In the April 2012 issue of Harper’s magazine, Anthony Heilbut has an engaging essay on Aretha Franklin. Titled “Aretha: How She Got Over,” Heilbut (who is the author of The Fan Who Knew Too Much: The Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations) tells the story of Franklin’s beginnings in the church and the influence of her pastor father, and shows how her gospel music background has served as a recurrent anchor for Franklin’s brilliant singing career.

Here at R&T, we think about relating theology and pop music, and one way to do that is to look at how theological culture and musical culture come together in the lives of individuals, and Franklin’s life gives much to consider in this regard. Her pop success was underwritten by gospel music skills and feel, Heilbut argues, and the close relation between sexual and religious experience, confected in the black church, is a leitmotif that warrants several interesting asides (including a note about her performance at a same-sex wedding in October 2011), and that I wish Heilbut would have explored more directly. Perhaps he does in his book.

Here is Franklin early in her career:

Franklin, he suggests, “virtually colonized American music for the gospel style.” It seems the choice of verb is innocent here, but I think it tells deeper than Heilbut lets on. From the church of a colonized people came an extraordinarily talented woman, who neither simply repeated nor neatly inverted that colonization, however metaphorically, but let gospel music flower across many different gardens over the past five decades.

Her interesting musical debts to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland are noted, and her singular influence on what has become the

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