Aretha – She was OURS, WE made her Queen. WE gave her the crown…
My father was a devout believer. So am I. Aretha Louise reminds me that God truly exists. And we are all glorified to have lived in her times…
By Darrell McNeill
She was OURS…
WE made her Queen. WE gave her the crown…
She didn’t ask for it. Didn’t “campaign” for it. We KNEW it to be so, and therefore MADE it so. So we gave the crown to her and she took it graciously…
She wore it impeccably… And showed us all the way…
In these facile times of unbridled hubris, artifice and court jesters who anoint themselves daily as gods and monarchs, we put our love, our trust, our faith in a self-evident, incontrovertible miracle. And, in so doing, her voice, her spirit, her fortitude lifted all of us out of the abyss…
We needed no oracle, no shaman, no medicine man to divine for us what our hearts and minds knew intuitively–this was TRUTH manifest from a voice in congress with The Divine…
My father bought each and every single record Aretha Louise ever recorded, even the godawful ones. Because he, like so many of us, loved our Queen and wanted to bask in her light, no matter how much it had dimmed over time. And each time it appeared to fade, she reached back somewhere deep inside the deepest wellspring within herself and burned brighter than ever before…
My father was a devout believer. So am I. Aretha Louise reminds me that God truly exists. And we are all glorified to have lived in her times…
Long ago, I took a hard pass on all the papier mache titles and crowns handed to all the pretenders to the throne who followed over the generations, offices devised to legitimize lesser, thirstier talents sold by record companies, akin to soap pads and dryer sheets. Queen of This, King of That, Godfather of Whatever, Empress of Blah Blah Blah.
They are all devoid of what Aretha Louise Franklin was born with–the undisputed, incorruptible TRUTH. And we didn’t need ANYBODY to explain it to us or sell it to us…
She was OURS…
WE made her Queen. WE gave her the crown…
She wore it impeccably… And showed us all the way…
The math doesn’t even EXIST to calculate how much poorer we all are right now…
Rest In Paradise, Malkia…
