Aretha Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised mostly in Detroit in a household built around music and the pulpit. Her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was one of the most famous Baptist preachers in the country — his recorded sermons for Joe Von Battle's label made him a national figure on the order of Sam Cooke or Mahalia Jackson, and gospel singing was the family's daily language. Franklin sang in his New Bethel Baptist Church choir as a child and toured briefly with his gospel caravan as a teenager. Family friend Sam Cooke's own move from gospel into pop stardom gave her a template for a secular career, and in 1960, at eighteen, she followed his path to New York.

Accounts differ slightly on exactly how she reached Columbia Records. In his own recollection, veteran producer John Hammond — the Columbia A&R legend already responsible for signing and shaping Billie Holiday and Count Basie, and who would later also sign Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to the label — said he was brought a demo tape by songwriter Curtis Lewis; the third song on it, "Today I Sing the Blues," stopped him cold ("I screamed! I said for Chrissakes who is this?"), and he tracked her down to Detroit through her manager, Jo King. Wikipedia's own account of her debut album, sourced to Hammond's liner notes, confirms Lewis as the one who "recommended" her. Other biographical sources instead credit family friend and jazz bassist Major Holley — who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins — with steering her toward Hammond and shaping the jazz-leaning material she brought in. The two stories aren't necessarily incompatible, but the better-documented one, straight from Hammond's own liner notes and later interviews, centers on Curtis Lewis's demo.

Whichever route got her there, Hammond signed her to Columbia in 1960 and produced her debut himself: Aretha, recorded between August 1960 and January 1961 and released February 27, 1961, teaming her with pianist Ray Bryant's combo. The backing band was serious jazz company — bassist Milt Hinton, drummer Osie Johnson, guitarist Skeeter Best, and Ellington trombonist Tyree Glenn all appear in the session credits. The album's sixth track, "Who Needs You?", was co-written by Billie Holiday (with Jeanne Burns) and appears to have gone unrecorded by Holiday herself; Franklin's version was its first recording. Hammond produced one more album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin (1962), before handing the reins to staff producer/arranger Robert Mersey, whose The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin (1962) became her first Columbia album to chart at all, and whose Laughing on the Outside (1963) brought in West Coast session players Dave Grusin, Leon Russell, and Hal Blaine.

The high point of the Columbia years, by most later assessments, is Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington (1964), cut within weeks of Washington's death and drawing on a small jazz combo — George Duvivier on bass, Gary Chester on drums, Teddy Charles on vibraphone, Ernie Royal on trumpet — with liner notes from jazz critic Leonard Feather. Later Columbia albums shifted production to Clyde Otis and arranger Belford Hendricks: Runnin' Out of Fools (1964), the live Yeah!!! In Person with Her Quartet (1965, recorded in New York with guitarist Kenny Burrell), and Soul Sister (1966), her final new Columbia album while still under contract. Columbia never found a consistent lane for her — the label mixed jazz, blues, gospel, and pop across nine studio albums and reportedly lost some $90,000 on her by 1966 — and when her contract lapsed she left for Atlantic, debuting there in January 1967. Columbia released one more LP built from Columbia-era session leftovers, Take It Like You Give It (April 1967), after "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" had already made her a star elsewhere.

Franklin died August 16, 2018, in Detroit, of pancreatic cancer, at age 76. The consensus that Columbia "mismanaged" her talent has softened somewhat with reassessment of individual records like Unforgettable, but the broader jazz-industry infrastructure she passed through in these years — Hammond, Mersey, Feather, Burrell, Duvivier — remains a genuinely under-told chapter next to her Atlantic-era fame.

The material on Franklin's nine Columbia albums ranges across jazz standards, pop, blues, and gospel-inflected soul — Columbia's own uncertainty about how to market her is well documented — but the personnel around her sessions is unambiguously drawn from the jazz world: pianist Ray Bryant, bassists Milt Hinton and George Duvivier, drummer Osie Johnson, guitarists Skeeter Best and Kenny Burrell, vibraphonist Teddy Charles, and Ellington alumnus Tyree Glenn all appear in her Columbia-era session credits, and jazz critic Leonard Feather wrote the liner notes for her Dinah Washington tribute. John Hammond, the same A&R figure who shaped Billie Holiday's and Count Basie's recorded legacies, personally produced her first two albums. None of this makes Franklin's own singing "jazz" in any narrow sense — her instrument was gospel-trained and became the defining voice of soul within a few years of leaving Columbia — but the sidemen, producers, and repertoire she worked through from 1960 to 1967 place this period squarely inside the era's working jazz scene, not adjacent to it.