A 13-year-old orphan wrote Aretha Franklin's greatest hit — and ended up a middle school music teacher
Pop history is full of songwriting origin stories, but this one deserves its own movie, and I'd like casting approval.
Brooklyn, the early '60s. Bobby Lance loses both parents by age 11 and moves in with his big sister Fran Robins — 17 years older, a classical pianist, and apparently the best sibling in recorded history. She teaches him guitar. He starts writing songs.
The song nobody wanted (at first)
At 13, Bobby writes "The House That Jack Built" with Fran's help, riffing on the old nursery rhyme, and dreams of exactly one voice for it: Aretha Franklin's. They actually get the song to her label.
The label passes. Ouch. The siblings hand it to an up-and-comer named Thelma Jones instead, whose version politely goes nowhere.
And then — plot twist — Aretha's camp circles back and records it anyway, without warning the kids. Imagine getting that phone call.
The Queen does Queen things
Released in 1968, Aretha's "The House That Jack Built" detonates: No. 2 on the R&B chart, No. 6 on the Hot 100. For context, only two songs of her entire career ever hit No. 1 — "Respect" and the George Michael duet. A nursery-rhyme lawsuit of a song written by a teenager sat comfortably among her biggest hits, and decades later Rolling Stone ranked it No. 25 among her 50 greatest recordings. Out of hundreds. Written by a kid.
Lance never got over her, in the best way. He told ABC7 after her death in 2018:
"My whole life musically changed knowing Aretha."
Years later he told his alma mater, Mercy University, about watching her run the room at Atlantic Studios — where to put the beat, what to tell the musicians:
"She was much more than just a great singer."
The ending nobody predicted
Here's my favorite part. Lance got his own record deal, cut two albums in the early '70s, radio shrugged — and instead of chasing the industry, he walked. Earned a master's in education. Became a middle school music teacher in Tarrytown, New York, writing most of the songs his students performed, right up until his 2019 retirement.
The man co-wrote a top-10 Aretha Franklin single as a barely-teenager and spent his prime teaching literacy through music to twelve-year-olds. Fran passed in 2014, but every time that song plays, it's the two of them — the orphan and the sister who raised him — permanently stitched into the Queen of Soul's legacy. Excuse me, something's in my eye.
Previously we wrote: Hayden Panettiere's screen work runs 32 years, from a 1994 soap to Sleepwalker
