Aretha Franklin, who died Thursday at 76, was one of the titanic figures in American pop music. She was central to the secularization of the gospel impulse in the 1960s, and her vision of soul music became the soundtrack to the civil rights movement. In addition to these ideological innovations, she could sing in a way that made all other singers sound irrelevant, tired, mushy.

She sang at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and Barack Obama’s first inauguration. She covered the Beatles, Otis Redding and Adele. She was a vivacious stage presence with signature style. And she was famously protective of her privacy and her public narrative.