Born poor on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, Aretha passed away at age 76 worth about $80 million in Detroit at home among her family, Aretha was a stunning Diva now she belongs to the ages. Her soaring, sweet, melodic, complex voice entertained us and triggered our emotions and wonderment that so perfect a voice was among us. She had a tremendous career that spanned the globe; included heads of state and who was welcomed into the homes of millions of fans. She rose to stardom in the 1960s after signing first with Columbia Records and then Atlantic Records. She would go on to record 42 studio albums and win 18 Grammy Awards, including eight consecutive Grammy Awards for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance. Over the course of her career she also charted 73 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 with songs like “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” and “Think”, the most of any female artist ever and the ninth-most of all artists. In 1987 she became the first woman ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One incredible woman.

One of the things that made Aretha so great was her impressive vocal range. She could sing notes spanning well over three octaves – and some people even argue she could sing up to four octaves. Sarah Brightman has a three octave range. Sinatra a few notes over two octaves. Elvis had a vocal range of two and a half octaves. His voice had wonderful control, tone and vibrato and he had the ability to cross genres effortlessly. Record producer John Owen Williams says of Elvis:

People talk of his range and power, his ability and ease in hitting the high notes. But the real difference between Elvis and other singers was that he could sing majestically in any style, be it rock, country, or R&B – because he had soul. He sang from the heart. And that is what made him the greatest singer in the history of popular music.
Elvis had a brilliant ability to control the attack and ending of each note. If we listen the 1954 Sun Records recording of Blue Moon of Kentucky we can hear Elvis using a technique known as “glottal onset and offset” – a technique in which the vocal folds in the larynx are closed at the start of a note and closed with extra emphasis at the end of the note – to achieve clarity of attack and an amazing rhythmic bounce in his vocal performance. That ability to drive the rhythm is also present in the 1963 hit Viva Las Vegas in which Elvis effortlessly accents the melody to give a rhythmic shape to each phrase.

A crucial element in Elvis’ sonic signature was his use of vibrato. The final Battle Hymn of the Republic’ segment of the 1972 recording of An American Trilogy features the sound of his vocal folds vibrating together in all their glory creating a sound that has been much copied in pop music but never bettered.

But then there’s Aretha, the Queen of Soul whose voice and interpretations were simply the greatest. She could take any song and bring such a level of intensity to her performance that all audiences could do was stand back and gasp and surrender to her extraordinary power and passion. Her career was filled with glittering highlights. We are richer for her life.

At the Grammys in 1998, the legendary soul singer stepped in – at the last minute – for Pavarotti, who had been due to sing his trademark piece, Nessun Dorma. So obviously she went ahead and performed that aria.

‘Nessun Dorma’ is one of the most impressive of tenor arias – with an astronomically high top B at the climax of the aria.

It’s also an operatic tenor role. Aretha Franklin is, clearly, neither an opera singer, nor a tenor.

But that did not stop her performing the aria at the Grammys in 1998. Well, it would have been a shame to send the choir home. 

This might be the most Aretha Franklin thing that has ever happened. 

The black NFL kneelers should take note of Aretha. She performed at the inauguration ceremonies for three US presidents. Particularly memorable was her great version, decked out in a fur coat and a church hat, of My Country ‘Tis Of Thee at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Her records sold millions of copies and the music industry couldn’t honor her enough. Franklin won 18 Grammy awards. In 1987, she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2005.

Her voice made our hearts sing. Our souls are better because of Aretha. 
Selfish of me, rather, … yes.

REPRINTED
Decline in the Fall (or Late Summer, Anyway): by Fred Gibbon
Posted on August 15, 2018 by Fred Reed
I am not sure why people write columns. Partly from boredom, I suppose, or lack of anything better to do. Partly from exasperation. Yet partly from the hope that if enough people collectively become aware of problems, they might, just maybe, do something about them. I can’t believe this any longer. Today’s crimes, lunacies, and decays are too many, profitable, and intractable. We are racing out of control toward some as yet dimly limned catastrophe. Hang on and take the ride.

