A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Otis Redding (1941-1967): Legendary, iconic, and innovative singer, songwriter, composer, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Otis Redding
was one of the most powerful and influential artists to emerge from the
Southern Soul music community in the '60s. A bold, physically imposing
performer whose rough but expressive voice was equally capable of
communicating joy, confidence, or heartache, Redding
brought a passion and gravity to his vocals that was matched by few of
his peers. He was also a gifted songwriter with a keen understanding of
the creative possibilities of the recording process. Redding was born in 1941, and he hit the road in 1958 to sing with an R&B combo, Johnny Jenkins & the Pinetoppers. In 1962, Redding traveled to Memphis, Tennessee with Jenkins when the latter scheduled a recording session for Stax Records. When Jenkins wrapped up early, Redding
cut a song of his own, "These Arms of Mine," in 40 minutes; Stax
released it as a single in May 1963, and the song became a major R&B
hit and a modest success on the Pop charts. Over the next four years, Redding
would cut a handful of soul classics: "Mr. Pitiful," "That's How Strong
My Love Is," "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," "Respect,"
"Tramp" (a duet with Carla Thomas), and "Shake." In 1967, Redding
seemed poised for a major breakthrough with a legendary set at the 1967
Monterey Pop Festival that solidified his status with hip rock &
roll fans. Sadly, Redding
would not live to see his greatest triumph: his most ambitious single,
"(Sittin' on The) Dock of the Bay," was released little over a month
after his death in a place crash, becoming his first number one Pop hit
and his signature tune. Redding
would become a bigger star in death than in life, and his recordings
would be regularly re-released and repackaged in the years to come, as
his legend and his influence lived on into the 21st century.
Otis Ray Redding, Jr.
was born on September 9, 1941 in Dawson, Georgia. His father was a
sharecropper and part-time preacher who also worked at Robins Air Force
Base near Macon. When Otis
was three, his family moved to Macon, settling into the Tindall Heights
housing project. He got his first experience as a musician singing in
the choir at Macon's Vineville Baptist Church, and as a pre-teen, he
learned to play guitar, piano, and drums. By the time Redding
was in high school, he was a member of the school band, and was
regularly performing as part of a Sunday Morning gospel broadcast on
Macon's WIBB-AM. When he was 17, Redding
signed up to compete in a weekly teen talent show at Macon's Douglass
Theater; he ended up winning the $5.00 grand prize 15 times in a row
before he was barred from competition. Around the same time, Redding dropped out of school and joined the Upsetters, the band that had backed up Little Richard before the flamboyant piano man quit rock & roll to sing the gospel. Hoping to advance his career, Redding
moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where he honed his songwriting chops and
hooked up with a band called the Shooters. "She's Alright," credited to
the Shooters featuring Otis, was Redding's first single release, but he soon returned to Macon, where he teamed up with guitarist Johnny Jenkins and his group the Pinetoppers; Redding sang lead with the group and also served as Jenkins' chauffeur, since the guitarist lacked a license to drive.
In early 1962, Otis Redding & the Pinetoppers issued a small label single, "Fat Gal" b/w "Shout Bamalama," and a few months later, Jenkins was invited to record some material for Stax Records, the up-and-coming R&B label based in Memphis, Tennessee. Redding drove Jenkins to the studio and tagged along for the session; Jenkins wasn't having a good day and ended up calling it quits early. With 40 minutes left on the session clock, Redding suggested they give one of his songs a try, and with Jenkins on guitar, Otis and the studio band quickly completed a take of "These Arms of Mine." Stax wasted no time signing Redding
to their Volt Records subsidiary, and "These Arms of Mine" was released
in November 1962; the single rose to number 20 on the R&B charts,
and crossed over to the pop charts, peaking at number 85. Redding's
follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs," arrived the following October,
and peaked at 27 on the R&B charts, but a stretch of singles
released in 1964 failed to make much of impression.
