The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, has passed away aged 76 in Detroit, surrounded by friends and family.
The singer had been suffering from pancreatic cancer since 2010 and announced her retirement only last year, in 2017.
An official statement released by her publicist stated: “Franklin’s official cause of death was due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin’s oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute.”
The statement was continued by her family her added, “In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart. We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family.”
Tributes have been flooding in for Franklin, the Queen of Soul.
The legendary American was groundbreaking in more ways than one. In 1987 she became the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and played a vital role in the fight for racial equality and the civil rights movement of 1960s.
Unsurprisingly, tributes have been flooding in for Aretha Franklin.
Elton John called the songstress “one of his favourite pianists” in a moving series of twitter posts.
Others who shared tributes to the Queen of Soul include Sir Paul McCartney and Former US president Barack Obama, who shared: “Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect. May the Queen of Soul rest in eternal peace.”
