When Aretha Franklin, the 73-year-old Queen of Soul, sang (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman at the Kennedy Center Honors last month (see below for performance), reducing United States president Barack Obama to tears, it was a truly astonishing reminder of her enduring power and potency. But Franklin isn't the only queen reclaiming her throne.
March 4 sees the release of Full Circle, a new record by the undisputed Queen of Country, Loretta Lynn, now almost 84.
Produced by Johnny Cash's son John Carter Cash alongside Lynn's daughter Patsy Lynn Russell, it's her 55th album – and her first since 2004's Van Lear Rose, her Grammy Award-grabbing collaboration with Jack White.
The royal triumvirate is completed by the Queen of Gospel, Mavis Staples, now 76. Staples will release Livin' on a High Note – a typically stirring new album with specially-commissioned songs by Nick Cave, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and others – on February 19.
“I told the writers I was looking for joyful songs,” Staples said. “I want to leave something to lift people up.”
Watching Franklin's aforementioned Kennedy Center performance on YouTube, what is almost as salient is the agog hysteria of onlooker Carole King, the Brill Building-schooled singer-songwriter who, together with Gerry Goffin, penned (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman for Franklin in 1967.
What King was reacting to at the Kennedy Center, one senses, was not just Franklin’s enduring ability to hit the money-notes, but also her stature and repute; the indomitable double-whammy of supreme talent plus rich life experience.
When Franklin left the piano, walked to front-of-stage, and cast off her regal furs, it was an infinitely more powerful gesture than the girly disrobing of so many pretenders to the throne.
The music of Lynn and Staples also packs sentiments to which their long and fully-lived lives lend extra weight. Lynn’s backstory in particular sounds like the stuff of PR hyperbole, but it’s true.
As her best-selling 1976 autobiography Coal Miner's Daughter relates, Lynn grew up in abject poverty in the wonderfully-named Appalachian hamlet of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. She married her husband Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn when she was a "barely-schooled child of 13", and by the time she was 18, she and Doolittle had four children. A 1980 film based on the book later won Sissy Spacek an Oscar for Best Actress.
Their twin girls, Peggy and Patsy, arrived just as Loretta – a self-taught singer-songwriter who would eventually sell 45 million records – began to make headway with her $17 guitar. She was still working seven days a week and growing garden vegetables to sustain her family.
“I canned what I grew,” she said. “That’s what’s real. I know how to survive.”
All of this means that, on Full Circle, when you hear Lynn revisit Whispering Sea, the first song she ever wrote, it resonates. The new album actually begins with some in-the-studio chit-chat, Lynn telling her rapt musicians what inspired the song.
“I was fishin’”, she says with a laugh, “and I had to get all these songs wrote in two days.”
Even her speaking-voice does not sound like that of an 83-year-old. It’s full of vitality.
Staples, too, is strongly resisting the dying of the light. Indeed, it’s arguable that her spirit is burning brighter than ever.
Born in Chicago in 1939, she was, of course, part of the gospel group The Staple Singers. Her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples, the group’s leader, had sang with delta blues luminaries such as Robert Johnson and was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr.
Staples’s musical pedigree is impeccable, then, and she was part and parcel of the civil rights movement that transformed the US in the mid-to-late 1960’s.
"Pops told us that he liked [MLK's] message, and that, if he can preach it, we can sing it," Staples told UK magazine The Big Issue in 2014.
"We started marching with Dr King [and] we'd sing Why? (Am I Treated So Bad) before he spoke at meetings."
MLK Song, a track on Staples's upcoming album that was composed by the record's producer M Ward (aka contemporary singer-songwriter Matthew Stephen Ward), has lyrics inspired by MLK's final speech. He delivered it on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated.
Less affecting but just as powerful is Don't Cry, a simple song of comfort. Its lyrics might have seemed a little patronising were they sung by someone still wet behind the ears, but because they are voiced by a woman who knows of what she speaks, they have real power.
Regardless of its quality, it would be glib and plain wrong to insinuate that the current output of Franklin, Lynn and Staples somehow negates or undermines the best music being made by today’s much younger female stars.
Not for nothing has Franklin covered songs made famous by Adele and Alicia Keys, while Staples has been the first to acknowledge "…my records are not selling like Beyoncé and [all] those [other] kids…" It was telling, nonetheless, when, in 2014, the Wall Street Journal listed names of various young female artists and sought Franklin's gut reaction.
“Taylor Swift?” asked journalist Christopher John Farley. “Great gowns,” she replied. “Nicki Minaj?” said Farley. “Nicki Minaj?” replied Franklin, raising an eyebrow and smiling. “I’m gonna pass on that one…”
The point to take away, perhaps, is that, more than ever, Franklin, Lynn and Staples are worthy of our respect.
Worthy because of their talents, their staying power, and the songs they wrote and/or performed.
Though it was penned by Otis Redding, it was Franklin who turned the song Respect into an 1967 hit single and an anthem for the civil/women's rights movements. Staples too, is living, breathing history.
Lynn, meanwhile, was the female country star who broke the mould.
When she released her 1969 song Your Squaw is on the Warpath the year after Tammy Wynette's submissive hit Stand by Your Man, it seemed like a feminist retort, and in 1975 she released The Pill, a frank if playful look at birth control that was banned by many US radio stations.
Youth may be the music industry’s chosen currency, but ultimately it’s the stars with a charisma and status eked out across decades that we tend to admire most.
It’s heartening, therefore, to see these three grand dames shine on, giving the whippersnappers something to aspire to and a run for their money.
Let’s cherish Aretha Franklin, Loretta Lynn and Mavis Staples while we still can.
James McNair writes for Mojo Magazine and The Independent.