Artha Franklin did not go to Elvis Presley’s funeral. This was noticed. The music world noticed. The press noticed. Elvis’s fans noticed. The list of musicians who attended the funeral on August 18th, 1977 was extraordinary. James Brown, Anne Margaret, Ched Atkins, Felton Jarvis, members of the Memphis Mafia who had been with Elvis for two decades.
Artha Franklin was not on it. Nobody asked her publicly. Nobody asked her privately, not in any documented way. It was simply noticed, noted, and moved past. For 41 years, Artha Franklin did not explain. In 2018, Artha Franklin was dying. She was 76 years old. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was at her home in Detroit.
She gave one final long interview to a journalist named David Ritz, who had collaborated on her autobiography and who had known her for decades. The interview was conducted over two sessions. Artha knew it was likely her last extended conversation about her life and career. Near the end of the second session, David Ritz asked about Elvis.
he asked because it was something he had always wanted to ask. Because it was something everyone in the music world had always wanted to ask. Why didn’t you go to the funeral? Artha was quiet for a long moment. Then she said something that David Ritz described in a piece he wrote after her death as the most unexpected answer he had received in 40 years of interviewing musicians.
because I couldn’t,” she said. He waited. “Not wouldn’t,” she said. “Couldn’t,” she explained. In the late 1950s, before Respect, before Atlantic Records, before the Voice became the instrument that redefined American soul music, Artha Franklin had been signed to Columbia Records. She was 16 years old.
She was the daughter of the Reverend CL Franklin, one of the most powerful preachers in black America. She was going to be a star. She was also lonely in ways that she did not talk about publicly for decades. She was young. She was away from Detroit. She was in New York in the machinery of a major label surrounded by people who had plans for her that she did not entirely understand.
In the summer of 1960, before her career had found its footing, before she had made a record that told the truth about who she was, Artha was at an industry event in New York. Elvis was there. He had just returned from the army. He had done the Sinatra special. He was the most famous person in America, and he was newly returned from two years of being a private citizen.
And there was something about him at that event, something looser, more present, less armored than the manufactured image that Artha Franklin noticed. They spoke for about 20 minutes. She described the conversation to David Ritz with the careful specificity of someone who has replayed it many times. Elvis had asked her about her music.
Not the music she was making at Colombia, her music, what she actually heard when she listened to herself. “Nobody had asked me that before,” Artha told David Ritz. “The people at Colombia asked me what I could sing. Elvis asked me what I heard. She answered him honestly. She told him she heard gospel, that the music she had grown up with in her father’s church was the music that lived in her voice, that everything else she was recording felt like a translation of something that wanted to be in its original language. Eldest listened. He said, “Then sing that.” Artha told David Ritz. He said, “Whoever told you to translate it was wrong.” She was 18 years old. He was 25. She had been in the music business for 2
years. He had been in it for six. I didn’t leave Colombia for another 6 years, she said. But I thought about what he said for six years. And when I finally got to Atlantic, when I finally got to record what I actually heard, I thought about it again. Respect was recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Scholes, Alabama in January 1967.
It reached number one in June of that year. It became one of the most important recordings in American music history. It made Artha Franklin who she became. I always thought about what he said. Artha told David Ritz, “Sing what you hear. Don’t translate it.” David Ritz asked her again about the funeral. Artha was quiet.
When Elvis died, she said, “I had a loss that I didn’t know how to be public about. I didn’t know him well. I only spoke to him that once. But what he said to me that night, I had never told anyone. And going to that funeral meant being in a room full of cameras and reporters and people who would want to know why I was there.
And I wasn’t ready to explain it. So I stayed home, she said, and I grieved privately the way he would have. She was quiet for a moment. Elvis was never understood, she said, not fully. What he took from us, yes, that was real and that was complicated. But what he understood about music, about what music is for, that was also real.
He understood that you sing what you hear, not what they tell you to sing. And for a girl from Detroit sitting in a New York hotel in 1960, that was exactly what she needed to hear. Artha Franklin died on August 16th, 2018. August 16th, the 41st anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. This was noted by many people who heard the news.
Noted and not explained, because some coincidences do not require explanation. They simply require witnessing. David Ritz published his account of the final interview in a magazine piece in 2019. The section about Elvis and the 1960 conversation ran to three paragraphs. three paragraphs that contained more honesty about Elvis Presley, about what he was and where he came from and what he gave and what it cost than most fulllength books on the subject.
Sing what you hear, don’t translate it. The man who said it was 25 years old. The woman who heard it was 18. And the music she made seven years later when she finally stopped translating is still
