Respect
ARETHA Franklin sat down at a piano on Valentine’s Day in 1967 in the Atlantic Records studio in New York and recorded Respect.
The Queen of Soul took the song written and first recorded by Otis Redding and made it her own, transforming it into what would become an anthem for the civil rights movement and for the women’s movement.
Respect became a soundtrack for the 1960s. Franklin, then just 24 years old, infused it with a soulful and revolutionary demand, a declaration of independence that was unapologetic, uncompromising and unflinching
She had taken a man’s demand for respect from a woman when he got home from work and flipped it.
“Aretha shattered the atmosphere, the aesthetic atmosphere,” Peter Guralnick, author of Sweet Soul Music, said in 1987, on the 20th anniversary of the song.
When Franklin’s version of Respect was released in April 1967, it soared to number one on the charts and stayed there for at least 12 weeks.
The country was in the throes of a revolution. The Vietnam War was raging, and protests against it were growing. By summer, racial unrest would grip dozens of American cities, including Detroit.
Respect would become an anthem for the black power movement, as symbolic and powerful as Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn, and Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come.
Otis Redding, a songwriter, had recorded Respect in 1965. “I had heard his version,” Franklin said in 1987. “And I liked it. Of course, I felt I could bring something new to it.”
Franklin, and her sisters, Carolyn Ann Franklin and Erma Franklin, who sang background vocals, came up with the idea to add the line, sock it to me, sock it to me.
It was Aretha Franklin’s idea to spell out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”. Before arriving at the studio, Franklin and her sisters had worked out the groove and the tracks.
“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 sock it to me line,” she said in 1999.
The song immediately crossed over.
“In black neighbourhoods and white universities, her hits came like cannon balls, blowing holes in the stylised bouffant and chiffon Motown sound, a strong new voice with a range that hit the heavens and a centre of gravity that was very close to earth,” wrote Gerri Hirshey, author of Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music.
When Franklin recorded the song, she wasn’t trying to make a political anthem, said David Ritz, author of the biography Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin.
“She deconstructed and reconstructed the song,” Ritz said. “She gave it another groove the original song did not have. She added background parts. Before she sang the lead part, she turned the beat around and rewrote all these background vocals.”
In the same way an engineer might take an engine apart and put it back together, Ritz said, Franklin took apart the song and put it back together.
“It is one of the major overhauls that never undercuts the original version,” Ritz said. “It took on a universality the original never had. I think it is a credit to her genius she was able to do so much with it. She should have been listed as a co-producer of the song.”
Franklin’s reinvention of Respect is marked by an urgency the original version did not have.
“The original version by Otis Redding is a great song,” Ritz said. “He sings the hell out of it but Aretha, in her reinvention, personalises it: You are going to give me respect when you come home. But her version is so deep and so filled with angst, determination, tenacity and all these contradictory emotions. That is how it become anthemic.”
The song caught on with the black power movement and feminists and human rights activists across the world. And its appeal remains powerful. In the last year, it’s become a symbol of the #Metoo movement. – The Washington Post