100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #35 Aretha Franklin – I Say a Little Prayer

Released: 1968

It’s an idea that takes some getting used to – and some writers it would appear never do – but once a song is out there, it’s no longer your own. Sure, if you’re lucky you can still get paid whenever somebody takes a shine and records it, but equally when some asshole politician uses it to misrepresent the meaning, the power is generally a lawyer’s.

To non-students of music history it feels like Aretha Franklin must’ve been one of the mainstays of soul’s early years, but her success took far longer into the decade to be realised than memory serves. When the singer’s break did come, it was with someone else’s song, her flipping of Otis Redding’s hit Respect and it’s dynamic new mid-section turbocharging it for an era in which women were seeking to redefine their place in society.

From the pens of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, I Say a Little Prayer For had already been a million selling hit for Dionne Warwick, But Franklin changed it’s structure and tone to suit her more emotive voice, giving a song which was about the young lives being destroyed by the Vietnam War a less passive sentiment. Like Respect she’d made someone else’s tune a classic thing of her own, the sort of joyous invention only made possible by people capable of hearing things differently in their mind.