Photograph by Hank Parker (1965), Columbia Records via YouTube

In January 1967, Aretha Franklin chose not to renew her contract with Columbia after six years with the company, and she moved over to Atlantic Records. She went next to NYC to try to jump-start her career. No one could have known at the time, but the first song that Franklin recorded on her new label would go on to become one of the greatest recordings of all time.

It was produced by Jerry Wexler, the visionary record executive behind the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and Dusty Springfield. He chose to open the album I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You), with Respect. If Franklin’s force-of-nature vocals on Respect aren’t impressive enough, she also simultaneously accompanies herself on piano.

Respect hit the top of the charts in Summer 1967 and turned Franklin into a Soul Queen, a Civil Rights Icon and a Feminist Icon. The track was a clever gender-bending version of a 1965 song by Otis Redding, whose original had reinforced the traditional family structure of the era: The man works all day, brings money home to wife and demands her respect in return.

Franklin’s version tore that structure apart. An enormous difference was that in Redding’s version, he doesn’t spell out R-E-S-P-E-C-T like Franklin does. He also doesn’t have the backup singers and their cool “sock-it-to-me” response to Franklin’s lead. So much of what made Respect a giant hit and an empowerment anthem, came from Franklin’s own arrangement of the tune.

Despite all those royalties, Redding wasn’t happy about Franklin’s take on his song. Yet, he came to accept that Respect no longer belonged to him, and he changed the way he performed it when he did it at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. He went onstage and announced:

“This next song is a song that a girl took away from me…”

He used her arrangement.

Just two days before Franklin recorded the song, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Abraham Lincoln’s 158th birthday. He called for an end to racism, which he condemned as:

“Man’s ancient curse and man’s present shame.”

Right after the release of Respect, LBJ signed an executive order that expanded affirmative-action legislation to cover sexual discrimination.

In the book Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs, they name Respect one of the Top Five Greatest Songs Of All Time, saying:

“Franklin wasn’t asking for anything. She sang from higher ground: a woman calling an end to the exhaustion and sacrifice of a raw deal with scorching sexual authority. In short, if you want some, you will earn it.”