Respect Yourself

The Staple Singers signed with the Memphis Soul label Stax Records in 1968, where they found success after languishing at Epic. "Respect Yourself" was written by the Stax songwriter Mack Rice and one of their artists, Luther Ingram, who is best known for his song "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right." They wrote the song after a discussion where Ingram said to Rice, "Black folk need to respect themselves." Rice decided to turn the idea into a song, and quickly cut a demo. He didn't think it was right for The Staple Singers, but Stax vice-president Al Bell did, stating, "I heard that lyric and I heard that melody and I said, 'that's it. This is the song I've been waiting on.'"

The first two Stax albums The Staple Singers recorded were with Steve Cropper of the Stax house band, but by August 1971, when they recorded "Respect Yourself," they were working with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section at their studios in Alabama. They slowed down the tempo of Rice's demo and did a lot of experimenting in the studio. Terry Manning, who engineered the session, said: "It was kind of like all or nothing. We consciously put majors and minors together and rock and blues together. It was a lot of elements trying to fuse together, purposely putting little high tinklely sounds to catch kids' ears, and just seeing if it would work."

In the liner notes to the 2011 remaster of the Be Altitude: Respect Yourself album, Stax biographer Rob Bowman points out some of the things to listen for in this song: Roger Hawkins using the rim of his snare and a wet-to-dry sound on the hi-hat. A fuzzed electric guitar line that gets louder as the song fades out at the end. This was supposed to have a subliminal effect on the listener. Mavis Staples blasting into the words "big ole man" at the end of the second verse. The scat singing on two 4-bar sections, which was written as horn lines. On the demo, Mack Rice did the scatting to show where the horns would be, but The Staples sang it anyway, and the results were so good they decided to leave it in.