On Valentine’s Day 1967, a 24-year-old singer sat down at the piano in Atlantic Records’ New York studio and began teaching a roomful of veteran musicians how a song was going to go. The song was not hers. It had been a hit two years earlier for Otis Redding, and in Redding’s hands it was a man’s plea: work all day, bring the money home, and get some respect when you walk through the door. Aretha Franklin had been performing it in her live shows, and she had other ideas. By the end of that session she had reversed its perspective, added a spelling lesson that would enter the language, and cut two minutes and twenty-nine seconds of tape that would reach number one, win her first two Grammy Awards, and eventually be named the greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone. Redding would joke about it on stage. He could afford to. She had not just covered his song. She had taken it.
Six Years of Being Held Back
The session only happened because Franklin’s career had been quietly failing. Signed to Columbia Records at 18, she spent six years there making polished pop, jazz and standards albums that showcased her voice while sanding off everything distinctive about it. None of her Columbia singles cracked the top ten. When the contract expired in November 1966, she owed the label money. Atlantic Records bought the contract anyway, because producer Jerry Wexler had heard what Columbia had not: a gospel singer from the Detroit church of her father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, who happened to be one of the most formidable pianists in Black music. Wexler’s plan was simple — stop restraining her, and let her record the blues- and gospel-inflected music that was coming to be called soul.
The first Atlantic sessions, in January 1967, were held at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Franklin and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section — the Swampers — cut the brooding “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” in a single, electric session. The follow-up recording collapsed when Franklin’s husband and manager, Ted White, got into a physical altercation with studio owner Rick Hall, and the Franklins flew back to New York. Ten business days later she called Wexler and agreed to finish the work at Atlantic’s own studio, with the Muscle Shoals players flown north to her. There she completed “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” and when “I Never Loved a Man” was released that February it became the breakthrough six years of Columbia records had never produced: number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the R&B chart, the first of twenty R&B chart-toppers in her career. Now Atlantic needed a follow-up, and Franklin knew exactly which song she wanted.
Valentine’s Day at Atlantic Studios
“Respect” had been written by Redding and released in August 1965, reaching number 35 on the Hot 100 and number four on the R&B chart as part of his album Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul. Franklin had loved it for years and had worked out her own arrangement on stage. In the studio she acted less like an interpreter than a composer finishing someone else’s draft. Working with her sisters Erma and Carolyn, who sang backing vocals, she flipped the narrator from a man to a woman — not a woman pleading, but one who knows her worth and is itemising what she is owed. She directed the rhythm section through the arrangement’s stop-and-stutter syncopation herself, played piano on the track, and built new parts for the backing singers, including the chant of “sock it to me” that she and Carolyn had worked out together.
The most famous addition came from Carolyn, according to engineer Tom Dowd: spelling the word out. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T — find out what it means to me” turned the chorus into something half demand, half schoolyard chant, and it has no counterpart in Redding’s version. Neither does the coda’s shorthand “TCB” — period slang for “taking care of business,” later adopted as a personal motto by Elvis Presley. And the sisters’ insistent “sock it to me” refrain, which became a household catchphrase, was never meant as innuendo. “Some of the girls were saying that to the fellas, like ‘sock it to me’ in this way or ‘sock it to me’ in that way,” Franklin explained decades later on Fresh Air. “It’s not sexual. It was nonsexual, just a cliché line.” For the bridge, tenor saxophonist King Curtis soloed over the chord changes of Sam & Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” a borrowed progression that gives the record its swaggering middle gear-change. Co-producer Arif Mardin, who arranged from Franklin’s ideas, remembered the day in near-religious terms: “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.”
Two Weeks at Number One
“Respect” opened Franklin’s Atlantic debut album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, released on March 10, 1967. With the title track climbing into the pop top ten, Atlantic rush-released “Respect” as a single on April 10, 1967 — Wexler took the unusual step of writing to distributors in Billboard citing “overwhelming demand” from dealers, disc jockeys and one-stops. The B-side was Franklin’s own smouldering “Dr. Feelgood.” Cash Box heard a “frantic, driving, wailing, up-beat workout”; Billboard tagged it a Top 20 Pop Spotlight pick “destined to follow the same successful groove.”
It entered the Hot 100 at number 50 on April 29 — the biggest debut of the week — then jumped to 26, then 14, then the top five, and on June 3 it displaced the Rascals’ “Groovin'” at number one, where it stayed for two weeks. By year’s end Billboard ranked it the thirteenth-biggest single of 1967, one of three Franklin records on the year-end list, alongside “Baby I Love You” and “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” — a remarkable haul for an artist who, twelve months earlier, had never had a top-ten hit of any kind. On the R&B chart it did even better, holding number one for eight consecutive weeks, the longest run of any single in Franklin’s career. It also topped the Cash Box chart, reached number ten in Britain, and went top ten in Canada and the Netherlands — her first international breakthrough. At the 1968 Grammy Awards the record won Best Rhythm & Blues Recording and Best Rhythm & Blues Performance, Female, the first of an unmatched eight consecutive wins for Franklin in that category.
“That a Girl Took Away From Me”
What the charts could not measure was the way the record landed in its moment. Released into the America of 1967, a Black woman’s voice demanding — not requesting — respect was heard far beyond its love-song frame. The song was adopted simultaneously by the civil rights movement and, in the following decade, by second-wave feminism, and the summer of 1967 was dubbed in some quarters the summer of “‘Retha, Rap, and Revolt.” Franklin herself always shrugged off the political weight others loaded onto it. “I don’t think it’s bold at all,” she told the Detroit Free Press. “I think it’s quite natural that we all want respect — and should get it.”
Redding, to his credit, took the appropriation with grace and humour. Introducing the song at the Monterey Pop Festival that June, he told the crowd it was one “that a girl took away from me — a friend of mine, this girl she just took this song.” He began incorporating Franklin’s ideas into his own performances. He would not live to see her version win its Grammys: on December 10, 1967, Redding died in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin, at 26.
The record also settled a question of authorship in the public mind. Because Franklin made “Respect” a hit, the many singers who have covered or sampled the song since have almost invariably followed her arrangement rather than Redding’s — the spelling, the stops, the sisters’ refrain. Songwriter credit and royalties still belonged to Redding’s estate, but the definitive text of the song became hers.
The honours kept accumulating for decades. “Respect” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2002, and was named to the RIAA and National Endowment for the Arts’ Songs of the Century list. Rolling Stone ranked it fifth on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time — then, in the 2021 revision, moved it to number one. Franklin re-recorded it for the 1998 film Blues Brothers 2000, and in 2021 her life story reached cinemas under the single-word title the record had made inevitable: Respect, with Jennifer Hudson in the role Franklin herself had hand-picked for her. Otis Redding wrote the song. But the demand the world hears in it — spelled out, letter by letter — belongs to the woman who took it home and made it hers.