Success of ‘woebegone yarn’ The Dock Of The Bay came too late for soul king Otis Redding

HE “had the audience spinning like a chicken on a spit”, enthused one oberservor after Otis Redding closed the Monterey Pop Festival in California in June 1967.

Otis Redding

HE “had the audience spinning like a chicken on a spit”, enthused one oberservor after Otis Redding closed the Monterey Pop Festival in California in June 1967.

Authorities had demanded an immediate end to the two-day concert as Redding sent the crowd wild in his two-song finale of Rolling Stones’ hit (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, before slowing into Try a Little Tenderness.

Referenced as his breakthrough with the predominantly white, middle-class “love crowd”, Redding did not survive long enough to enjoy his success. A few days after recording what would become his greatest hit, Redding and four members of his Bar-Kays band perished on December 10, 1967, in the freezing waters of Lake Monoa in Madison, Wisconsin, when their Beechcraft H18 plane went down in heavy fog.

Otis Redding in concert in an undated picture.

Their deaths added to the growing list of American musicians lost to plane crashes since big-band leader Glenn Miller’s disappearance on a flight between England and Paris on December 15, 1944. Gospel singers Bill Lyles and R. Winston Blackwood perished when their plane crashed on landing at Clanton, Alabama, on June 30, 1954. Redding’s death was also reminiscent of that other plane crash in bad weather that killed rock ‘n’ roll greats Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Jiles “The Big Bopper” Richardson, when their chartered Beechcraft Bonanza came down near Mason City, Iowa, on the snowy winter night of February 3, 1959. Patsy Cline had helped pave the way for women in country music when she died at 30 on March 5, 1963, along with Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins and her pilot/manager Randy Hughes, when their Piper PA-24 Comanche crashed near Camden, Tennessee. On July 31, 1964 country balladeer Jim Reeves died at the controls of a single-engine Beechcraft Debonair aircraft when caught in a violent thunderstorm over Brentwood, Tennessee. Redding’s death also coincidently fell on the third anniversary of the death of his musical inspiration Sam Cooke, shot dead in a mysterious encounter at a seedy Los Angeles hotel.

Otis Redding (1941-1967) in undated pictures.

Otis Redding once said he “entered the music business because of Richard — he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his rock ‘n’ roll stuff ... My present music has a lot of him in it.”

The fourth child and first son of sharecropper Otis Redding and his wife Fannie Mae, Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, on September 9, 1941. Redding Sr, an occasional preacher, moved to Macon to work at Robins Air Force Base, where his son grew up on Belleview housing estate, called Hellview by residents.

Redding sang in the Vineville Baptist Church choir as a child and learned guitar and piano, then at 10 took drumming and singing lessons. He sang with the Ballard-Hudson High School band and on Sundays earned $6 performing gospel songs for Macon radio station WIBB.

Forced to leave school at 15 to help financially support his family when his father contracted tuberculosis, he worked as a well digger, service station attendant and occasional musician. In 1958 he won the $5 prize at Macon’s Teenage Party talent show for 15 consecutive weeks, and played with pianist Gladys Williams’ orchestra, which had helped launch “Little” Richard Penniman and James Brown.

Otis Redding in undated pictures.

He cited Cooke as an early vocal influence, but Redding later said he “entered the music business because of Richard — he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his rock ‘n’ roll stuff ... My present music has a lot of him in it.”

Little Richard’s band The Upsetters hired Redding on about $25 per show when Richard abandoned rock ‘n’ roll for gospel music, but Redding did not stay long. He met Zelma Atwood, then 16 in 1959 at The Teenage Party and in 1960 she was pregnant with their son Dexter when Redding moved to Los Angeles with his sister. In LA he released She’s Alright and wrote his first songs. He returned to marry Zelma in August 1961, and the couple had two more children. Performing as “Rockhouse Redding” with Johnny Jenkins and The Pinetoppers, who were invited to record at Memphis’ Stax Studio in October 1962, he cut These Arms Of Mine, which made no. 20 on R & B charts in 1963.

The cover of Otis Redding's 1968 album The Dock of the Bay released after his death in 1967.

His debut album in 1964 was a hit with African-Americans. He found a wider audience with I’ve Been Loving Your Too Long (To Stop Now) and Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song). Another hit came with a ballad he wrote for Speedo Sims, but released himself in 1965, although it was Aretha Franklin who made Respect a chart-topper in 1967.

Late on December 7, 1967, he met guitarist Steve Cropper and session musician at the Stax recording studio, promising to cut another song he was sure was “a hit”.

“Otis played and sang a verse he had written,” Cropper later recalled of the “woebegone yarn” about lounging in the morning sun, watching ships in the bay come and go. Cropper, who co-composed other Redding hits, helped complete the lyrics that afforded Redding a posthumous no. 1 hit.

Days later he was headed from Cleveland, Ohio, to a Sunday evening concert in Madison, Wisconsin, on the private plane he had just purchased. At 3.30pm on a wet, foggy afternoon, the plane crashed as it came into land, killing seven of the eight men on board.