Aretha's Bridge

If one way of understanding gospel music is to trace its emergence in the midst of the African-American Great Migration — from south to north, from rural areas to urban regions, from agrarian culture to industrialization, then so too can we hear Aretha Franklin traveling miles and miles in her luminous cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." With each magnetic pass that she took through this song, we can hear Queen Re mediating the gospel space between traditional spirituals and blues-inflected musicality, bringing the Holy sounds of her Baptist upbringing closer to the secularized lyrics of folk hero Paul Simon.

In her extraordinary live performances of this track which she first performed on the Grammys telecast in 1971, Aretha Franklin a bridge, phantasmagorically elasticizing the wondrous instrument that is her vocal body across musical genres — soul, gospel, folk. Most remarkable was how she drew out the deep spiritual grooves of Simon's "Bridge" in March of that year at concert promoter Bill Graham's Fillmore West, a rock and roll palace where Hendrix's psychedelia and Grateful Dead jam band bacchanalia had been flourishing since 1968. Resplendent in her flowing, earth-toned gown and a supremely Haight-Ashbury slouchy hat, she took a seat at the piano and became the first African-American woman artist to headline a concert event at the venue, home of the "long hairs" as some would