Otis Redding
The singer who carried the pleading style he learned in church, rough voice and all, into secular song, and laid down the grammar of Southern soul.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- InfluenceLittle Richard
A fellow Macon native and idol; Redding learned the stage in his band, the Upsetters.
- InfluenceSam Cooke
His model for singing and songwriting; after Cooke's death, Redding put three of his songs on 「Otis Blue」.
- FamilyZelma Redding
His wife, married in 1961, who took on the work of guarding his legacy and his name after his death.
- ColleaguePhil Walden
His manager from college days and lifelong partner, with whom he founded the publishing company Redwal Music.
- ColleagueSteve Cropper
Guitarist of the MG's and his songwriting partner on “Mr. Pitiful” and “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay.”
- InfluenceAretha Franklin
She re-recorded his “Respect” and took it to the top of the Billboard chart, turning the song into an anthem of its era.
I. The boy from Dawson and Macon · 1941–1958
(Birth) He was born in September 1941 in Dawson, Georgia. His father, Otis Redding Sr., worked as a sharecropper and later at Robins Air Force Base, and in his spare time took the pulpit as a Baptist preacher. His mother was Fannie Roseman Redding. He was the fourth of six children and the first son, and he inherited his father's name outright. When he was about three, the family moved to Macon, a city in central Georgia, and settled in Tindall Heights, a public housing project for Black residents. (Choir) The singing began in church. He sang gospel in the choir of Vineville Baptist Church and taught himself, more or less on his own, guitar, piano and drums. His father, a preacher, is said to have frowned on secular music. Even so, the boy's ear turned to the rhythm and blues on the radio, above all to the sound of Little Richard, a fellow son of Macon. (Provider) In his mid-teens his father was struck down by tuberculosis, and the family's fortunes declined. At around fifteen he left Ballard-Hudson High School and helped pay the household's way by digging wells and working at a gas station. The boy did not leave singing as a mere dream; he took hold of it in earnest as a way to earn a living. This early lesson in the weight of money would later shape his habit of minding his own copyrights and business affairs. (Contest) His first breakthrough came at the teenage talent show at Macon's Douglass Theatre. On that stage, hosted by local DJ Hamp Swain, he sang songs such as Little Richard's “Heebie Jeebies” and took the $5 prize, and the story goes that he won fifteen weeks in a row. His way of carrying the pleading gospel style he had absorbed in church straight over into secular rhythm and blues was already his own by then.
II. In Little Richard's shadow · 1958–1962
(The Upsetters) In 1957, when Little Richard gave up rock and roll for the study of theology, his band, the Upsetters, kept touring the South without their leader. Redding joined the band as a singer for a while and went out on the road with them. While filling the empty place left by his idol, he learned in his body how to seize an audience and how to push on to the very end, drenched in sweat. (Zelma) Around 1959 he met Zelma Atwood. The two married in August 1961 and made a home in Macon, where they raised children. Zelma stood by him throughout his short life, and after his death she took on the work of managing his legacy and his name. (The Pinetoppers) To make a living, he worked as driver and singer for Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, a popular Macon band. Jenkins, a left-handed guitarist, was known for his flashy playing with the guitar held upside down. The one who booked the band's shows was Phil Walden, a white college student. Walden soon became Redding's manager, and this partnership between a Black singer and a white manager, forged in a South where segregation was firmly in place, lasted until Redding's death. (Apprenticeship) In 1960 he stayed briefly in Los Angeles and made his first recordings, then returned to Macon and put out “Shout Bamalama,” a dead ringer for Little Richard's shouting, on a local label. He was still at the stage of borrowing his idol's voice. Finding a voice of his own came, unexpectedly, at a Memphis studio where he had tagged along for someone else's session.
