By Josh Resnek
The death of Aretha Franklin at 76 is a great loss not for black people alone, but for all of us, white and black, who were mesmerized by her voice.
That powerful, melodic, extraordinary voice pierced our sensibilities during the 1960’s and 1970’s, and in ways that were unimaginable for white kids growing up in all white suburbs in the relatively segregated America of that time and day.
Ms. Franklin’s song, “Respect,” stands as one of the all time great musical coming together songs for the ages.
It was a song sung by all of us, black or white, and often shouted out with vigor when we were young, because it was a song about the energy of a great a generation coming up – a giving birth song if you will, reminiscent of the few great things that rocked our world when we were much younger than we are today.
To have been a white teenager in an all white community, in an all white America at the time that song came out, was to have become transformed by something one had never heard – and which we will likely never hear anything quite like it again.
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