Aretha Franklin

Few voices in American music carry the weight of Aretha Franklin's, and it was shaped in church. Born in Memphis in 1942 and raised in Detroit, where her father C. L. Franklin preached at New Bethel Baptist Church, she sang gospel before she was a teenager, and that grounding never left her. A pianist as well as a singer-songwriter, she carried that fervour into soul and pop, and Rolling Stone twice named her the greatest singer of all time.

Signed to Columbia Records at 18, she did not flourish at once, but after joining Atlantic in 1966 she made I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, followed in the 1970s by Young, Gifted and Black and Amazing Grace. Problems with the company led her to leave in 1979 for Arista, where Jump to It, Who's Zoomin' Who? and A Rose Is Still a Rose revived her career. Her later honours included induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, as its first female inductee, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a duet with George Michael on "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)". She died in August 2018.