III. The 40 minutes left over · 1962–1964
(Memphis) In October 1962, Redding drove all the way to Stax Studios in Memphis for a Jenkins session. Converted from an old movie theater, the studio was run by Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, with distribution handled by Atlantic Records in New York. When the Jenkins session came to nothing much, Joe Galkin, Atlantic's contact man, and others asked that the remaining time be given to the young driver. The time allotted, it is said, was a little over 40 minutes. (Debut) The song he sang was a slow ballad of his own, “These Arms of Mine.” Steve Cropper played piano and Jenkins played guitar. Released on Volt, Stax's sister label, the song reached the top 20 of the rhythm and blues chart in 1963, and the young man who had come along as the driver became the label's rising hope overnight. (The MG's) Booker T. & the MG's, the Stax house band, mixed Black and white musicians, a rare combination in the South of that time. Booker T. Jones on organ, Cropper on guitar, Al Jackson Jr. on drums and, soon afterward, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass stood behind his sound. Unable to read music, Redding hummed the lines he wanted the horn section to play, and the musicians worked out the arrangements on the spot. This method of head arrangement became the foundation of the Stax sound. (The nickname) “Mr. Pitiful,” from 1964, took the nickname a radio DJ had pinned on him for his plaintive singing and, with Cropper, turned it into a song outright. Already the ease with which he could make a jab at himself into a weapon of song was on display. The same year his first album, “Pain in My Heart,” came out, and he became a regular headliner on the Southern Black club circuit.
A debut seized in the 40 minutes left over from someone else's session. It captures the very moment the voice of the young man who had come along as the driver was first set down on tape.
- Cropper's piano accompaniment, which splits each beat into three and marks them out one by one (triplets), carries the whole song, creating a rhythm that sways like a slow dance.
- In the first lines the voice is low and cautious, but as the same plea is repeated it gathers force, revealing a rough, cracking grain.
- Jenkins's guitar adds only brief ornaments, with no flashy solo, then steps back, leaving room for the voice to stand out front.
- Because the session was hastily arranged, an unpolished simplicity remains, and that is precisely what makes it sound like the sincerity of a debut.
IV. A dictionary of soul · 1965–1966
(Sam Cooke) In December 1964, Sam Cooke, the singer he admired above all others, was shot dead in Los Angeles. Redding had always taken Cooke's smooth delivery and gift for songwriting as his model. The following July, in little more than a day between tour dates, he recorded nearly an album's worth of material, and the resulting “Otis Blue” included no fewer than three of Cooke's songs. He expressed his grief not in a eulogy but in covers. (Covers) The album also included “My Girl,” which the Temptations had taken to number one that year, and the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction.” His knack for twisting other people's hits into his own style came into full bloom here. Yet the center of gravity lay in his own songs. “I've Been Loving You Too Long,” a ballad written with Jerry Butler, reached number 21 on the pop chart to become his first crossover hit, while “Respect,” which he wrote himself, voiced the weary demands of a man coming home after a day's work. (Business) When money came in, he knew how to put it to work. With Walden he founded the music publishing company Redwal Music to look after the copyrights to his songs himself, and he started his own label, Jotis, to record younger Macon artists. In the mid-1960s he bought a large ranch in Round Oak, north of Macon, and called it the Big O Ranch. The boy who had dug wells had become a man who owned land. (Expansion) His April 1966 shows at the Whisky a Go Go club in Los Angeles became the occasion for white rock audiences to discover him. That fall the album “Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul,” true to its title, gathered up the vocabulary of soul he had built, and it included “Try a Little Tenderness,” a 1930s standard turned fiercely inside out. In September he crossed to Britain to appear in a special of the TV show “Ready Steady Go!”
A ballad written with Jerry Butler, it carried him deep into the pop chart for the first time. He sang the weariness of a long love, and the inability to let it go, with hesitation rather than shouting.
- Over a slow meter that sways and flows in groups of three (6/8 time), the horn section swells long and subsides, accompanying as if it were breathing.
- Redding comes in just behind the beat and sings as if speaking, drawing the weary hesitation of someone who has loved for a long time.
- Toward the end the lyrics grow shorter and give way to improvisation (ad-lib), repeating the same words and single cries as the emotion bursts out.
- The 1967 Monterey performance is slower and more drawn out than the studio version, and is counted as the moment that day when the audience held its breath most.
A song of his own from “Otis Blue,” it carries the demands of a man home from work. Two years later, in Aretha Franklin's hands, it would be reborn as an entirely different song.
- Al Jackson's drums drive in from the first beat with a rhythm that strikes hard on the second and fourth beats (backbeat), pulling the song along like a quick march.
- Short, repeated phrases from the horn section (riffs) answer back between the vocal lines, so that voice and brass trade off as if in conversation.
- The speaker is a man home from a day's work, and though he shouts roughly, the feeling that runs through the song is that what he wants, in the end, is respect.
- The spelling-out passage and the chorus added in Aretha Franklin's version are not in the original. Listen to the two side by side and you can hear how much the same song changes with its speaker.
A cover that turns the Rolling Stones' hit inside out, Stax-style. His knack for making someone else's song his own shows here at its boldest.
