FEATURE: Women Who Inspire
Women Who Inspire: Heroes, Legends and Storytellers by DAVID LYMAN
“I’ll tell you my Aretha story,” said Cincinnati Pops conductor John Morris Russell. He and I were supposed to be talking about the Pops’ March 18–20 concerts called “RESPECT: A Tribute to Aretha Franklin.” If you know anything about JMR, he just has to tell this story. And it’s always a good one. It was July 2016. He was scheduled to conduct Franklin—the “Queen of Soul”—in a Riverbend Pops concert. It was a sweltering night, with temps in the 90s all afternoon. But that wasn’t the worst of it. “We were worried she was going to pull out at the last minute,” he says, recalling how health issues had caused her to bail on several other concerts in recent years. “But she so much wanted to come down to Cincinnati. It was an easy trip for her. She traveled in a tour bus, and it’s a straight shot from her home in Detroit.” (For the record, Russell pronounces it DEE troit.) She would go on to cancel important concerts later that summer: in New York, Washington DC, St. Louis and Detroit. But on that night, July 24, 2016, she showed up. There was a short rehearsal with Aretha’s music director. But Russell didn’t have a chance to speak directly with her. “Just before the show started, her manager shouts down the backstage hallway, ‘Make Way for the Queen of Soul.’ The sea parted as she
Aretha Franklin with the Cincinnati Pops at Riverbend, July 2016.
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walked along in her fulllength fur coat. I just kind of shuffled along behind her.” The concert? “Remarkable,” said Russell. “The crowd went crazy.” But the best came later, after the massive crowd of autographseekers had finally made their way back John Morris Russell to their cars. “Her manager came up to me and said, ‘do you want to meet Aretha?’ I had all these things I wanted to say to her, like ‘I listened to you as a kid’ and ‘I thought your Nessun dorma was fabulous.’ But when I walked into her dressing room, her feet were up on a coffee table and she was drinking an ice cold can of Vernors.” They didn’t talk music. Instead, the Queen regaled the Maestro with directions for her glazed ham recipe. [Find the recipe online at cincinnatipops.org/aretha-program.] “I still remember it,” said JMR. “It had a can of Vernors, a dollop of French’s yellow mustard, some maraschino cherry juice, a half cup of brown sugar…she talked about cooking food
