Aretha Franklin the 'Queen of Soul' has died

Photo: Jon Pack/NBC/Getty Image

Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title "the Queen of Soul," has died, she was 76. Franklin died at her home in Detroit, The due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type.The singer had been reported to be in failing health for years, but she kept her struggles private.

In February 2017, Franklin announced she would stop touring, but she continued to book concerts. The singer's final public performance was last November, when she sang at an Elton John AIDS Foundation gala in New York. Over the course of a professional career that spanned more than half a century, Franklin's songs not only topped the charts but became part of the vernacular.

The first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she had 88 Billboard chart hits during the rock era, tops among female vocalists. At the peak of her career -- from 1967 to 1975 -- she had more than two dozen Top 40 hits. She won 18 Grammy awards, including the honor for best female R&B performance for eight straight years. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, but was raised mostly in Detroit, where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a prominent minister and a nationally known gospel singer. Franklin sang in the choir of her father's church and, though she declined her dad's offer of piano lessons and taught herself instead, began recording gospel music at age 14.

She was signed to Columbia Records in 1960 by John Hammond, the eagle-eyed talent scout who also discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but she had only limited success at the label. It wasn't until her arrival at Atlantic Records in the decade's second half that she gave up trying to become a polished all-purpose entertainer for a career as a soul and R&B singer, backed by an earthy rhythm section from Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Over a year-and-a-half stretch from 1967 to 1968, Franklin racked up 10 Top Ten hits. Songs like "Respect" were not only huge sellers, they were also adopted by African-Americans and feminists as anthems for social change. After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Franklin sang at his funeral. The hits kept coming throughout the early 1970s, including "Spanish Harlem" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water." She re-emerged in the 1980s, releasing the 1985 album "Who's Zoomin' Who?", which spawned the hit "Freeway of Love." She also collaborated with the Eurythmics on "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" and British pop star George Michael on the smash duet, "I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)." The latter hit No. 1, her last chart-topper.