When Aretha Franklin died on 16 August 2018, the response within popular music writing was a story unto itself: dozens of critics, academics, biographers, or some combination working to explain her immense impact.
Although Journal of Popular Music Studies could not hope to compete with Billboard, NPR, or the New Yorker, we did want to note Franklin’s passing in our journal. So we asked readers to contribute comments, some of which are reprinted here. We also offer a long but still partial list of the work published in the immediate aftermath of Franklin’s death. Too often, given the transition from hard copy publication to virtual web postings, writing of this kind can get lost to history. These markers are not an archive, but at least a guide for those in the future looking to assemble one.
Among the first to write about Franklin’s historic importance in the late...
University of California Press