The church claims Ms. Franklin, rightly, as the preacher’s daughter who brought everything she had learned from gospel music — the timing, the dynamics, the ornaments, the vocal tones, the call-and-response with her backup singers, the way she played piano — into the hits that would make her a star for the next five decades and into her countless live concerts. When Ms. Franklin hit an artistic impasse she would reinvigorate herself by returning to church and recording albums of gospel standards. Ms. Franklin sang gospel at the funerals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, and of Rosa Parks in 2005; Ms. Parks’s funeral was also held in the Greater Grace Temple. The continuity was symbolic and unmistakable.

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But the church was only part of Ms. Franklin’s education and of the style she would forge. She also grew up hearing jazz, blues and R&B in a home that welcomed visits from touring musicians. And in the 1950s and 1960s her father, like other preachers nationwide, was a civil-rights leader, an ally of Dr. King. Growing up in a segregated era, Ms. Franklin absorbed not only the tenets of faith but also a determination to make earthly life more equitable. At her funeral, there was as much praise for her civil-rights advocacy — touring to fund Dr. King’s payroll, posting bail for Angela Davis in 1970 — as for her music, while some speakers, like Ms. Franklin’s longtime friend the Rev. Jesse Jackson, used the pulpit to get out the vote for this year’s midterm elections.

Ms. Franklin had to move outside gospel music to become a superstar. Her 1967 breakthrough, after years of working in and out of gospel and jazz, was to bring pop concision and impact — “Think” runs just 2:20 — to songs that didn’t confine her voice or constrain her pride. Through the decades, she kept finding them, writing them, or (as with “Respect” and “I Say a Little Prayer”) seizing them to make them her own. She sang about pain to exorcise it; she sang about strength to spread it. She also made herself an example as a tough businesswoman.