Aretha Franklin – Respect (Live)

She Came In With Her Own Arrangement. The Engineer Had Recorded the Original Three Years Earlier. Nobody Planned Any of It.

On Valentine’s Day, 1967, Aretha Franklin walked into Atlantic Records’ New York studio with a song she had already been performing live for two years — a song she had first heard on the radio while cleaning her Detroit apartment, piano by the window, watching the cars go by, and had immediately known she needed to do something different with. Engineer Tom Dowd had set up the microphones and walked out into the studio when Franklin began to sing the first bars. “I know that song,” he told her. “I made it with Otis Redding three years ago.” He had. The arrangement she brought to that Valentine’s Day session bore so little resemblance to the Redding original that Dowd spent the rest of the day watching something new being built from the wreckage of something familiar — and then went home and tried to account for what he had just witnessed. He couldn’t. Nobody who was in that room has ever fully managed it.

“Respect” was released in April 1967 on Atlantic Records as the lead single from Franklin’s debut Atlantic album and reached Number One on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B chart simultaneously, spending two weeks at the top of the pop chart. In the UK it reached Number 10, helping transform Franklin from a domestic star into an international one. She won two Grammy Awards at the 1968 ceremony — Best Rhythm & Blues Recording and Best Rhythm & Blues Solo Vocal Performance, Female — for a track that had been recorded in a single afternoon. Keyboardist Spooner Oldham, who played the session, said it took two or three takes at most. Co-producer Arif Mardin, whose arrangement gave the track its structure, recalled the day with characteristic economy: “I have been in many studios in my life, but there was never a day like that. It was like a festival. Everything worked just right.” Rolling Stone placed it in the top five greatest songs of all time. The Library of Congress inducted it into the National Recording Registry in 2002. It was her first Number One. She had been recording for nine years.

The song’s path to that studio began with Otis Redding’s 1965 recording — a horn-heavy, strutting declaration of bruised male pride that had reached Number 35 on the Hot 100 and Number 4 on the R&B chart, a solid hit without being a defining one. Franklin had heard it, loved it, and begun performing it live with a different emotional center — the song reframed from a man’s demand to a woman’s declaration. Working with her sister Carolyn at that Detroit apartment, piano by the window, she had mapped out the rearrangement before a session was booked: the stop-and-stutter syncopation that Wexler later called her own invention, the spelling of R-E-S-P-E-C-T that was entirely absent from the Redding version, and the “sock it to me” refrain that Carolyn brought from the street language of their neighborhood. The whole concept arrived as a fully formed package. What the studio gave it was Carolyn’s suggestion of “TCB” — short for “Take Care of Business,” a phrase current in the Black community that Aretha jumped on immediately — and King Curtis’s tenor saxophone solo, played over chord changes borrowed from Sam & Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.” Both elements went into the final recording on the day.

The sessions that produced “Respect” had not been scheduled for New York at all. Jerry Wexler had booked Franklin for recording dates at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama — the facility whose rhythm section had become one of the most sought-after in American recording, whose combination of Jimmy Johnson, Tommy Coghill, and Roger Hawkins had a chemistry that Wexler had wanted around Franklin’s voice from the moment he signed her. One track — “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” — was recorded before an altercation between Franklin’s husband and manager Ted White and studio owner Rick Hall shut the sessions down entirely. Wexler moved everything to New York, shipped the Muscle Shoals rhythm section north, and resumed recording ten days later without White in the room. The disruption that had derailed the Alabama sessions produced, in the New York substitute, the most consequential recording of Franklin’s career. The FAME blowup gave the world “Respect.” Sometimes the interruption is the point.

Franklin’s own understanding of what the song was and what it became evolved across decades. She told Terry Gross at Fresh Air in 1999 that the “sock it to me” line had come directly from the street: “That was a big, big thing in our neighbourhood — all the kids were saying it.” She was consistently clear that when she recorded it, the song was primarily about the dynamic between a man and a woman rather than a political statement. “In later times,” she said, “it was picked up as a battle cry by the Civil Rights movement. But when I recorded it, it was pretty much a male-female kind of thing.” Producer Jerry Wexler drew the broader conclusion: “The call for respect went from a request to a demand. It started off as a soul song and wound up as a kind of national anthem.” Both readings were correct. The song was large enough to hold all of them simultaneously — which is the defining quality of the recordings that last.

Otis Redding performed “Respect” at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, three months after Franklin’s version had made his own obsolete. Before playing it, he told the crowd: “This next song is a song that a girl took away from me.” He said it with a glint in his eye. He told Wexler privately: “This girl has taken that song from me. Ain’t no longer my song. From now on, it belongs to her.” Redding died in a plane crash over Lake Monona, Wisconsin on December 10, 1967 — five months after Monterey, seven months after Franklin had walked into that New York studio with her arrangement already in place. He was twenty-six years old. The royalties from “Respect” flowed to his estate for the rest of the century and beyond, a financial acknowledgment of a creative debt that Franklin herself had never denied. She had heard his song. She had loved it. She had made it into something he could not have imagined, and he had known it immediately. Some transformations are so complete they become an act of tribute.

Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018, at seventy-six, of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. The summer of 1967 had been called “the summer of ‘Retha, Rap, and Revolt.” Fifty-one years later, the revolt was still ongoing and the song was still its most concise expression — seven letters, spelled out, demanding what everyone already knew was owed. She had not written it. She had made it so completely hers that the writer himself conceded the point. That is not a minor achievement. It is, in fact, the whole story.