Aretha Franklin, who died on Thursday 16 February, was in the last decades of her life the most eminent living soul musician.

A career that lasted nearly 60 years yielded a body of work which includes recordings that have become touchstones for all lovers of music: 'Respect', 'Think', 'I Say A Little Prayer', 'Natural Woman', 'Chain of Fools'. Her music is rich with dozens of brilliant tracks, but these are the sort of transcendental floor-fillers and anthems which are up there with 'Dancing Queen', 'We Will Rock You', 'Hey Jude', and you can fill in your own blanks: the kind of songs that have the power to make everyone come together.

Aretha came to fame in the late 60s, but she'd had a long apprenticeship, having first gone on the road with her gospel singer father C.L. Franklin in 1956. She signed her first record deal in 1960, and those who expected her to be a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old were startled by how much she had seen and lived through, having had her first child at fifteen, and her second at seventeen. Her first single for Atlantic, 1967's 'I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)', was riveting, a sparse arrangement anchored by Aretha's soaring, ecstatic vocal and powerful gospel-fuelled piano. She was only supposed to sing on the date, but her playing when demoing the song in the studio was so authoritative that session keyboardist Spooner Oldham recused himself from piano duties.

Over the next few years on Atlantic, with albums like Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul, Aretha Now and Soul '69, she recorded the songs that would make her a legend. 'Respect' had been written by Otis Redding and was sung by him as a plea for domestic harmony, but when Aretha sang it, it became an instant and thrilling call for justice, and Redding knew it, ruefully commenting 'I just lost my song. That girl took it away from me.'

'Think', which she co-wrote with her then-husband Ted White, was similarly philosophical, and just as much of a stirring challenge. The original version is far more swinging and loose-limbed than the rather rushed version in The Blues Brothers, but on the other hand, the film features her gloriously disgusted reading of the line 'The Blues Brothers? Shee-it! They still owe you money, fool!' (Summing up the historical relationship of the popular music industry to black American musicians in just ten words.)

And yet, she was equally brilliant in other emotional registers. 'The House That Jack Built', a #7 hit from 1968, is a song about wishing she hadn't driven her man away, but it's still fantastic, with one of the dirtiest grooves she ever sung over and a performance in which she entirely owns the emotion. It was overshadowed by its B-side, her version of Bacharach & David's 1966 hit for Dionne Warwick, 'I Say A Little Prayer'. Warwick's version, which to be fair she herself was unhappy with, is perky and appealing, but Aretha's version embodies what could be summed up in the phrase Barack Obama chose as the theme of his election campaign: 'the audacity of hope'. No wonder, really, that Obama chose her to sing at his inauguration, an occasion on which her performance managed to eclipse even her awesome hat.

In her long career, not everything she touched rang with equal power. She threw herself at all kinds of material, but when she connected with it, it connected with audiences. She's perhaps best known for singing other people's songs, but she was a gifted songwriter: 'If You Don't Think', 'One Way Ticket' and 'School Days' are among her best tracks.

Some singers perform as seducers, trying to charm or guilt or smooch us into submission, but Aretha didn't. She spoke as one person to another, and whenever she truly inhabited a song, she won us over by speaking to us the way that she wanted to be spoken to. Hers was a voice that didn't wallow in sorrow and hurt but contended with them, asserting selfhood and dignity in the face of everything that got thrown at her.

She was truly the Queen of Soul. RIP.