To begin with, America is no longer a country. It is a set of special interests occupying the same place: Corporations, races, ethnicities, faiths, ideologies, foreign agents pretending to be Americans, all at each other’s throats. No cure is possible.

Racial relations are a disaster. Blacks, fourteen percent of the country, are congenitally furious at whites. They neither assimilate nor want to. Whether they should doesn’t matter since it will not happen.

They give their children strange names to differentiate them from whites, maintain a separate language sometimes called Ebonics–blacks in other countries learn to speak normally–and concentrate in huge all-black Sowetos: Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, Trenton , Camden, Atlanta, Milwaukee, East St. Louis, New Orleans. And many others. Horrific crime and horrific schools produce each year a large cohort who, barely literate, will for fifty years be unable to fit into the economy or into white (or Hispanic) society. This will not change. If it were going to, it would have.

Hispanics, seventeen percent of the population, have a much higher likelihood of assimilating, and are doing so, but it will not happen overnight and will never be complete. They face intense hostility from much of the white population. Add Somalis, North Africans, Jews, Asians, and various Muslims and you have more than a third of the country. Their interests are their own interests. This cannot be changed.

Americans no longer have a shared identity, a common culture to hold them together. In 1950 America was overwhelmingly white, European, and Christian. How deeply one believed was not the point. Christianity was a matrix binding all, as Catholicism is in Latin America. Today Christianity is like marijuana–tolerated, barely legal, but better not to get caught. Whites are reviled by those of lesser capacity and, weirdly, by themselves. What do we now have in common? Almost nothing. This will not change before some strange looming denouement befalls us.

Government has changed irrevocably, and changes yet. It no longer consists of executive, judicial, and legislative branches. In practice the branches are now the Presidency, Wall Street, the corporations, AIPAC, and the media, with overlap and interlocking directors. Elections are play toys to occupy the public. The levers of governance are no longer accessible to the populace. Governments gain power. They do not give it up. This will not change.

“American” corporations no longer are. When Charlie Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA,” it was. Today’s corporations are free-floating entities spread over the globe, putting down tentacles in countries of convenience and loyal only to their profits. They are too powerful to be reined in. The prime examples are offshoring and encouraged immigration from Latin America, but many others exist. This cannot be remedied: the corporations needing change own those who might change them.

Wild thought: Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by the government. Ours is a system in which the means of production own the government. Congressmen are commodities and Washington a Coke machine: insert your coins, choose your law, and pull the lever. Voila.

Demographics have consequences. Only whites and East Asians, mostly men, display talent for engineering, mathematics, scientific research, or organization on a large scale. Affirmative action does not put landers on Mars nor program computers. By now it must be obvious that racial gaps in achievement are intractable. Argument over causes changes nothing. The country depends increasingly on a declining number of white brains. The attacks on both whites and brains will continue.

The country crumbles politically. The Constitution has been interpreted into near impotence, a trend that continues. Congress has abdicated most of its important powers and become a passive bribery receptacle. Trump is close to being our first real dictator. At best you could say that America is an oligarchy with Hulk Trump fronting for the corporations in general, the military industry in particular, and the Israelis. At will he imposes sanctions, threatens war, turns much of the world into enemies, sends troops to Africa–Africa?–breaks treaties, discards environmental protections. None dare tell him no, in America or, as yet, abroad. America cannot be brought back.

Democracy, to the extent that it ever existed, doesn’t. Americans have no influence over what their children are taught, where Christmas carols can be sung, over war and peace, whether they can legally choose their neighbors, who they must hire. All of these things are dictated from far away. This cannot be changed. If you disagree, tell me how.

Social control intensifies. Saying the wrong things about blacks, Jews, feminists or homosexuals has in many places become a firing offense–very Soviet, this. The mainstream media, utterly dishonest, are committed mouthpieces for those who rule. This will not change. Who could change it?

The social media, also organs of government, censor us. The three CEOs of Google and Facebook, unelected, two of them Jewish, control what almost the entire world is permitted to see. Is this not astonishing? Twitter is now in the same category, and all are censoring both covertly and actively. The silenced may win an occasional lawsuit, but the censoring will not stop., It will grow.

