"No Respect" from Godfather?

[Wilson Gray]

On Oct 7, 2004, at 10:24 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "No Respect" from Godfather?
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> At 9:01 PM -0400 10/6/04, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>> ---------------------------------------------
>> NO RESPECT
>>
>> In the late 1960s, I saw my first live television show--the Ed
>> Sullivan show.
>> The guest was Rodney Dangerfield. My mother had told me about his "no
>> respect" theme. I'm sure Rodney used "no respect" on the Ed Sullivan
>> show that I saw,
>> and probably several times before Sullivan's show went off the air in
>> 1971.
>>
>>
> I was wondering if an alternate source of inspiration for Rodney
> Dangerfield's line, since The Godfather (at least the movie version)
> was clearly too late, was the popularity of the Aretha Franklin song
> R-E-S-P-E-C-T, very often heard in the late 1960s.  (Her own
> recording was, I believe, 1967, although Otis Redding had covered it
> earlier.)
>
> Larry
>

Larry, I think you mean that "Otis Redding had [written it and]
_recorded_ it earlier." In any case, I wouldn't bet my ass on it, but I
would bet (an extremely modest amount of) money on it that Rodney
predated not only Aretha, but also Otis, with respect to the "respect"
line. In fact, the first time that I heard the song, I thought that
Otis had been inspired by Rodney. After listening to the words of the
song, though, I decided that any resemblance was purely coincidental.
Like, you know, Rodney and Otis were looking at respect from two
entirely different perspectives, though they did overlap with respect
to the fact that neither of them was getting any.

-Wilson