Somebody somewhere once asked the human embodiment of American soul music how she would define American soul music. Aretha Franklin replied, “Being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside.”

-snip-

Franklin — who died on Thursday at age 76 — didn’t invent the notion that singing should expose something profound about the singer, but she did show us how it’s done, freighting her words with maximum emotion and routing her syllables through two dozen different notes in a single exhalation. Oftentimes, when we talk about what “good singing” sounds like, we’re unthinkingly talking about what Aretha Franklin’s singing sounds like. Imagine the strange frustration of being that influential. Your big ideas become the air we breathe.

And who felt that Aretha Franklin hadn’t been properly recognized in the final decades of her life? Aretha Franklin, for one. Years ago, she told her biographer David Ritz that the media hadn’t been paying enough attention to all the trophies and medals being thrown at her, so it was time to type up another book. Ritz went ahead and penned his second Franklin biography, 2014’s “Respect,” but this time, without his subject’s input.

Instead, Franklin’s friends and family tell the story of a grief-stunned child whose mother died of a heart attack before Franklin was 10 years old; the story of a prodigious teenage gospel singer who had given birth to two children before she had turned 15; the story of an ascendant pop star who suffered abuse at the hand of her husband-manager; the story of an era-defining artist who, outside of her music, kept her anguish entirely to herself. As Franklin’s longtime producer Jerry Wexler once told Ritz, “She was a woman who suffered silently.”

But when her music first erupted into the wider American consciousness in the late 1960s, all the masses really knew about Franklin was that she was young, black and female — and considering the times, that made everything Franklin was surfacing feel radical. The vastness of expression in her voice was equal parts paralyzing and galvanizing. It asked the world to think. It demanded respect. It quickly became a symbol of the civil rights movement, and after that, a sonic emblem of American progress and virtue — the yearning sound of who we still hope to become.

-snip-

Franklin continued to chase the latest pop styles into the ’80s and across the ’90s, but once the 21st century got underway, she finally figured out that her relevance had always been rooted in the consecrating power of her voice. She sang at the funeral for Rosa Parks in 2005, and at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011. I was fortunate enough hear her sing twice in 2009 — first, alongside a crowd of nearly 2­ million at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and again, months later, at the opening of a modest, 500-seat theater at a community college in suburban Maryland.

She sounded better at the community college — a booking that felt absurd at the time, but remains beautiful in hindsight, as if this giant of American song had made it her duty to travel from town to town, blessing every little corner of the republic. Maybe that was the idea. Maybe every space is sacred, every moment holy. If Aretha Franklin’s voice doesn’t make you believe in God, it should at least make you believe in that.