Respect

Otis Redding wrote and recorded Respect in 1965 for Otis Blue. Franklin had been performing it in her live shows for several years when she cut it at Atlantic on 14 February 1967. She worked out the changes with her sisters Erma and Carolyn: the lyric was turned around, Carolyn came up with the spelling of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and the sisters sing the repeated sock it to me. Arif Mardin arranged it from her ideas, King Curtis played a tenor saxophone solo over the chords of Sam and Dave's When Something Is Wrong with My Baby, and Franklin played piano. Mardin said he had never known a day in a studio like it, and likened it to a festival.

Atlantic released it as a single on 10 April 1967. It spent two weeks at the top of the Billboard pop singles chart and eight weeks on the Black Singles chart, and reached number 10 in the UK. Franklin told the Detroit Free Press it was quite natural that we all want respect. Redding, at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer, said a girl had taken it away from him. The Guardian's obituary wrote that she made it a demand for equal rights on behalf of all women. It won two Grammys in 1968 and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2002. Rolling Stone ranked it fifth in its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs and first in 2021.