The King of Soul Otis Redding would have celebrated his 79th birthday today.
A plane crash on December 10, 1967, ended Redding’s life. Otis, and all but one of the band members, died. He was just 26 years old.
As I was growing up, I did a lot of talent shows.
I won fifteen Sunday nights straight in a series of talent shows in Macon. I showed up the sixteenth night, and they wouldn’t let me go on anymore. Whatever success I had was through the help of the good Lord.
Otis Redding
Three days prior to his death he recorded ‘Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay’, which became the first posthumous No.1 single in US chart history and sold over four million copies worldwide.
The record company rushed the last production on ‘The Dock of the Bay,’ and released it in early 1968, it shot to the top of the charts.
Ottis and co-writer Steve Cropper never intended the whistling at the end of the song left in. At the end of the song’s recording session, they were still trying to figure out a lyric with which to end the song. Otis did the whistling as a temporary measure until he could return and sing the final fadeout. Unfortunately, he never made it.
The plane crash killed Redding along with members from The Bar-Kays, Jimmy King, Ron Caldwell, Phalin Jones, and Carl Cunningham. Trumpet player Ben Cauley was the only person to survive the crash.
Ottis was a driver of the band Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, although some reports say he was a member of the band.
In 1962, Stax Records invited Johnny Jenkins to make a demo in Memphis, Tennessee, and Otis drove him there. They cut the session short and Otis asked if he could sing during the remaining time.
When he drove Jenkins back home, it was Otis who had a new recording contract in his pocket. Stax released his debut album, Pain in My Heart, in 1964. This album produced his first single on Stax, ‘These Arms of Mine’.
Like the song, Ottis did once live on the dock of the bay. In 1967, he lived in a boathouse across the bay from San Francisco and he would literally sit and watch the ships on the bay coming and going.
Redding won many awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His legacy remains solid; he received the honorific, “King of Soul”.
