Sara Bareilles performs Aretha Franklin’s Natural Woman for CBS songbook

Sara Bareilles performed “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” with pianist Misty Boyce as CBS News folded the 1967 standard into its Essential American Songbook, a 250-song project built for America’s 250th birthday.

The choice placed Bareilles, a two-time Grammy winner born Dec. 7, 1979, in Eureka, California, inside one of the most durable lines of American popular music. Gerry Goffin, Carole King and Jerry Wexler wrote the song, and Aretha Franklin recorded it in 1967, turning it into one of her best-known recordings and one of the records most closely tied to her artistic authority.

That authority still shapes how the song lands in public life. Franklin’s version became a signature because it joined vocal power, gospel feeling and a direct emotional claim that moved easily across race, gender and genre boundaries. Any modern performance of the song inevitably measures itself against that standard, and Bareilles’ rendition did so with a streamlined arrangement centered on Boyce’s piano rather than a large production.

CBS News built the Essential American Songbook for its Sunday Morning project around a simple idea: notable Americans were asked to nominate essential songs by American artists, and the result was a list of 250 songs spanning eras and genres. The segment that featured Bareilles was one piece of that broader collection, which the network made available as part of its songbook project.

The song’s pedigree also reaches back to another pillar of American songwriting. King and Goffin were among the most successful teams of the Brill Building era, writing hits that helped define the commercial center of pop in the 1960s. King later carried that achievement into her solo career, and her album Tapestry spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, a run that cemented her place in the canon alongside the singers who gave her songs their most enduring life.

Bareilles’ performance fit that lineage without trying to overwrite it. By choosing one of Franklin’s most recognized recordings for a national songbook tied to America’s 250th birthday, CBS News put a familiar standard back in circulation and underscored how the song remains alive not just as nostalgia, but as a test of who gets to sing the American story and how.