Aretha Franklin Reinvented Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’
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- 3 days ago
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‘100 Greatest Soul Songs’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
“Respect” was written and first recorded by Otis Redding in 1965, when it reached №4 on the R&B chart. Aretha Franklin’s reworking of the song from a woman’s viewpoint became a №1 pop and R&B hit — and feminist anthem — in 1967.
A ballad with the title “Respect” was brought to Redding by Earl “Speedo” Sims, who intended to record it with his group, the Singing Demons. It is unclear who wrote this early version. Redding wrote new lyrics and sped up the tempo.
When Sims was unable to produce a workable version of the tune, Redding recorded it himself and included it on his third album, 1965’s Otis Blue.
“That’s one of my favorite songs because it has a better groove than any of my records,” Redding said of “Respect.” “It says something, too: ‘What you want, baby, you got it; what you need, baby, you got it; all I’m asking for is a little respect when I come home.’
“The song lines are great. The band track is beautiful. It took me a whole day to write it and about twenty minutes to arrange it. We cut it once, and that was it. Everybody wants respect, you know.”
Franklin wrote in her autobiography Aretha: From the Roots that the song was “an ongoing blessing” in her life. “It was the need of a nation,” she said, “the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher — everyone wanted respect.”
“I heard Mr. Redding’s version of it,” Franklin told NPR. “I just loved it. And I decided that I wanted to record it.
“My sister Carolyn and I got together. I was living in a small apartment on the West Side of Detroit. Piano by the window, watching the cars go by, and we came up with that infamous line, the ‘Sock it to me!’ line. It was a cliché of the day.
“Actually, we didn’t just come up with it, it really was cliché. And some of the girls were saying that to the fellows, like, ‘Sock it to me’ in this way or ‘sock it to me’ in that way. Nothing sexual, and it’s not sexual. It was nonsexual, just a cliché line.”
Franklin was to record the album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, AL in January 1967 but an altercation between Franklin’s husband and manager, Ted White, and studio owner Rick Hall caused the session to be moved to New York after one song was recorded. The musicians and engineer Tom Dowd were brought to New York to complete the album.
“I walked out into the studio and said, ‘What’s the next song?’” Dowd recalled in the documentary Tom Dowd and the Language of Music. “Aretha starts singing it to me. I said, ‘I know that song. I made it with Otis Redding like three years ago.’
“The first time I recorded ‘Respect’ was on the Otis Blue album and she picked up on it. She and Carolyn were the ones who conceived of it coming from the woman’s point of view instead of the man’s point of view, and when it came to the middle, Carolyn said, ‘Take care, TCB.’ Aretha jumped on it, and that was how we did ‘Respect.’”
“It really blew my mind,” keyboardist Spooner Oldham told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Oldham said he had only heard Redding’s version “a time or two” when Franklin proposed the tune.
“It didn’t have any influence at all on the outcome of her record. To me, it was totally different. We treated it like a new song. As I recall, it went pretty smoothly. It wasn’t a labored thing at all. Two or three takes at most, I would say.”
Franklin accompanied herself on the piano when recording “Respect.” “She was great every time she touched the piano,” Oldham said. “She had such a feel for it. Typically, it was set up where she would play the piano and I would do electric piano or organ. It seemed like we played a little alike, in retrospect.
“Aretha had the world by the tail. She was strong, and she obviously liked the band because we were pumping up the songs with her. I think she was motivated to do her best, as were we. It was like, ‘Bring me another song — let’s do it!’ She was ready.”
In Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, producer Jerry Wexler explained how Franklin transformed the song’s original meaning. “The call for respect went from a request to a demand,” said Wexler. “It started off as a soul song and wound up as a kind of national anthem.”
“In later times, it was picked up as a battle cry by the Civil Rights movement,” said Franklin. “But when I recorded it, it was pretty much a male-female-kind of thing. And more in a general sense, from person-to-person — I’m going to give you respect and I’d like to have that respect back.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Greatest Soul Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series, and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever. For more on our books and mini books, visit Edgar Street Books.
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