CNY Music Legend Digs on Aretha Franklin

If you are a gospel church musician or a student of jazz in CNY, when you hear the name 'Doc' Woods, you are filled with admiration at the man's legacy. So, when HE, a professor of music at Hamilton (no small feat) bows his head in reverence to another musician, you pay attention. He wrote a piece that was published following Aretha Franklin's death that you can read in it's entirety here, but below are some excerpts that I thought summed it up...

She was my hero, rivaled only by James Brown... Soul ought to be about producing sounds that are expensive, because those sounds cost somebody a lived experience to create...  No one else in all of America could riff like that... Now it is such that almost anyone in the world can identify the sound of Aretha’s voice in seven notes or less!!! This cannot be said about several of the cookie cutter artists that are out now... She has won so many awards that it is off of the scale! Even the governor of Michigan declared her voice a natural resource! The greatest R&B voice in the history of American music has passed into another realm! But that much soul has to leave a residue. I do not know who her mantle should pass to or if we should just let her magnificent soul rest and start fresh by creating new categories because Aretha’s cannot even be touched?

And here's the good Doc in action!

And an interview with Doc by another local legend, Monk Rowe!