- The famous repeated line that fuzz guitar (an electric guitar sound deliberately distorted) carried in the original is blown here by the horn section, giving it an entirely different texture.
- Over a tempo faster and bouncier than the original, Duck Dunn's bass runs ceaselessly, building the skeleton of a dance tune.
- Rather than following the original lyrics faithfully, Redding slurs them or makes up new ones, led by sound and rhythm, so that it becomes a song conveyed through the body more than through meaning.
V. The love crowd · 1967
(Europe) In the spring of 1967, Stax sent its roster on a European tour as the Stax/Volt Revue. Audiences in London and Paris responded even more passionately than those back in America, and that year, in a readers' poll by the British music paper Melody Maker, he was voted top male vocalist, ahead of Elvis Presley. The same year he released a duet album, “King & Queen,” with Stax singer Carla Thomas and scored a hit with “Tramp.” (Aretha) That spring Aretha Franklin re-recorded his “Respect” and took it to the top of the Billboard chart. A song that had been a man's demand became a woman's proud declaration, and the cover grew more famous than the original. Introducing the song on stage that summer, Redding said with a laugh that a girl friend of his had taken his song away from him. (Monterey) On the night of June 17, he took the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival in California with the MG's. Calling the audience, packed with the hippie generation, the love crowd, he opened with “Shake” and closed with “Try a Little Tenderness.” This performance, in which a Black soul singer from the South captivated a festival of the white rock generation, carried him beyond the boundaries of genre. Around this time Britain's Bee Gees are said to have played “To Love Somebody” for him, but the chance to record it never came. (Throat) He took Arthur Conley, a younger Macon singer, under his wing, co-writing and producing “Sweet Soul Music,” based on a Sam Cooke song, and turning it into a big hit. But nonstop touring had damaged his throat. That fall he underwent surgery to remove growths on his vocal cords (polyps), and for a while he had to refrain from singing and even from speaking. His fear that he might lose his voice is said to have been great.
A 1930s standard lifted from a slow ballad into explosive soul. It was also the song that closed his 1967 set at Monterey.
- The first minute or so is a low, softly whispered ballad, setting out in respect for the mood of the original by the old singers who sang gently into the microphone (crooners).
- Al Jackson's drums at first tap only lightly on the rim, then gradually add force, leading a design in which the song slowly speeds up and heats up.
- In the final stretch Redding chops short, meaningless syllables into fragments and repeats them, singing like a rhythm instrument, while the band follows with a beat that surges to double time.
- Isaac Hayes lent a hand with the arrangement, and Booker T. & the MG's provided the backing.
- At Monterey he closed his set with it, letting the song seem to end and then surging back to a climax again and again, and it became the most famous moment of the night.
VI. Sitting on the dock · 1967
(Sausalito) That August, while staying in San Francisco for a club engagement, he caught hold of the thread of a new song on a houseboat across the bay in Sausalito. It was unlike anything he had done before, a song carrying the loneliness of a man sitting on a dock, idly letting the hours slip away. He is said to have listened over and over to the Beatles' “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” wanting to broaden his own sound. (Return) Recovered from surgery, he settled into the Memphis studio from late November and recorded a great many songs. “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay,” polished with Cropper, was completed then too. Jim Stewart and a few others at Stax shook their heads at so unfamiliar a song, but Redding believed it was his next step. (Crash) On December 9 he appeared on a TV show in Cleveland, and the next day he boarded the twin-engine Beechcraft he had bought, bound for a concert in Madison, Wisconsin. On the afternoon of December 10 the plane went down in Lake Monona in Madison. Four members of his backing band, the young group the Bar-Kays, died along with his valet and the pilot; only trumpeter Ben Cauley survived. He was twenty-six. (Legacy) Thousands gathered for his funeral at the Macon City Auditorium, and he was buried at his Big O Ranch. Released in January 1968, “The Dock of the Bay” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the first single in America to top the chart posthumously, and the following year it won two Grammys. That same year Stax's distribution deal with Atlantic came to an end, and under a clause in the contract his master recordings passed into the ownership of Atlantic rather than Stax. In 1989 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A song begun on a houseboat in Sausalito and finished three days before his death. His first step in a new direction became, just as it was, his last.
- Cropper's clean guitar lays short melodic lines over it, creating a mood more understated and closer to folk than the fiery Stax soul that came before.
