Flashback

Aretha Franklin’s hit single was released in April 1967 and became her signature song

Remembering Aretha Franklin, and the song that made her a star

When Aretha Franklin shouted out at the conclusion of her number-one hit, ‘R-ES-P-E-C-T find out what it means to ME/R-E-S-P-E-C-T, take care, tcb…’ it wasn’t a request to ‘take care of business’ – in the phrase popular at the time among black Americans – it was a demand.

Respect – released 53 years ago this week – was the record that made Franklin a star and which galvanised America at a time of unparalleled social and cultural upheaval.

The song, written by Otis Redding, was originally recorded by him in 1965. His version was the lament of a working man – pleading that he be given the respect in his home that he believes is his due, but which he is denied in the outside world.

But if Redding’s recording of the song was about love, Franklin’s version, recorded two years later, was about power – a fierce clarion call of self-assertion and independence that would become an anthem for two rising movements: women’s liberation and black power. The Black Panther Party had been founded four months before Aretha recorded the song.

In the first week of June 1967, Respect went to number one in the US charts. It would be her biggest hit, the song that made her an international star. Two weeks later Otis Redding performed it at the Monterey Pop Festival, joking to the crowd, ‘This next song is a song that a girl took away from me.’

When Franklin walked into the Atlantic Records studio in New York on Valentine’s Day 1967 to record Respect ,withthe backing of a group of session musicians flown in from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she was 24 years old – but had already led a life in which she’d seen and done too much, too soon.

Her father CL Franklin was a celebrated preacher, known as the ‘Man with the Million-dollar Voice’, who ministered to a 4,500-strong congregation in his New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit – but who had been obliged to leave a previous church in Memphis after impregnating a 12-year-old member of his congregation.

Her mother left Franklin when she was a child, dying by the time she was 10. At 14 Aretha recorded her first album in her father’s church. By the age of 17 she had given birth to two sons.

At 19, she married a Detroit pimp named Ted White, who went on to become her manager. In 1968, a year after recording Respect, Franklin became the first African-american entertainer to grace the cover of Time magazine. But even while celebrating her achievements, the report described how White had ‘roughed her up’ in full public view in the lobby of an Atlanta hotel. And Franklin described herself as ‘26 going on 65, an old woman in disguise’.

She left White shortly afterwards, but her life would be a checkerboard of emotional storms and insecurities from then on. Jerry Wexler, who produced Respect and many of her other great hits, called Franklin ‘Our Lady of the Mysterious Sorrows’, describing her ‘luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain’.

But that sorrow and pain was the grist of her genius, transcended by the sublime power of her voice, the dignity of her bearing, the longevity of her career. She was an American legend, whether singing My Country, ’Tis of Thee at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, or moving Obama to tears singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2015, three years before her death at the age of 76.

In the end, Aretha got what she demanded. ‘Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me – Respect!’

— By Mick Brown

Aretha Franklin performing in 1968