Image David Ritz Credit... Nicola Goode

Mr. Ritz’s years of experience have given him both a panoply of connections to good sources and a library of old interviews with anybody who was anybody in a recording studio in those days. He can quote, for example, the singer Bettye LaVette (about whom he wrote a book), one of the people who speaks relatively kindly about Mr. White, who became Ms. Franklin’s first husband. “I’d call Ted a gentleman pimp,” she says of Mr. White, who left Ms. Franklin with visible bruises. He also was party to a notorious racial melee in Muscle Shoals, Ala., after Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, a white Jewish blues magician, put together what he thought would be a felicitous, interracial group of studio musicians. Though Wexler was one of the great influences on Ms. Franklin’s career, this fight almost ended their collaboration before it began.

Ugly physical fights were not unusual between Mr. White and Ms. Franklin. But when she got drunk enough to brawl or fall, Jet magazine was there to do damage control. When she lost weight, Jet celebrated; when she got to looking large, the magazine diverted attention elsewhere. And when she simply dropped out of sight and missed scheduled performances, Jet published excuses that perhaps even the Franklin camp hadn’t even thought of.

As Mr. Ritz shows, she remained a fearful, secretive woman of few words throughout her career, though there was one realm in which she was always eager to verbalize. She earned her diva reputation by seldom missing a chance to insult a female rival, even if — especially if — that rival was one of her ever-envious sisters.

It may surprise Steely Dan fans to know that the song “Hey Nineteen,” with its affectionate reference to “ ’Retha Franklin,” gave her fits. The lead singer laments that he is dating a woman so young she doesn’t who the Queen of Soul is; the Queen saw that as an insult and felt down right litigious about it. As Ms. Franklin got older and tetchier, handling her became an ever more delicate art, in ways that the book discusses. She excitedly married the actor and acting teacher Glynn Turman in California, only to discover that he had more admirers than her ego could handle. When the marriage broke up, she fled home to the shelter of Detroit and has stayed here. When her father died in 1984, she nearly got into a fight with her sister-in-law who tried to walk close to his coffin.

“Self-reflection was never Aretha’s strong suit,” Mr. Ritz writes, in a remarkable bit of understatement, explaining just how any memoir got written at all. Before she hired a book agent to get the process rolling, Aretha appeared on “60 Minutes” in the late 1980s to be lightly grilled by Ed Bradley, who had the temerity to ask her about the sexual content of her songs. “Lust,” he said. “A feeling — a good feeling.” “You got me mixed up with somebody else, Ed,” she replied. Mr. Ritz writes that she said this “indignantly.” So he deserves some kind of thanks for writing not two Aretha Franklin books, or even a newly unadulterated one, but anything about her at all.