In April 1967, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” hit the charts in one of those rare gestalts that perfectly melded music and vocalist. Franklin flawlessly embodied the song, making it both her first No. 1 hit and the single that crowned her the Queen of Soul. The song spent 12 weeks at the top of the charts.

This is probably why so few people remember that the song was originally written and sung by Otis Redding two years earlier, in 1965. Redding sang the mournful ballad of a hard-working man begging his woman for a little respect, but Franklin didn’t ask for anything — hers was a high-decibel roar demanding equality. “Respect” soon became a ferocious anthem for the burgeoning feminist movement, and Franklin’s version so eclipsed Redding’s that it’s hard to imagine anyone but Franklin singing it.

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Here are some other hit songs that were so thoroughly possessed by the stars who rode them to the top of the charts that the original artists were pretty well forgotten.

Jimi Hendrix: “All Along the Watchtower,” 1968
Originally performed by Bob Dylan, 1967
Hendrix was a wildly innovative musician in his own right, but he had a peculiar genius for finding more in his interpretations of others’ songs than the original writers ever imagined were there. His rambling four-part guitar solo in the middle of Dylan’s original dark ballad sounds like a stitched-together Frankenstein of four different songs; yet it somehow holds together so well that Dylan himself changed the way he performed his song and never looked back.

Another Hendrix hit, “Hey Joe,” was also a cover. “Hey Joe” was first copyrighted by songwriter Billy Roberts in 1962, although the real author is still disputed. By the time Hendrix released “Hey Joe” in 1966, the song had been recorded by The Leaves, The Surfaris, The Byrds, Love, and Tim Rose, in addition to numerous other bands. But the only one still in real rotation today is the Hendrix version.

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Whitney Houston: “I Will Always Love You,” 1992
Originally performed by Dolly Parton, 1974
Parton’s wistful, melancholic look back at lovers grown apart was written for Porter Wagoner, her former partner and mentor. Parton and Houston may both have been spinto sopranos, but Houston replaced Parton’s sweet summer breeze with her hurricane-force vocals in the soundtrack for her film, “The Bodyguard.” Unlike the other songs on this list, “I Will Always Love You” was hardly obscure before its rebirth: It hit No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in 1974 and 1982, both times performed by Parton — before hitting No. 1 again, for an unprecedented third time, with Houston’s version.

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Soft Cell: “Tainted Love,” 1981
Originally performed by Gloria Jones, 1965
British synthpop duo Soft Cell scored fifth in a “Rolling Stone” readers’ poll of the top one-hit wonders of all time with their take on this Motown-flavored pop ballad. Jones’ version didn’t chart in the U.S. or U.K. at all; but when Soft Cell got hold of it, the group’s radically changed version — with a slower tempo, lower key and all-electronic instrumentation — zoomed up the charts and is still a dance favorite. Soft Cell’s Motown influences can also be heard in the song’s extended version, which fades out with a couple of lines from The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”

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Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Blinded by the Light,” 1976
Originally performed by Bruce Springsteen, 1973
Named after the group’s South African founder, Manfred Mann has the unique distinction of charting with three Springsteen songs that were flops when Springsteen himself recorded them: “For You,” “Spirit in the Night,” and “Blinded by the Light” — all from Springsteen’s debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”

Springsteen cobbled together the song by searching a rhyming dictionary, and the lyrics reflect it. “Madman drummers bummers Indians in the summer” and the like made for an incoherent word salad in “Asbury Park,” but Manfred Mann’s soaring wah-wah pedal solo and “Chopsticks” samples somehow pulled off a No. 1 psychedelic prog-rock smash that would have made Pink Floyd proud.

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Led Zeppelin: “Dazed and Confused,” 1969
Originally performed by Jake Holmes, 1967
Commercial jingle writer Jake Holmes penned and performed “Dazed and Confused” on the New York college coffeehouse and folk music circuit in the late ’60s. British blues-rock band The Yardbirds caught one of Holmes’ shows in 1967 and adapted — some would say stole — the song into a staple of their final tours. That was before they reformed themselves under guitarist Jimmy Page’s leadership as The New Yardbirds, soon to be rebranded as Led Zeppelin.

Led Zeppelin turned Holmes’ minor-key folk blues dirge into the quintessential self-indulgent improvisational juggernaut parodied in the film “Spinal Tap” — they often stretched the song, which clocked in at seven minutes on their debut album, into 45-minute marathons of meandering call-and-response noodling between Page and vocalist Robert Plant, interspersed with blistering guitar solos. Jimmy Page’s inimitable “Dazed and Confused” trademark was sawing at his Les Paul with a cello bow until it shredded all over the stage.

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