Ooo, your kisses, sweeter than honey

Happy birthday today to one of the greatest singers of all time, Miss Aretha Franklin!

Rightly lauded throughout her five-decade career as "The Queen of Soul", Aretha has tried her hand at many genres of music, including gospel (her roots), jazz, pop, R&B, disco, and even opera. Always a fighter, she emerged from a lowly background with two teenage pregnancies already behind her, to become a hit recording artist at just 18. But it was to be a further few years before she released the ground-breaking Respect, and became an international sensation. She swiftly followed up this success with classics such as Think, I Say A Little Prayer and Spanish Harlem.

In early 1968 Franklin won her first two Grammies and went on to win eight "Best Female R&B Vocal Performance" awards in a row (and eighteen in total), she has been awarded the Kennedy Centre Honour and The Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was the first woman to enter the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, selling millions of records along the way. She has collaborated with the greats of soul and pop, including Otis Redding, Luther Vandross, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, George Benson, Eurythmics, James Brown, George Michael and Lauryn Hill, yet remains very much her own woman, with famous "spats" with Roberta Flack, Beyonce and Tina Turner.

Always larger-than life, Aretha Franklin is a formidable force to be reckoned with, and there is no-one, vocally, these days who can touch her!

Only Aretha could stand in for the magnificent Luciano Pavarotti:

Here she is competing brilliantly with three other great vocalists, Miss Peggy Lee, Miss Sarah Vaughan and Miss Roberta Flack:

Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin and Roberta Flack

And here she beats Mr Tom Jones hands-down:

Aretha Franklin and Tom Jones

Aretha Franklin website