Episode 149: “Respect” by Aretha Franklin
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
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Aretha Franklin's Columbia Records
For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded but none of them had any success at all. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning Jerry Wexler was at Fame Studios and Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and told him he sounded just like James Brown. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic.
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