The Aretha Franklin performance that made Carole King weep: “I was knocked out”
The subject of gig history has been relatively present in my recent work as a music journalist.
Janelle Monae’s brazen admission that she time-travelled back to watch David Bowie in 1973 got us all thinking about what such an opportunity would mean for us. Who would I see if I could do as Monae does and travel back in time? I’ve come to realise it would be Aretha Franklin.
As a music fan, I live for those moments where the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and the music in question transcends any sort of emotion. Yeah, I know, that may sound obvious, but the fact is in the mundanity of the modern digitalised existence, the reality of those experiences feels increasingly distant.
A simple listen to Aretha Franklin’s 1971 record Live At Fillmore West confirms that desire of mine. It’s an album packed with joy, vibrancy and the highest level of musicianship, and for me in 2025, it gives me a mere glimpse into what I could have experienced had I been living in the heady days of the 1970s.
But in 2015, Franklin gave the world one last performance that confirmed she will be remembered forever as one of the all-time greats. During the Kennedy Centre Honours, in 2015, she took to the stage to perform Carole King’s ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, in front of King herself, whose animated reaction encapsulated all of the feelings I can imagine come with an Aretha Franklin show.
King explained, “I can take you through it because the very first thing I see her come out wearing the mink. And now, yeah, that’s Aretha. You know, Aretha took her inspiration from those gospel singers, and she came out in the mink. And I was like, OK, well, that’s cool. And then she sat down at the piano. Now, she had not been playing piano in her later life as much as she used to.”
She continued, “And when she sat down at the piano, you see me turn and my daughter, Sherry Condor, who is also my manager now, was there with me, and I said, ‘She’s playing!’ and I was knocked out”.
Adding, “I could not wait to hear her play. Because I know what a great player she is, and the fact that she was doing it that night. And then everything went up and up and up, and she gets to some of these notes, and then she gets to, ‘You make me feel so alive!’ And I’m like, oh my God, oh my God.”
At this point, King was outrightly losing herself in the way any normal fan would. But let’s not forget, King herself is an iconic artist and so isn’t anaesthetised to being in the presence of talent. But something about Franklin beat anything she had seen before, and so only proved just how incredible she was.
She concluded, “That was the kind of experience I was having because she was just giving her all in a way I had not seen her give in a long time. And Aretha, if she gave this much, [gestures so small amount] it would be more than most people would be giving on their best day.”