The times approach the oozing last years of Rome. We have mixed martial arts, football, boxing, and now legal bare-knuckle. The country throws national tantrums over who can use what bathrooms. Drug use is high from middle school up. A child who can use a keyboard can watch any conceivable sort of pornography. Twenty percent of America thinks the sun moves around the earth. In rotting societies sexual curiosities come forth. Northwestern University, I think it was, offers a course in sadomasochism. paralleling the dominance of a known torturess heading the CIA.

Schooling has declined badly. Genuine education is now regarded as an elitist imposition by dead white men. The young do not recognize the extent of the deterioration as they have known nothing else. Over twenty years ago I went into a middle school in Arlington, Virginia, an upscale white suburb of Washington, and saw a student’s project honoring Italian contributions to science. Below a photo of Fermi it spoke of his work in “Nucler Phisicts.” In letters six inches high. Uncorrected. The academic content, if so it can be called, of instruction is heavy, heavy, heavy, on social-justice propaganda. This cannot be changed.

Would you dare say anything racially incorrect to your daughter who might tell her teacher? We are approaching what might be called the Soviet Union by Disney.

Universities for the most part are no better. We suffer from an odd sort of civilizational autoimmune disease, eating ourselves. Shakespeare is racist, Mozart elitist, grammar a means of oppression. Two and a half millennia of Western civilization, forgotten by a sea of gilded peasants with no retirement plans. Monkeys chattering over the ruins of a forgotten society. Once the chain of culture is broken, it cannot easily be restored. Anyway, a literate population might cause trouble. We will not have one.

As culture and cultivation die, we equally erase our history. It is rewritten, enstupidated, lied about to children in grade school and up, shouted down by racial mobs who cannot spell it. Statues must be razed, names of historical men removed from buildings and cities. We have a President who cannot pronounce Namibia, Nepal, or Bhutan. Soon we will be a nation of purest Bandar-log, chuckling and pecking at telephones, knowing not when, nor what, nor where, nor why.

Corruption is rife. It is seldom the Mexican briefcase-of-money kind, being legal, hidden, and far more profitable. Student loans are a crafted way of getting the young deeply in debt for many years, very profitable for banks and universities. Most of the students–I want to write “students”–have no business in college, but they are persuaded to take out loans and thus enrich administrators and banks. It is legal. Big Pharma bribes Congress to pass a law requiring the government–e.g., VA hospitals–to pay retail. It is legal, and a goldmine for the pharmaceutical corporations. Military industry bribes Congress to buy hugely expensive and unneeded weapons (my beat for years: I know whereof I speak). It is legal. It cannot be changed. Only those could change it who profit by it.

Overall, America declines into the Third World. The one percent own most of the country while the middle class declines. Retirement plans and health insurance evanesce. The police become more brutal and less accountable. Censorship intensifies. Impunity grows: Nobody went to jail for the subprime scam. Politicians pose in front of The Flag, trumpet democracy but do not practice it. Surveillance quietly grows: TSA, tracking by cell-phone location records, NSA’s internal spying, social media recording everything we do, and now Alexa and voice-controlled televisions constantly listen in our homes. Civil unrest grows with street gangs of Antifa and BLM fighting white nationalists and defying police.

We know the foregoing, many of us. The takeaway is that none of it is preventable. We careen toward whatever epochal demise awaits us. Slow motion or all at once, it will be a doozy.

At Samuel Adams they brew a hundred different beers* from Ale to Kreik** to Utopias. All are great. Many are better than great. This is a tribute to the American spirit from it’s beginning in a revolution to the worldwide greatness with an American presence in over a hundred places. Sam Adams beers are the best!

* OK, OK, It’s 25, not a hundred but they are so great it’s easy to get all hyperbolic and exaggerate. I admit it. I’m a big fan.

** Made from Sour Cherries….. Cherry Beer? Yes, based on the Belgian favorite. If you’re a biker don’t look down your nose about cherry beer. And if you don’t like it give it to your girlfriend. She’ll love you all the more. !