Things got really emotional on Friday for Stevie Wonder as he discussed having a final conversation with his longtime friend, Aretha Franklin.
Wonder said that he and Franklin, who died Thursday, had spoken about collaborating as recently as two months ago.
“We’d been talking about it. There was a song that I had written called ‘The Future,’ and we were going to sing it together. And so I thought I cried my last tear,” Wonder told CBS This Morning on Friday, his voice breaking.
Wonder, 68, and Jesse Jackson visited Franklin at her Detroit-area home on Tuesday.
Wonder described his last words to the legend.
“She wasn’t able to speak back, but her family felt that she could hear me, and so I just said all the things that I’ve always said and told her to say hello to my sister – that I lost this year as well,” Wonder recalled.
“I love you Aretha, and that’s a forever thing,” he continued. “We have to celebrate her life and continue her legacy by letting people of all the various genres hear the music that influenced us all. I’ve known [for] sometime about her condition, and I just prayed, even though the odds were very, very, very crazy — when you think two out of 100 would succeed — [that she] would beat this thing.”
Franklin had been battling pancreatic cancer. She was 76.
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