Franklin died at 9:50 a.m. at her home here, surrounded by family and friends, according to a statement on behalf of Franklin's family from her longtime publicist Gwendolyn Quinn, reported CNN. The "official cause of death was due to advance pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type", the family statement said.
Franklin, a 17-time Grammy Award-winner, was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, and delivered her last performance at the Elton John AIDS Foundation party in New York last November.
"The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, is dead. She was a great woman, with a wonderful gift from God, her voice. She will be missed!" Trump said in a Twitter post, Efe reported.
Bill and Hillary Clinton said the artist was "elegant, graceful, and utterly uncompromising in her artistry".
"For more than 50 years, she stirred our souls," the Clintons said, noting that Franklin's first music school was the church.
Barack Obama said in a statement that Franklin "may have passed on to a better place, but the gift of her music remains to inspire us."
"In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade - our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect," Obama and his wife, Michelle, said.
Franklin was a favoured artist among US presidents, performing for Jimmy Carter, Clinton and Obama. In 2005, President George W. Bush honoured Franklin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour.
The singer had been reported to be in failing health for years and appeared frail in recent photos.
In February 2017, Franklin announced she would stop touring, but she continued to book concerts. Earlier this year, she cancelled a pair of performances, including at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, on doctor's orders, according to Rolling Stone.
The singer's final public performance was last November, when she sang at an Elton John AIDS Foundation gala in New York.
Franklin released her first album, "Songs of Faith," in 1956, scoring regional hits with two gospel songs and occasionally touring with The Soul Stirrers, whose star was Sam Cooke.
In a professional career that spanned more than half a century, Franklin's songs were not just chart-toppers, but also gave out a message.
Her song "Respect" was a call to arms, while "(You make me feel like) A natural woman" was an earthy expression of sexuality and "Think" was a rallying cry for women fed up with loutish men. She even won a Golden Globe award for "Never gonna break my faith".
As the first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she had 88 Billboard chart hits during the rock era, the top among female vocalists. At the peak of her career -- from 1967 to 1975 -- she had more than two dozen Top 40 hits.