“The cool cat wept!” King told me later. “I loved that.”
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Before the show, I was talking with people in the aisles. More than a few said they hadnt seen Franklin or paid much attention to her recordings for years. It was an older crowd, but they hadnt come to see an oldies show. What reawakened them, they said, was precisely what had reawakened me: a video, gone viral, of Franklin singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman at last Decembers Kennedy Center Honors. Watch it if you havent: in under five minutes, your life will improve by a minimum of forty-seven per cent.
Aretha comes out onstage looking like the fanciest church lady in Christendom: fierce red lipstick, floor-length mink, a brocaded pink-and-gold dress that Bessie Smith would have worn if shed sold tens of millions of records. Aretha sits down at the piano. She adjusts the mike. Then she proceeds to punch out a series of gospel chords in 12/8 time, and, if you have an ounce of sap left in you, you are overcome. A huge orchestra wells up beneath her, and four crack backup singers sliver their perfectly timed accents (Ah-hoo!) in front of her lines. Aretha is singing with a power that rivals her own self of three or four decades ago.
Up in the first tier, sitting next to the Obamas, Carole King is about to fall over the rail. She is an honoree, and wrote A Natural Woman with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. From the moment Franklin starts the first verseLooking out on the morning rain, / I used to feel . . . so uninspiredKing is rolling her eyes back in her head and waving on the music as if in a kind of ecstatic possession. She soon spots Obama wiping a tear from his cheek. (The cool cat wept! King told me later. I loved that.)
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul