2008, NPR via YouTube

I am old enough to have been on the Aretha Franklin ride from the beginning of her mighty career, starting with The Electrifying Aretha Franklin (1962), a gift from my parental units when I was eight-years-old.

Yet, when I heard the news of her passing this morning, the first thing I thought of was not my own experiences listening to and loving her music, but about how much Franklin meant to my favorite POTUS.

This happened back when the president would attend this event: At the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, Franklin made her entrance wearing full length fur coat, sitting at a grand piano, and tearing the roof off the place doing inductee Carole King‘s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, a version so astonishing, it brought Barack Obama to tears. The standing ovation started before she had finished the last note. During the song, King was visibly shaking with excitement and the camera caught the Obamas grooving to the music and pumping their fists.

Obama loves music and he has been open about his adoration for the Queen of Soul.

Franklin and her hat sang a rousing My Country, ‘Tis of Thee at his inauguration on January 20, 2009. Obama stood resolute as Franklin sang of the freedom that shines from sea to shining sea. The new president looked as if he was about to cry even then.

The 44th president has real pipes himself. In the summer of 2008, at campaign stop in Detroit, Obama acknowledged Franklin’s presence in the audience, brought her up on stage and joined her in a duet of Chain Of Fools. A few months later, he sang Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Walk On By at a Democratic fund raiser.

At a campaign event at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 2012, he sang a few bars of Al Green’s Let’s Get Together as the audience gasped and then cheered. Later that year, he joined Blues greats B.B. King, and Buddy Guy on Sweet Home Chicago at a reception at the White House.

At the funeral for South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, who was murder in a Charleston church along with eight others when on June 17th, 2015 by Dylann Roof, Obama paused, bowed his head, and began singing a moving Amazing Grace.

Franklin is Obama’s favorite musician and he welcomed her to the White House on several occasions. Only a few months before he sang Amazing Grace in Charleston, he hosted a celebration of Gospel music at the White House headlined by Franklin, who sang for more than 30 minutes backed by a full choir. Obama stood clapping along in the front row, and afterwards, took the stage to declare:

“We’ve been to church tonight. It feels like old-time religion here. Air conditioner broke. Women all fanning themselves.”

Franklin replied:

“That’s getting it the old-time way!”

Michelle Obama offered Franklin a fan to cool herself, and 44 remained onstage to dance as Franklin closed out the performance with Lord Lift Me Up.

Obama:

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R & B, rock and roll, the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope. American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings A Natural Woman, she can move me to tears, the same way that Ray Charles‘version of America The Beautiful will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

I am sure that wherever he is today, like me, Obama is listening to the Queen of Soul.