Aretha Franklin: my respect for Barack Obama: London Times

Quoted via London Times:

How tantalising. Aretha Franklin politely excuses herself as soon as she answers the phone in her Philadelphia hotel room. Faintly I hear: “Hello, H? H, it's a go. I heard the whole arrangement. It's a beautiful arrangement. It's a go.”

“I was just talking to my conductor,” Franklin says in her grand, measured voice when she returns to the phone. “I was telling him to send the track to Washington.” Is she talking about the song she is planning to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration on the steps of the US Capitol building tomorrow? “Uh huh,” the widely hailed “Queen of Soul” says. What will she be singing? “I can't tell you.” Will it be a song we associate with her? “Oh yeah, sure, certainly.” more