- After the surgery, his voice murmurs calmly in a low register rather than shouting, so that resignation and stillness are heard together.
- The cries of gulls and the sound of the waves are effects Cropper overdubbed after his death.
- The whistling at the end is said to have originally been a placeholder for an improvised lyric (ad-lib) to be added later; that chance never came, and it became the song's emblem.
Lesser-known stories
“Respect” is credited to Redding alone, but the story goes that its starting point lay with Speedo Sims, a Macon singer who was also Redding's road manager. Sims brought in a draft for his own group, Redding rewrote it heavily, and Sims, though he expected a songwriting credit, never saw his name on it. Because the song became so famous as Aretha Franklin's anthem, these goings-on in the Southern music scene survive only as a footnote in the biographies. The horn arrangement on “Satisfaction” has a curious backstory. Keith Richards said many times that he had originally meant the famous riff to be played by horns, and that the fuzz guitar was only a placeholder. Redding's version, then, unintentionally offered a sound closer to the songwriter's first conception. Redding himself admitted that he didn't know all the original lyrics and made up a good part of them as he sang. The April 1966 shows at the Whisky a Go Go were recorded but not released in his lifetime. Part of them appeared on an album only in 1968, after his death, and the full set of remaining tapes was not compiled and released until 2016. The pivotal stage on which he first met a white rock audience was, for nearly half a century, heard only in part.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Soul
(The word) The English word soul means spirit, or heart. The name carries a sense of singers pouring out their innermost feelings just as they are. (In pop) A branch of 1960s African American popular music that fused the vocal style of church gospel with the rhythms of rhythm and blues. It sings of love and the hardships of life in the fervent voice once raised to God. Think of it as singing love songs with the big voice and tremolo learned in a church choir, kept fully intact. (Elsewhere) Soul food means the cooking handed down in Black households of the American South, and more broadly any food that comforts the heart.
House band
(The word) House means a home; it is a band that always stays in that house. (In pop) The staff musicians attached to a label or studio who back many different singers on their recordings. As with Stax's Booker T. & the MG's, the singers change but the feel of the playing stays the same, giving the label its own signature sound. It's like the school broadcasting club helping a different student with each presentation, using the same equipment and the same skill every time.
Horn section
(The word) Horn originally meant an animal's horn. Because people once blew into horns to make sound, wind instruments played with the mouth came to be called by this name. (In pop) A group of several instruments blown by mouth, such as trumpet, saxophone and trombone. Playing together in short, clipped stabs or long sustained notes, they add power and color to a song. Just as a cheering squad at a field day shouts short chants in unison to lift the mood, a horn section answers back between the lines of the song and stirs up the excitement.
Head arrangement
(The word) Head means the head, and arrangement means the arranging of music. It is an arrangement worked out in the mind rather than on sheet music. (In pop) A way of arranging in which nothing is written out in advance; at the recording session the musicians play ideas for one another, try them together, and settle the arrangement on the spot. Redding, who couldn't read music, would hum the lines the horns were to play, and the players picked them up and played them straight away. It's like friends preparing a dance for a talent show without a choreography sheet, showing each other moves one at a time in front of a mirror until it all fits.
Ad-lib
(The word) Short for the Latin ad libitum, meaning as one pleases. (In pop) Improvised sounds, cries or words added on top of the set lyrics or melody. Soul singers build up emotion toward the end of a song by repeating the same phrase or letting out sudden shouts. It's like the moment during a class presentation when you toss in an unscripted joke and your classmates react even more strongly. (Elsewhere) In theater or broadcasting, it refers to lines an actor or host delivers on the spot, outside the script.
Master
(The word) Master means an owner, and also the original from which every copy is made. (In pop) The original recording first made in the studio, and the rights to that original. Whoever holds the master presses the records, licenses it for films and commercials, and takes the revenue. It's like asking who has the original file of the class group photo. Only the person with the original can make new prints or use it elsewhere. (Elsewhere) At a university it means a master's degree, and in everyday use, as with a master key that opens every door, it refers to a person or thing in complete command of something.
Cover
(In pop) To record a new version of a song first released by another artist. A good cover doesn't stop at imitating the original; it changes the tempo, arrangement and vocal style so that it sounds like a different song. It's like singing your favorite artist's song at a school talent show in your own voice and your own way. Sometimes, as with Aretha Franklin's “Respect,” the cover becomes more famous than the original. (Elsewhere) It means a book's cover or a lid, and to cover for someone means to shield them or take something on in their place.