Aretha Franklin grew up in Detroit after moving from Memphis. Born in Memphis in 1942, she relocated with her family first to Buffalo and then to Detroit by the time she was five.
Her father, the prominent Baptist preacher C. L. Franklin, became pastor of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church. The family home and church placed Aretha at the center of Detroit’s gospel community, where she learned piano by ear and began singing publicly as a child.
Detroit remained central to Franklin’s identity even after her career took her elsewhere. She moved to New York in the 1960s, later lived in Los Angeles, and returned to the Detroit area in the early 1980s to be near her ailing father. The city is therefore both her formative hometown and a major part of her musical origin story.