Fans and fellow artists are remembering the “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin. Among those paying tribute is Sam Moore, the original “Soul Man.”
Moore and Franklin were friends for more than 60 years, and she played piano for his album “Plenty Good Lovin.” Moore spoke to “CBS Evening News” anchor Jeff Glor about what made Franklin so great.
“The struggles, the hurt, the lies,” he said. “Everything that happened to her in the past. … It’s what made singers like Aretha the greatest of the great. And she is now, she was and is still to me the greatest that ever, ever stood before a microphone.”
That’s because Moore says Franklin channeled her pain into her music.
“Aretha was hurt, a lot of things happened in her life,” he said. “The way she sang, you could hear the, well we could in her closed circle, we could hear the pain.”
The first time Moore saw Franklin was in Miami, when he went to a service to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“She got up and she sang I believe, I think it was “Precious Lord,” and as a 15-year-old, I went ‘Oh my God,'” Moore said.
Moore called his friend a “giant among giants” that will never be replicated.
“There will never ever be, in my lifetime, or maybe yours, there will never be another Aretha Louise Franklin. That’s it. I am going to miss that girl, but I am celebrating right now,” Moore said.
Franklin died Thursday at her home in Detroit after a long battle with cancer, her family said in a statement. She was 76 years old.
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