Aretha drops the fur coat and a president wipes his eyes

The Kennedy Center Honors are a formal evening: black tie, the honourees in a box beside the President, tributes performed by other people. In December 2015 the honourees included Carole King, and the producers had a surprise for her. Aretha Franklin walked out in a floor-length fur, put her handbag down on the piano, and began the song King had written with Gerry Goffin and Jerry Wexler for her in 1967.

She took the first verse alone at the keyboard, unhurried, then stood up as the orchestra came in. Carole King, in the box above, was on her feet with her hands over her face. Barack Obama, next to her, wiped away a tear, an image that went around the world when the broadcast aired on CBS at the end of the month. Somewhere in the last chorus Franklin let the coat slide off her shoulders onto the stage, a gesture she had used for decades and that the room read exactly as she meant it.

She was 73 and had been singing this song for forty-eight years. It became the performance people reached for when she died in August 2018: a summary of what she could do to a room, on a night when she was not even the guest of honour.