On August 16, 2018 Aretha Franklin died in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76. Franklin, also known as the Queen of Soul, had an award winning career as a singer, songwriter, actress and pianist while also being described as the voice of the civil rights movement. This dataset contains two tweet id files. The first was collected from the search API during the response to the announcement of her death, which includes tweets from August 8 - August 19 using the query "Aretha Franklin" OR "Queen of Soul". The second dataset was collected over August 24 to September 3, which includes the date of her funeral on August 31. This second dataset was collected using the query "Aretha Franklin" OR "Queen of Soul" OR ArethaHomegoing OR ArethaFranklinFuneral OR ArethaFranklin which includes hashtags that were trending at the time. The datasets contain 2,832,128 and 1,332,442 tweets respectively.