Respect (song)

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“Respect”
Song by Otis Redding
Album	Otis Blue
Released	August 15, 1965
Format	7" single
Recorded	Stax Studios, Memphis, Tennessee: 1965
Genre	Soul, jazz
Length	2:08
Label	Volt/Atco V-128
Writer	Otis Redding
Producer	Steve Cropper
Otis Blue track listing
"Ole Man Trouble" "Respect" "A Change Is Gonna Come" "Down in the Valley" "I've Been Loving You Too Long" "Shake" "My Girl" "Wonderful World" "Rock Me Baby" "Satisfaction" "You Don't Miss Your Water"

"Respect" is a 1967 hit song and the signature song of the R&B singer Aretha Franklin, written and originally released by Volt recording artist Otis Redding in 1965. While Redding wrote the song as a man's plea for respect and recognition from a woman, the roles were reversed for Franklin's version. Aretha Franklin's cover was a landmark for the feminist movement, and is often considered as one of the best songs of the Rock & Roll era, earning her two Grammy Award in 1968 for "Best Rhythm & Blues Recording" and "Best Rhythm & Blues Solo Vocal Performance, Female", and was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2002, the Library of Congress honored Franklins version by adding it to the National Recording Registry. It is number five on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.^[1] It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

[edit] Origins

Otis Redding wrote and recorded "Respect" as a blues tune in the studio while finishing his third album, Otis Blue. The album became widely successful, even outside of his largely R&B and blues fanbase. When released in the summer of 1965, the song reached the top five on Billboard's Black Singles Chart. The song even crossed over to pop radio's white audience, peaking at number thirty-five there. At the time, the song became Redding's second largest crossover hit (after "I've Been Loving You Too Long") and paved the way to future presence at American radio.

[edit] Making of a hit

Producer Jerry Wexler had come across Redding's song and brought it to Franklin's attention. While Redding's version was popular among his core R&B audience, Wexler thought the song had potential to be a crossover hit and demonstrate Franklin's vocal ability. Together with Aretha's sisters, Carolyn and Erma, singing backup "Respect" was recorded on Valentine's Day of 1967.

During the recording process, a bridge was added to Redding's original composition. Another addition was King Curtis' tenor saxophone and the slicker production of Wexler and co-producer Arif Mardin. The resulting song was featured on Franklin's Atlantic Records debut album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. As the title track became a hit on both R&B and pop radio, Atlantic Records arranged for the release of this new version of "Respect" as a single.

Franklin's rendition found even greater success than the original, spending two weeks atop the Billboard Pop Singles chart, and for eight weeks on the Billboard Black Singles chart. It also became a hit internationally, reaching number ten in the United Kingdom, and helping to transform Franklin from a domestic star into an international one. Even Otis Redding himself was impressed with the performance of the song, and at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of the cover's release, he was quoted playfully describing "Respect" as the song "that little girl done stole from me."

[edit] What did she say?

Franklin's version of the song contains the famous lines (as printed in the lyrics included in the 1985 compilation album Atlantic Soul Classics):

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Take care ... TCB

The last line is often misquoted as "Take out, TCP", or something similar, and indeed most published music sheets which include the lyrics have this incorrect line in them. The confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that the entire sequence was an ad-lib by Franklin, not present in Redding's original song.^[2] Thus, for that sequence, there were no official written lyrics to quote, and those transcribing the lyrics would have had to take their "best guess" as to the words being sung.

"TCB" is an abbreviation that was commonly used in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning "Taking Care of Business", and it was particularly widely used in African-American culture.^[3] However, it was somewhat less well-known outside of that culture^[4], yielding a possible explanation as to why it was not recognized by those who transcribed Franklin's words for music sheets.

[edit] Legacy

"Respect" is one of several songs considered to have defined the 1960s. It has appeared in dozens of films and still receives consistent play on oldies radio stations. In the 1970s, Franklin's version of the song came to exemplify the feminist movement. Although she had numerous hits after "Respect", and several before its release, the song became Franklin's signature song and her best-known recording.

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You was ranked eighty-third in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time in 2002. Two years later, "Respect" was fifth in the magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time. The song "Respect" is part of the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.^[5]

Despite being greatly overshadowed, Redding's version is still considered a soul classic, and highly regarded by fans of Stax-Volt and southern soul recordings.

The Vagrants, a Long Island, New York blue-eyed soul group recorded a version of Respect in 1967, which became a minor hit in the Eastern United States. Another regional band that had a hit with the song was the Michigan-based rock band The Rationals, whose 1966 release of the song received airplay on Detroit radio stations and predated the release of Aretha Franklin's version by a year.

The Rotary Connection also have a version of the song, recorded in 1969 for Chess Records.

The song was covered by the Basque fusion-rock band Negu Gorriak, translated as "Errespetua" (respect in euskara) for their 1996 cover album Salam, agur. After the band's split, singer Fermin Muguruza continued to perform his version of the song in some of his solo projects' concerts, and it appeared as the final track on his live album Kontrabanda - Barcelona, Apolo 2004-I-21.

The phrase "what you want, baby I got it" is interpolated on Joss Stone's song "Headturner", from her 2007 album Introducing Joss Stone.

[edit] Chart performance

[edit] Otis Redding version

[edit] Aretha Franklin version

[edit] Credits

• Written by Otis Redding.

[edit] Otis Redding version

• Produced by Steve Cropper
• Instrumentation by Steve Cropper (guitar), Isaac Hayes (keyboards), Al Jackson, Jr. (drums), Andrew Love (sax), Gene Miller (trumpet), Floyd Newman (sax).
• Background vocals by William Bell and Earl Sims.

[edit] Aretha Franklin version

• Produced by Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin.
• Engineering by Tom Dowd.
• Instrumentation by Willie Bridges (sax), Charles Chalmers (sax), Gene Chrisman (drums), Tommy Cogbill (bass), Dewey Oldham (keyboards), and Curtis Ousley (sax).
• Background vocals by Carolyn Franklin and Erma Franklin.

[edit] Parodies

• In the show Bill Nye the Science Guy, the music video in the episode Garbage is called R-e-c-y-c-l-e, a parody of this song.

[edit] References

• The Very Best of Otis Redding. Rhino/Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1992. Los Angeles, CA.
• I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1967. New York, NY.

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Hot 100 No. 1 Hits of 1967 (USA)