TRIBUTE: Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?

Aretha Franklin turned Otis Redding’s plea into the most empowering popular recording ever made.

Officially, “Respect” is a relationship song. That’s how Otis Redding wrote it. But love wasn’t what Aretha Franklin was interested in. The opening line is “What you want, baby, I got it.” But her “what” is a punch in the face. So Ms. Franklin’s rearrangement was about power. She had the right to be respected — by some dude, perhaps by her country. Just a little bit. What did love have to do with that?

Depending on the house you grew up in and how old you are, “Respect” is probably a song you learned early. The spelling lesson toward the end helps. So do the turret blasts of “sock it to me” that show up here and there. But, really, the reason you learn “Respect” is the way “Respect” is sung. Redding made it a burning plea. Ms. Franklin turned the plea into the most empowering popular recording ever made.

Ms. Franklin died yesterday, at 76, which means “Respect” is going to be an even more prominent part of your life than usual. The next time you hear it, notice what you do with your hands. They’re going to point — at a person, a car or a carrot. They’ll rest on your hips. Your neck might roll. Your waist will do a thing. You’ll snarl. Odds are high that you’ll feel better than great. You’re guaranteed to feel indestructible.

Ms. Franklin’s respect lasts for two minutes and 28 seconds. That’s all — basically a round of boxing. Nothing that’s over so soon should give you that much strength. But that was Aretha Franklin: a quick trip to the emotional gym. Obviously, she was far more than that. We’re never going to have an artist with a career as long, absurdly bountiful, nourishing and constantly surprising as hers. We’re unlikely to see another superstar as abundantly steeped in real self-confidence — at so many different stages of life, in as many musical genres.

That self-confidence wasn’t evident only in the purses and perms and headdresses and floor-length furs; the buckets and buckets of great recordings; the famous demand that she always be paid before a show, in cash; or the Queen of Soul business — the stuff that keeps her monotonously synonymous with “diva.” It was there in whatever kept her from stopping and continuing to knock us dead. To paraphrase one of Ms. Franklin’s many (many) musical progeny: She slayed. “Respect” became an anthem for us, because it seemed like an anthem for her.

Most Americans had never heard anything quite as dependably great and shockingly big as Ms. Franklin’s voice.

The song owned the summer of 1967. It arrived amid what must have seemed like never-ending turmoil — race riots, political assassinations, the Vietnam draft. Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his championship title for refusing to serve in the war. So amid all this upheaval comes a singer from Detroit who’d been around most of the decade doing solid gospel R&B work. But there was something about this black woman’s asserting herself that seemed like a call to national arms. It wasn’t a polite song. It was hard. It was deliberate. It was sure. And that all came from Ms. Franklin — her rumbling, twanging, compartmentalized arrangement. It came, of course, from her singing.

Because lots of major pop stars now have great, big voices, maybe it’s easy to forget that most Americans had never heard anything quite as dependably great and shockingly big as Ms. Franklin’s. The reason we have watched “Showtime at the Apollo” or “American Idol” or “The Voice” is out of some desperate hope that somebody walks out there and sounds like Aretha. She established a standard for artistic vocal excellence, and it will outlast us all.

She, along with Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Tina Turner and Patti LaBelle, changed where the stress fell in popular singing. Now you could glean a story from lyrics but also hear it in the tone of the singer’s voice — agony, ecstasy and everything beyond and in between. Roots, soil, pavement on one hand, the stratosphere on the other.

I know. That does just sound like the art of singing. But when gospel left the church and entered the body — the black body — we called that soul. And a good soul artist could make singing for sex sound like she was singing for God. They call that secular music. But it just repositioned what else could be holy. Almost nobody — and even then, maybe just Ray Charles — did as much toggling between and conflating of the religious and the randy with as much sincere athletic imagination and humor and swagger as Ms. Franklin.

“Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business)”, the hit from 1967 that she co-wrote, never fails to chill, arouse and amuse. Ms. Franklin performs it with a mix of exasperation and smoldering anticipation. That song’s never sounded better or more theatrical than it does on “Aretha Live at Fillmore West,” from 1971. Its structural brilliance is that there’s no robust chorus or melody, just Ms. Franklin, her piano, a blues groove and her mood. She wants a friend to get going so she can have sex with her man. But who’s been shown the door with this much flair?

The song starts, “I don’t want nobody always sitting around me and my man.” You could bake a pie in the pause between “nobody” and “always.” And when she gets to “sitting,” she takes a deep, five-second drag on the “s” so that it sounds less like a consonant and more like a lit fuse. The remaining six and a half minutes put you in exhilarated suspense over when her top’s gonna blow.

Almost nobody was able to switch between the religious and the randy with as much sincere imagination and humor as Ms. Franklin.

There are so many things to love about this performance: its sexiness, its playfulness, its resolve, all the space in the arrangement for Ms. Franklin’s singing to stay low until it takes off high, the way that once she finally connects with Dr. Feelgood himself, the crowd audibly connects with the song or, really, just more deeply connects, since people had been shouting stuff like, “Sing it, Aretha!” between her pauses. You can feel in that moment the hold Ms. Franklin had over anybody who ever saw — or heard — her sing. She worked with bottomless reserves of swagger.

We tend not to think of Ms. Franklin that way — as an artist of bravado and nerve and daring, as a woman with swagger. We tend not to think of her this way even though nearly every song she sang brimmed over with it. (She sang about taking care of business — the old “tcb” — and, consequently, having her business taken care of, as much as she sang about respect.) Swagger we left to the Elvis Presleys and James Browns and Mick Jaggers. But “swagger” is the only word for, say, her approach to the music of other artists.

It didn’t matter whether it was a Negro spiritual or something by the Beatles. It was all wet clay to her. The Supremes, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Adele, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, ? and the Mysterians, C & C Music Factory: She oversaw more gut renovations than a general contractor. In 1979, she took the occasion of B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” to allow her backing singer to exclaim that she (and they) were “free at last.” Toward the end of her funked-up, very fun version of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” from the 1981 album “Love All the Hurt Away,” she tossed in some “beep-beeps” and a couple of lines from “Little Jack Horner” because she knew she could make it work.

If good soul music is like good barbecue — slow cooked, falls off the bone — by the 1980s, she’d become a pit master, yelping and barking and wailing, but also talking in songs, sermonizing. You know the char and gristle, the bits of sugar and salt and fat on, say, a perfectly done slab of ribs? Most of this woman’s songs were blackened that way. Yet if Ms. Franklin told you she was going to take a classic R&B song and throw in a little nursery rhyme, you’d be nervous. Did 1986 really need a cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash?” Probably not. But she did it anyway — and robustly — and threw in a “hallelujah” while she was at it.

But, by that point, Ms. Franklin seemed well on her way to becoming somebody who might have relished the culture’s doubt. She loved music too much to be vestigial or nostalgic or relegated. She wanted — you know, what she wanted. And eventually respect was tricky to come by. I, at least, remember sitting on my bed watching the 1998 Grammys and hearing that she’d be filling in for Luciano Pavarotti and rolling my eyes. Ms. Franklin knew. She went out there, sang some Puccini, and left the nation in shock. The Queen of Opera, too?

Is it possible that despite the milestones and piles of Grammys (the now-defunct female R&B vocal performance category seemed invented just for her; she won the first eight), despite famously having been crowned the greatest singer of all time in a vast Rolling Stone survey, despite being Aretha Franklin, the Greatest was also rather underrated — as a piano player, as an arranger (who had a greater imagination when it came to coloring a song with backing singers), as an album artist? Despite the world’s bereavement over her death, despite her having been less a household name and more a spiritual resident of our actual home, despite giving us soundtracks for loneliness, for lovemaking, for joy, for church, cookouts and bars, despite the induction ceremonies, medals and honorary degrees, despite her having been the only Aretha most of us have ever heard of, is it possible that we’ve taken her for granted, that in failing to make her president, a saint or her own country, we still might not have paid her enough respect? Just a little bit.

Culled from The New York Times