The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

8 RESPECT, Aretha Franklin Produced by Jerry Wexler; written by Otis Redding Atlantic 2403 1967 Billboard: #1 (2 weeks)

Aretha's "Respect" is the Motown style in reverse. It sounds worked out down to the finest detail but in fact the arrangement fell together spontaneously at a late 1966 session. Producer Wexler brought together Franklin, her sister Carolyn, and a white band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, that made some of the best hard soul hits of the day. Aretha was merely fiddling with Otis Redding's song - already an R&B hit - when she and Carolyn began pulling threads of tempo and phrasing together in a way that suggested putting them on tape. But even though that's how it happened, don't discount the arduous excavation of vision it took to create this Everest of southern soul. The most obvious example of the work involved is the bridge. Redding's original lacked one, so Franklin and Wexler lifted the part whole from Sam and Dave's "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby." Redding's version of "Respect" is extraordinary because it seizes a key idea of the civil rights movement and applies it to everyman's sex life. But the song meant much more as a woman's vehicle - particularly since the woman was Aretha Franklin, a legend since she was a fourteen-year-old singing in her father's Detroit Baptist church and just then declaring her artistic freedom as the finest, deepest individual musical performer of the late sixties and early seventies. She may have set out to sing "Respect" on a lark, but by the time the tape was rolling, she was all business, and Aretha when she's concentrating is as good as it gets. As she did on all her early Atlantic hits, Aretha brought to "Respect" everything she'd learned in church and from family friends like Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, and the Ward Singers. But if Franklin were only another gospel singer turning to secular themes, "Respect" wouldn't be a masterpiece and she wouldn't have more entries in this book than any other artist. Partly because she'd just recorded for six years at Columbia Records, partly because she was the product not only of the church but of big city life up north, with its panoply of pop and ethnic cultures, Aretha approached "Respect" as a pop singer, and particularly, as a modern pop singer who's most at home in the recording studio. For all her vocal ability, Aretha has never been better than a journeyman gospel singer because she's never been that comfortable with pure improvisation. Though she knew personally the greatest of all recorded gospel vocalists -- Jackson and the Wards' Marion Williams, the Soul Stirrers' R. H. Harris and Cooke -- her principal stylistic mentor was clearly Clara Ward, a ragged voice upstaged in her own live performances by Williams and Frances Steadman but unsurpassed with the tape rolling in the studio, where calculation paid off better than freewheeling. Franklin's inspiration on "Respect" is to use gospel chords from her own piano as a base for both the band's arrangement and for her own feints toward improvisation. She knows exactly where the song is headed and propels it there with single-minded intensity. There's not a "Hey baby" or a "Mis-tuh!" that's accidental. Had Aretha not been trained in church, she'd never have known what to do here; had this really been her first pop session, she'd never have known how.

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