"Thanks to Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, Aug. 16 forever will be known, to quote a song from my youth, as the day the music died. We don't agree about much as a country and a people now. We find some of the silliest reasons imaginable to turn disagreements into arguments, arguments into fights, fights into brawls and brawls into wars. But most of us did agree about Elvis. And Aretha. More important, we agreed that we wanted to live in a country where stories like theirs were possible. We wanted an America in which the son of an ex-convict Southern sharecropper and day laborer could vault from working as a truck driver to becoming a king. And we wanted a land in which a black, teenage, unwed mother could leap from being in the choir in her father's church to becoming a queen. Elvis and Aretha became royalty the same way – through hard work, by breaking down barriers and by being talented. So talented. Perhaps it was a coincidence that they both died on Aug. 16. Maybe it was a quirk of fate. Possibly a message from the universe. All I know is that, for a lot of us, that date will be the day the music died, the anniversary of when the King and the Queen left us. Long may they reign."