A spelling lesson with a horn section
The band hits, and she is already ahead of them, piano in the left hand of the arrangement, voice in no doubt at all. Respect does not ask. It inventories what she has, what he needs, and the small remainder she is willing to negotiate, which is none. Then her sisters, Carolyn and Erma, start the sock-it-to-me, and the word itself gets spelled, letter by letter, as if the studio had become a school where the lesson is dignity and the homework is immediate. Otis Redding wrote a man’s complaint. Aretha Franklin walked in with the complaint reversed and the groove tightened until the original could not get its song back.
She recorded it on 14 February 1967 at Atlantic Studios in New York, produced by Jerry Wexler, engineered by Tom Dowd, for I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. The Muscle Shoals players who had come north are in the room, King Curtis on saxophone, Franklin on piano, the arrangement already finished in her head before the red light. Wexler has said there was nothing he could tell her about phrasing. Redding came to the office before the single, out in April, and heard the tape. He said she had taken his song. He said it, Wexler wrote, benignly and ruefully. He knew the identity was slipping from him to her. By summer it was a number one, and at Monterey he introduced it as the one a girl took away.
Live, the spelling is a communion. Rooms wait for the letters. Franklin could smile through it or burn through it. The demand did not soften when the hit arrived. It widened: a domestic lyric, a sexual lyric, and, without a speech attached, a public one. People who had never been in her marriage heard their own name in the chorus. That is not an accident of reception. It is what a great singer does to a pronoun.
She done took my song.
(Otis Redding to Jerry Wexler, 1967, recalled in Rolling Stone, 2004)
Wexler later called the record an appeal for dignity combined with a blatant lubricity, which is a producer’s way of admitting the song will not sit in one drawer. The ‘sock it to me’ was Franklin’s insertion, not Redding’s, and it changed the temperature from plea to command. The horns do not decorate the command. They march it. Two minutes and a half, and a decade’s argument about who owes what to whom has a hook. Covers since have mostly bowed. The bow is correct. You can sing the notes. You cannot sing the possession.
What remains is the spelling, childish and absolute. R-E-S-P-E-C-T is a mnemonic and a line in the sand. Respect still starts dances and arguments, often in the same bar. The man who wrote it recognised the theft and, by Wexler’s account, did not pretend it was still his. That grace is part of the record’s story. The voice is the rest. It does not share.
