Respect
Well, call me ignorant, but until the other day I hadn’t realized that Otis Redding wrote Aretha Franklin’s anthem “Respect.”
And he sang it, too.
Differently…
…than she did:
Aretha’s version was a sister act, although I don’t know whether those are her sisters on the video:
Re-arranged by Arif Mardin and Franklin, the song was delivered from a female’s point of view and produced a gospel-styled version with Franklin using her gospel vocals over the lyrics. The call and response vocals were arranged by Aretha and her little sister Carolyn, who sung in the background on the song alongside her older sister Erma. Franklin added in the ad-lib, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, take care, TCB”. In response her sisters shouted “sock it to me” repeatedly.
And when I read that I realized that I’ve written about Erma before, in another one of these “compare and contrast” posts of which I’m so very fond. “Piece of My Heart” was the topic. Here’s Erma, singing the original:
And then there’s Carolyn, my least favorite of the three Franklin sister singers. But she’s no slouch, either; the competition is rather steep:
But whoever the women are who sing backup in that Aretha “Respect” video, Franklin sisters or no, I have to say I very much admire their hip action. Fluid, understated by today’s standards, and all in all absolutely perfect (I call your attention most particularly to minute 1:10 and after).
Rolling Stone rates it #5 in its list of “500 greatest songs of all time” – –
Otis Redding wrote “Respect” and recorded it first, for the Volt label in 1965. But Aretha Franklin took possession of the song for all time with her definitive cover, made at Atlantic’s New York studio on Valentine’s Day 1967. “Respect” was her first Number One hit and the single that established her as the Queen of Soul. In Redding’s reading, a brawny march, he called for equal favor with volcanic force. Franklin wasn’t asking for anything. She sang from higher ground: a woman calling an end to the exhaustion and sacrifice of a raw deal with scorching sexual authority. In short, if you want some, you will earn it.
“For Otis, respect had the traditional connotation, the more abstract meaning of esteem,” Franklin’s producer, Jerry Wexler, said in his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music. “The fervor in Aretha’s voice demanded that respect; and more respect also involved sexual attention of the highest order. What else would ‘Sock it to me’ mean?”
He was referring to the knockout sound of Franklin’s backup singers – her sisters Carolyn and Erma – chanting “Sock it to me” at high speed, which Aretha and Carolyn cooked up for the session. The late Tom Dowd, who engineered the date, credited Carolyn with the saucy breakdown in which Aretha spelled out the title: “I fell off my chair when I heard that!” And since Redding’s version had no bridge, Wexler had the band – the legendary studio crew from Muscle Shoals, Alabama – play the chord changes from Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” under King Curtis’ tenor-sax solo.
There is no mistaking the passion inside the discipline of Franklin’s delivery; she was surely drawing on her own tumultuous marriage at the time for inspiration. “If she didn’t live it,” Wexler said, “she couldn’t give it.” But, he added, “Aretha would never play the part of the scorned woman….Her middle name was Respect.”
Is it my browser? No links or embedded videos displaying in the post.
Judith: it’s not your browser. Mine’s doing it, too. I’m going to check it right now and see why this is happening.
Judith: thanks, fixed!
I have no idea what had happened, though. All four videos had simply disappeared. I had to put them back in there.
Weird.
According to Wikipedia, “TCB” stands for “taking care of business,” which of course is a phrase many of us will remember having come into wide use around that time. I am really glad to have the mystery of that line cleared up. It’s puzzled me for about 45 years now. I remember discussing it with people at the time, and we thought she was saying
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Take out the TCP
I.e., remove the letters “t,” “c,”, and “p” from the word “respect,” and discover what the word means to her. And the answer was…”rese”…?? Or some anagrammatic rearrangement of those letters? It was a great puzzlement.
“Older”s citation is relevant.
RESPECT is to be earned, not granted on demand.
“Dissing” has come into wide, particularly black use, since the time of the song. It is a frequent proximate cause of black-on-black murder.
Dissing, to me, means that respect has not been granted on actual, or implied, demand of the self-perceived dissee.
It is a serious symptom of decline.
Really enjoyed that video. I had almost forgotten the incredible energy Aretha Franklin brought to her craft when she was younger. That “call and response” aspect of black Christian music takes a lot of energy and precise timing.
Thank you for posting this.
Nor was this the only time Aretha made someone else’s hit record her own: her version of “I Say a Little Prayer” has arguably outlasted Dionne Warwick’s, and Dionne had both Bacharach and David working with her.
I also enjoyed her sisters’ songs. In my opinion, piece of my heart was better than Janis Joplin’s version.
I’m not sure who is in the video, but Aretha’s backup singers at the time of the recording were the Sweet Inspirations, one of whom was Cissy Houston, mother of Whitney.