Most people think of respect as a song that was always meant to belong to Artha Franklin. But two years before she ever sang a note of it, the song belonged to someone else entirely, and it sounded almost nothing like the record the world would come to know. In 1965, Otis Reading walked into a Staxs recording studio in Memphis with a song he had written himself, a tight, urgent demand built on a simple horn riff and a voice that practically pleaded with the listener.

“Respect,” as Otis sang it, was the sound of a man asking, almost begging, for a small amount of consideration in his own home. It was a good record. It became a modest hit and for two years that was the only version anyone knew. Otis Reading was by then one of the most respected voices in soul music. A singer whose performances carried a rawness and warmth that audiences across the country had come to depend on.

He wrote songs the way he sang them directly without much ornamentation, trusting that the emotion underneath would carry the record. Respect was exactly that kind of song. Simple, direct, built around a feeling most people understood. What Otis could not have known in 1965 was that two years later in a small studio in Muscles Scholes, Alabama, a young singer named Artha Franklin would walk into a session with that same song and walk out having rebuilt it so completely that almost nothing of the original would remain except the title

and a handful of words. By early 1967, Artha Franklin had just begun recording for Atlantic Records after years at Colombia, where her sound had never quite found its footing. Her first session at Muscle Scholes recording I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, had already produced something extraordinary, a sound that finally matched the power of her voice.

The follow-up sessions back in New York with many of the same musicians were where respect entered the picture. Producer Jerry Wexler had heard Otis Reading’s version and thought it might suit Artha. It was a reasonable idea. The song had a strong hook, a recognizable title, and had already proven itself on the radio once. On paper, it looked like a simple cover, the kind of song an artist records to fill out an album.

give a nod to a fellow Atlantic artist and move on to the next track. But when Artha began working on the song, something happened that no one in the room had fully anticipated. She did not approach Respect as a song to be covered. She approached it as a song to be answered. In Otis Reading’s version, the singer was asking for respect from a position of need, almost vulnerability, a man trying to hold on to something that felt like it was slipping away.

Artha Franklin, sitting at the piano in that studio, understood the song from an entirely different angle. She had spent years watching the women around her, in her family, in her community, in her own life, ask for things they deserved and not receive them. She knew what it felt like to want respect not as a favor, but as something owed.

Working with her sisters Carolyn and Irma Franklin, who helped shape the now famous backing vocals, Artha began reworking the song from the inside out. The pleading tone of the original became something closer to a demand. The horn arrangement became sharper, more confident. And then came the additions that would change everything.

the spelled out chorus R E S P E C T and the call and response socket to me backing vocals that Carolyn Franklin helped create. None of that existed in Otis Reading’s version. None of it had been written down before that session. It emerged in the studio in real time, the product of musicians and singers who understood instinctively that the song needed to become something new in order to say what it was truly meant to say.

By the time the session ended, the musicians in that room knew they had recorded something special. What they could not have predicted was how completely the song would be transformed in the public imagination. How quickly respect would stop being thought of as an Otis Reading song that Artha Franklin had covered and start being thought of as an Artha Franklin song that had simply existed in an earlier form.

When Respect was released in the spring of 1967, it became an immediate sensation, reaching the top of the charts and quickly becoming an anthem far beyond music, embraced by the civil rights movement and the emerging women’s movement alike. For millions of listeners, the song was not a demand from a man trying to hold on to his marriage.

It was a declaration sung by a woman on behalf of anyone who had ever had to ask for something that should never have needed to be asked for. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Otis Reading heard the record for the first time. Those who knew him said his reaction was not resentment, and it was not surprise in the sense of feeling robbed.

It was something closer to recognition. The recognition of a fellow musician hearing a song he had written taken somewhere he never could have taken it himself and somewhere it clearly needed to go. Otis reportedly told friends with a kind of amused respect that the song did not belong to him anymore. That girl took my song, he is remembered as saying, not with bitterness, but with the kind of half-ling admiration one artist gives another when they have been thoroughly, completely outdone.

He understood, perhaps better than anyone, what it meant for a song to be transformed by the right voice. He had built his own career on doing exactly that to other people’s songs. In interviews afterward, when asked about respect, Otis would sometimes simply smile and say that Artha had done something with the song that he never could have done, and that he was glad she had.

He never asked for the song back, and by all accounts never wanted it back. What had started as his song had become something larger than either of them, a record that spoke for an entire moment in American history. Less than a year later, Otis Reading would be gone. His life ending in a plane crash before he could see how lasting his influence on American music would become, both through his own recordings and through the songs he had given, knowingly or not, to other artists.

Artha Franklin continued to perform respect for the rest of her career, and she rarely, if ever, performed it without acknowledging where it had come from. She spoke of Otis Reading with warmth, crediting him as the writer of the song, even as audiences thought of it as entirely hers. For Artha, there was no contradiction in this.

A song could belong to the person who wrote it and the person who finally allowed it to become what it was always capable of being. Most people think of respect as a song that was always meant to belong to Artha Franklin. In a way, they are right. But it took Otis Reading writing it first and Artha Franklin completely rebuilding it two years later for either of them to find out.

He wrote the question. She gave the answer. And neither version would exist in the way the world remembers it without the