‘Through the Storm’: How Aretha Franklin and Elton John fought their way to the top
Aretha Franklin: an American, Black woman. Elton John: an English, white man. On paper, they were total stereotypical opposites.
But in reality, these were the most frivolous and superficial traits to define them by. When you actually got down to the nitty-gritty of life, and even more so music, none of those supposed differences were in the slightest bit relevant. All that mattered was that they were two souls connected by sound and voice, and nothing else mattered.
While in the context of today, John and Franklin are both firmly cemented as cultural icons, it’s easy to forget that this was far from certain sights for either of them at various points in time. Of course, every artist endures ups and downs throughout their career – that’s par for the course – but what’s most interesting for these two is exactly how much they converge.
It was a stroke of fate that the pair of respective musical behemoths shared a birthday of March 25th, albeit being born five years apart, but when you really think about it, this represents far more than just a fun nugget of trivia – it’s an act of serendipity that saw the stars align and brought them both together as anchors to steer the course.
Naturally, this is not an attempt to say that both John and Franklin permanently walked the same course and witnessed all the same things in life. Indeed, this was the furthest thing from the case. But their storied connection spoke to the fact that they inherently understood each other on a level that not many other people could.
In any context, having a tough childhood is an experience which binds those with that shared sense of trauma together, but in their situation, the fact that this led them both into a life of music was a remarkable feat which earned their equal respect from an early stage. Later, they also realised that just because you ‘make it’ doesn’t mean that troubles instantly disappear.
Indeed, it was perhaps squaring up to the brutality of the music industry that proved to be the greatest challenge of both their lives and careers. There are very few other artists out there who have been forced to weather as many storms in the business, but John and Franklin’s trajectories prove that the sun can still always be found somewhere.
Having said that, they couldn’t have realised that while still being in the eye of some of those tornadoes. While the 1980s represented a decade of both massive success and huge turbulence for the pair, the point where their two paths crossed in the greatest harmony was in the 1989 track ‘Through the Storm’.
Taken from Franklin’s album of the same name, the song was not a major success despite the appeal of John being attached, nor was the entire record as a whole. Yet, in some ways, this could be considered as being beside the point. Neither of them was receiving particularly massive critical acclaim at the time, but it was testament to two artists who were prepared to play the long game.
On the face of it, the song could have been seen as a romantic platitude. But as the pair sang the words “Through the storm/ Through the tears/ You and I/ I know we can survive,” there was no avoiding the resonance this had to the paths they were walking. Musical careers, not chosen out of seeking an easy life, but for the very opposite reasons.
It goes without saying that these periods could be viewed as hiccups in retrospect of the wider context of their stories. They both eventually sailed off into the sunset, and all was well. Not only was that not quite the case, but neither Franklin nor John could forget all they endured to achieve what they did.
That was likely a major part of the reason why, in one last symbolic act of service to her sonic kindred spirit, Franklin devoted her final ever live performance to John and his AIDS foundation benefit concert in 2017, mere months before she passed away.
A moment that brought everything into perspective, as a frail Franklin stood there in the New York church, delivering one last startling song. John sobbed at the sight of his hero and musical muse, moved to a final act of strength in his honour. It was not just a mark of true friendship, but the ultimate acknowledgement that, through it all, they had both come good. They had finally, indeed, got ‘Through the Storm’.
