Erma Venice Franklin was born in Shelby, Mississippi, and moved with her family to Memphis, Buffalo (where she made her singing debut in her father's church at age five), and finally Detroit. She sang with sisters Aretha and Carolyn in their church choir, Aged 14, Erma started a secular group called the Cleopatrettes, which won a state- wide singing competition and recorded with JVB label (who also recorded her father's sermons). The Cleopatrettes broke up after high school, and Franklin toured with her father's gospel group for two years; she subsequently had chances to record for Chess and to join Motown's early roster, but wound up following her father's wishes that she attend college before trying a singing career. She studied Business at Clark Atlanta University (then known as Clark College).
Later Franklin successfully auditioned for Epic in 1961, and moved to New York to record. Aretha was on the parent label Columbia at the time, and Erma had much the same problem as her sister, namely that pure R&B wasn't the label's area of expertise, and they simply didn't know how to handle her.
![]()
Franklin's debut album, Her Name Is Erma, appeared in 1962, and featured jazz and pop standards as well as R&B tunes; one of several commercially ignored singles, "Abracadabra," was written by Van McCoy, later of "The Hustle" fame. Frustrated with Epic's choice of directions for her, Franklin waited out her contract while spending 1961-1966 on the road as a featured vocalist in New Orleans R&B legend Lloyd Price's show.
![]()
Franklin's debut album, Her Name Is Erma, appeared in 1962, and featured jazz and pop standards as well as R&B tunes; one of several commercially ignored singles, "Abracadabra," was written by Van McCoy, later of "The Hustle" fame. Frustrated with Epic's choice of directions for her, Franklin waited out her contract while spending 1961-1966 on the road as a featured vocalist in New Orleans R&B legend Lloyd Price's show.
When Aretha's career suddenly took off at Atlantic, Franklin signed with producer/songwriter Bert Berns' Shout Records in 1967. "Piece of My Heart," a song Berns had co-written with Jerry Ragovoy, became Franklin's first Top Ten R&B hit later that year but unfortunately, before Franklin could
 |
| Aretha & Erma |
It was not until 1992 that she received real recognition for her greatest recording, Piece Of My Heart, when the jeans company Levi Straus used the 25-year-old song in a European advertising campaign, catapulting it into the UK top 10.Franklin's original recording of "Piece of My Heart" enjoyed an early-'90s revival in Europe, where it was featured in a jeans commercial. She also performed with Aretha off and on through the '80s and '90s,
The news that Erma was suffering from throat cancer became public knowledge earlier in 2002; both her younger brother Cecil (who had managed Aretha’s career for so many years) and younger sister Carolyn had also succumbed to the disease and while she had shown some improvement, Erma’s condition ultimately deteriorated until she died in Detroit, Michigan on September 7, 2002 at age 64. She is interred at Detroit's historic Woodlawn Cemetery.
(Edited mainly from AllMusic & The Guardian)