Respect

Aretha Franklin's 1967 recording that transformed Otis Redding's original 'Respect' — a man's demand for domestic deference — into an assertion of female and Black dignity that became one of the defining cultural statements of the civil rights era.

Demonstrates how performance can fundamentally alter a work's meaning; became a cultural artifact encoding the demands of the civil rights and women's movements; philosophically significant for debates about performer interpretation and the ontology of musical works.