How Aretha Franklin Created “Respect”

#TIA – A good part of the world stood still when Aretha Franklin bade goodbye 

““The call for respect went from a request to a demand,” Jerry Wexler has said. “[It] started off as a soul song and wound up as a kind of national anthem.” Wexler, who signed Aretha Franklin to Atlantic Records, was describing to her biographer David Ritz how Franklin transformed a minor 1965 hit by Otis Redding into a statement carved into the Mount Rushmore of American music. There, the letters R-E-S-P-E-C-T stand eternally in solid granite. While Wexler (whose own death came a decade ago this week) nominally produced that February 1967 session, there’s no question it was the as-yet-uncrowned Queen of Soul who was at the helm of perhaps the greatest cover song in history, both musically and conceptually.”

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