the Queen of Soul in the ’60s, when she was barely in her 20s, and nobody argued. People heard Aretha, and they were inspired. And it was an inspiration that she channeled from gospel, into soul music, into music that spoke to people’s daily lives. There were songs like “Think,” which is a warning shot across a relationship. It’s one of the few songs she wrote, and it’s one of her strongest messages. She had 100 songs in the Billboard R-and-B charts and 17 pop hit singles, but what was more important was the way she freed other singers, the way she showed other singers this is how a voice can fly. You can hear Aretha Franklin in Whitney Houston. You can hear Aretha Franklin in Chaka Khan. You can hear Aretha Franklin in men, too, Luther Vandross. I mean, you can hear Aretha Franklin across R-and-B and across American music. She wasn’t always in the charts. There were long stretches of the late ’70s, the late ’80s, when she couldn’t get a hit. I think the people who were giving her material often let her down. “What do you do if you forget a lyric?” “I keep stepping.” [laughter] “You keep moving fast?” You see here at the end of her career singing an Adele song … and you think, what if Aretha had better songwriters all the way through her career? She would have even more than those 100 R-and-B singles. “Respect” was first recorded by Otis Redding, and for Otis Redding, it was, “Come on, when I get home, baby, you know, be nice to me, I worked.” When Aretha gets it as a woman and turns it around — “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” — it’s about much more than that. It’s about respect for her as a woman, it’s about respect for her as a person. It’s about respect for her as a breadwinner in this song. But it’s also about sexual respect and physical respect — it’s everything. “Anywhere I’ve gone in the world, people love that song” — “They do” — “Did you have any idea when you recorded ‘Respect’ that it was going to be what it was?” “No, I really did not. I did not have any idea that the civil rights movement would adopt that as its mantra.” “My country, ’tis of thee …” Her father had been involved in the civil rights struggle. She was close to Martin Luther King. She was involved back in the ’60s. To see America’s first African-American president be inaugurated, this was a culmination of something, and you had to have Aretha Franklin there. [applause] “All right, thank you. Good evening, how’s everybody tonight? Feel good? Looking out on the morning rain ...” Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, gospel music applied to secular topics. And that meant putting all of the airborne improvisation of gospel into songs about fighting with your guy, and bringing that spirit, channeling that ecstatic spirit into really down-to-Earth situations.” “Gospel goes with me wherever I go. Gospel is a constant with me.” “Amazing Grace” is a gospel standard. Everybody who sings gospel music knows “Amazing Grace.” It’s a beautiful song. And when you hear Aretha Franklin sing that song, it’s just transcendent. “Amazing grace, how sweet …” There was always that feeling that she was channeling some higher power into whatever she was singing. “... the sound.”