DIY network could save Aretha Franklin's childhood home

Aretha Franklin's deteriorating South Memphis childhood home may have found an unlikely savior in cable TV, activists working to preserve the house said Thursday.

The DIY Network, a Knoxville-based, Scripps Co.-owned cable channel dedicated to programs about do-it-yourself projects, apparently is interested in paying for the restoration and possible relocation of the shotgun house at 406 Lucy where the future "Queen of Soul" was born on March 25, 1942.

"We'd been talking to them about it for some time, but we had to keep quiet about it until we got something semi-definitive," said Jeffrey Higgs, executive director of the LeMoyne-Owen College Community Development Corp., which created the complementary South Memphis Renewal CDC to help improve properties relevant to "the culture and music of the neighborhood," including the long-empty Franklin home.

"If we can get this worked out, then they would pay for the renovation of the house — total — and the move if we decide to move it," Higgs said after a Thursday morning hearing in Shelby County Environmental Court, which has been overseeing the effort to preserve the culturally historic property since it was declared a public nuisance in 2012 due to its rotting floors and collapsing roof. "Nobody else has come forward to say that."

"The television network really is interested," said lawyer Alan Crone, special counsel to Mayor Jim Strickland. But he said saving the house would be only the first step in transforming a fixer-upper into a cultural and tourist amenity. "What we really need is some sponsoring organization that has the wherewithal to not only maintain it but curate it."

Higgs said he most recently talked to a DIY producer Wednesday night, but said he could not give more information until more details of the plan are confirmed. He said network scouts have been to Memphis in the past few months, and have visited three sites in the Soulsville neighborhood where the house might be moved.

The W.C. Handy home on Beale Street provides a precedent. The small house where the "Father of the Blues" lived after he moved from Alabama to South Memphis was relocated to Beale in the 1980s and converted into a museum. Proponents of the effort to preserve Franklin's home envision a similar tourism-plus-education component for the historic fixer-upper.

Franklin, 74, whose biggest hits include "Respect," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" and — appropriately enough, in this context — "The House That Jack Built," lived in Memphis only two years, but her significance as a foundational soul singer and pop hitmaker is so extensive that the home has become an off-the-beaten-path tourist site for adventurous music pilgrims from around the world. The house also is important for being the one-time base of Aretha's father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, the civil rights activist and so-called "Man with the Million Dollar Voice" whose recorded sermons were big sellers.

Higgs said he hopes to have more details on the plan to save the house confirmed by the next Environmental Court hearing, set for March 23.