Aretha Franklin Says Detroit Music Weekend May Mark Last Concert

DETROIT, MI — The upcoming Detroit Music Weekend could mark Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin’s last live performance. The 18-time Grammy Award winner said earlier this year that she would retire from the stage sometime in 2017, and this week she said “it’s possible” retirement may come after she headlines the inaugural outdoor music festival in the city’s downtown entertainment district.

Detroit Music Weekend is a coronation of the Queen of Soul’s place in music and Detroit history. A stretch of Madison Street will be renamed Aretha Franklin Avenue in a ceremony Thursday in front of Music Hall. She’ll be given a key to the city. A tribute concert will be held in her honor Friday, and Franklin has committed to join the sessions artists for the final song. Franklin’s free headline concert starts at 6 p.m. the following night, one June 10.

Franklin, 75, has more than earned her hometown’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T during a storied, 60-year career, but she says humbled to be held in such high esteem.

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A gospel prodigy and the daughter of a Baptist minister, she toured with her father’s revival show until she caught the ear of music executives in New York City and went on to churn out a string of nearly 100 hit singles on the pop and R&B charts. One of the most honored artists in Grammy history, Franklin also was the first female to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

She sang “Precious Lord” for Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in 1968 and “Amazing Grace” for Pope Francis in 2015. President George W. Bush gave Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2005. She sang at President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, at President Clinton’s in 1993 and at President Carter’s in 1977.

“This will be my last year,” Franklin told WDIV-TV in February. “This will be my last year in concert. This is it.”

Then, in an interview with the Detroit Free Press ahead of the events next weekend celebrating her reign as the Queen of Soul, she choked back tears and said it’s “possible” she will step down from stage for the final time at the June 10 show.

“Yeah, it’s possible,” she repeated.

“It’s not something that I look forward to,” told the Free Press “But you can’t go on forever. It’s just a lot. It entails a lot. And the tour bus after a while gets wearing. (The business) is glamorous, but it’s a lot of work at the same time. A lot goes into it. A lot of planning, a lot of calling, a lot of emails.”

To WDIV, she said in February that she feels “very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from, and where it is now.”

“I'll be pretty much satisfied, but I'm not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing,” she said. “That wouldn't be good either.”

No worries there — Franklin is working on a second volume of “Aretha Franklin Sings Diva Classics,” and is collaborating with Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie and Itzhak Perlman.

But she left the door on live performances open just a crack.

“Where I used to do five, six dates a month, I’m only doing one, maybe two now. And going forward, it may only be one. Or none,” she told the Free Press. “I’ll see how I feel as I go.”

Click the link for more on Detroit Music Weekend, which features three days of concerts, June 9-11. Saturday concerts are free.

Aretha Franklin performed for Pope Francis at the Festival of Families in Philadelphia during the pontiff’s 2015 trip to the United States. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images News/Getty Images)