I know. That does just sound like the art of singing. But when gospel left the church and entered the body — the black body — we called that soul. And a good soul artist could make singing for sex sound like she was singing for God. They call that secular music. But it just repositioned what else could be holy. Almost nobody — and even then, maybe just Ray Charles — did as much toggling between and conflating of the religious and the randy with as much sincere athletic imagination and humor and swagger as Ms. Franklin.

“Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business),” the hit from 1967 that she co-wrote, never fails to chill, arouse and amuse. Ms. Franklin performs it with a mix of exasperation and smoldering anticipation. That song’s never sounded better or more theatrical than it does on “Aretha Live at Fillmore West,” from 1971. Its structural brilliance is that there’s no robust chorus or melody, just Ms. Franklin, her piano, a blues groove and her mood. She wants a friend to get going so she can have sex with her man. But who’s been shown the door with this much flair?

[Read Wesley Morris on Aretha Franklin’s landmark live album “Amazing Grace.”]

The song starts, “I don’t want nobody always sitting around me and my man.” You could bake a pie in the pause between “nobody” and “always.” And when she gets to “sitting,” she takes a deep, five-second drag on the “s” so that it sounds less like a consonant and more like a lit fuse. The remaining six and a half minutes put you in exhilarated suspense over when her top’s gonna blow.

There are so many things to love about this performance: its sexiness, its playfulness, its resolve, all the space in the arrangement for Ms. Franklin’s singing to stay low until it takes off high, the way that once she finally connects with Dr. Feelgood himself, the crowd audibly connects with the song or, really, just more deeply connects, since people had been shouting stuff like, “Sing it, Aretha!” between her pauses. You can feel in that moment the hold Ms. Franklin had over anybody who ever saw — or heard — her sing. She worked with bottomless reserves of swagger.

We tend not to think of Ms. Franklin that way — as an artist of bravado and nerve and daring, as a woman with swagger. We tend not to think of her this way even though nearly every song she sang brimmed over with it. (She sang about taking care of business — the old “tcb” — and, consequently, having her business taken care of, as much as she sang about respect.) Swagger we left to the Elvis Presleys and James Browns and Mick Jaggers. But “swagger” is the only word for, say, her approach to the music of other artists.