Aretha Franklin’s Sublime 2015 Performance Will Bring You To Tears
If you do nothing else today, watch this.
There are dozens and dozens of goosebump-inducing moments from Aretha Franklin’s immense, six-decade long career — but one in particular stands out from the rest.
In 2015, Franklin appeared at Washington’s Kennedy Center to honour a fellow legend (and her friend) Carole King, who was receiving a lifetime achievement award. Sat at a grand piano, she delivered a powerful performance of ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, a song that King wrote and Aretha released back in 1967.
The performance moved then-President Barack Obama to tears, and induced such excitement in Carole King that she spent the entire song like this:
Same Carole, same.
“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll — the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” Obama told The New Yorker about the performance.
“That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears — the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed — because it captures the fullness of the American experience,” Obama said. “The view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”
The clip subsequently went viral, with artists such as Elton John publicly praising Franklin.
“I will definitely, when I’m 75, be having a fur coat like that, and coming in with a clutch bag, too,” Elton John told The New York Times. “And throwing my coat off. And in a fishtail dress.”
Following her death last night, aged 76, Obama shared a tribute on Instagram, writing that Franklin helped “define the American experience.”
“America has no royalty. But we do have a chance to earn something more enduring,” he wrote. “Every time she sang, we were all graced with a glimpse of the divine. Through her compositions and unmatched musicianship, Aretha helped define the American experience.
“May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace.”
Watch the Kennedy Center performance below.