Redding's
luck changed in 1965. In January of that year, he released "That's How
Strong My Love Is," which hit number 2 R&B and 71 Pop, while the
B-side, "Mr. Pitiful," also earned airplay, with the song going to 10
R&B and just missed hitting the Pop Top 40, stalling at 41. Redding's
masterful "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," issued in May
1965, shot to number 2 R&B, and became his first single to make the
Pop Top 40, peaking at 21. Redding landed another crossover hit in September 1965, as his song "Respect" hit number four R&B and 35 Pop. By this time, Redding
was becoming more ambitious as an artist, focusing on his songwriting
skills, learning to play guitar, and becoming more involved with the
arrangements and production on his sessions, helping to craft horn
arrangements even though he couldn't write sheet music. He was also a
tireless live performer, touring frequently and making sure he upstaged
the other artists on the bill, as well as a savvy businessman, operating
a successful music publishing concern and successfully investing in
real estate and the stock market. In 1966, Redding also released two albums, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads and Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul; he miraculously wrote and recorded most of the latter in a single day.
In 1966, Redding released a bold, impassioned cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" that was yet another R&B and Pop hit and led some to speculate that perhaps Redding
was the true author of the song. That same year, he was honored by the
NAACP, and played an extended engagement at the Whisky A Go Go on
Hollywood's Sunset Strip; he was the first major soul artist to play the
historic venue, and the buzz over his appearances helped boost his
reputation with white rock & roll fans. Later that year, Redding
and several other Stax and Volt Records artists were booked for a
package tour of Europe and the United Kingdom, where they were greeted
as conquering heroes; the Beatles famously sent a limousine to pick Redding up when he arrived at the airport for his London gig. The British music magazine Melody Maker named Redding the Best Vocalist of 1966, an honor that had previously gone to Elvis Presley for ten consecutive years. Redding released two strong and eclectic albums in 1966, The Soul Album and Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, which found him exploring contemporary pop tunes and old standards in his trademark soulful style, and a cut from Dictionary of Soul,
an impassioned interpretation of "Try a Little Tenderness," became one
of his biggest hits to date and a highlight of his live shows.
In early 1967, Redding headed into the studio with fellow soul star Carla Thomas to record a duet album, King & Queen, which spawned a pair of hits, "Tramp" and "Knock on Wood." Redding also introduced a protege, vocalist Arthur Conley, and a tune Redding produced for Conley, "Sweet Soul Music," became a million-selling hit. After the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took psychedelia to the top of the charts and became a clarion call for the burgeoning hippie movement, Redding
was inspired to write more thematically and musically ambitious
material, and he solidified his reputation with what he called "the love
crowd" with an electrifying performance at the Monterey Pop Festival,
where he handily won over the crowd despite being the only deep soul
artist on the bill. He next returned to Europe for more touring, and
upon returning began work on new material, including a song he regarded
as a creative breakthrough, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay." Redding
recorded the song at the Stax Studio in December 1967, and a few days
later he and his band set out to play a string of dates in the Midwest.
On December 10, 1967, Redding
and his band boarded his Beechcraft H18 airplane en route to Madison,
Wisconsin for another club date; the plane struggled in bad weather and
crashed into Lake Monona in Wisconsin's Dane County. The crash claimed
the lives of Redding and everyone else on board, except for Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays. Redding was only 26 when he died.
"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released in January 1968 and quickly became Redding's
biggest hit, topping both the Pop and R&B charts, earning two
Grammy awards, and maturing into a much-covered standard. An LP
collection of single sides and unreleased cuts, titled The Dock of the Bay, followed in February 1968, and it was the first of a long string of albums compiled from the material Redding cut in his seven-year recording career. In 1989, Redding
was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he was granted
membership into the BMI Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and he
received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999
Born in Dawson, Ga., Otis Redding, Jr. and his family moved to Macon
when he was two years old. At an early age, he began his career as a
singer and musician in the choir of the Vineville Baptist Church. He
attended Ballard Hudson High School and participated in the school band.
As a teenager, he began to compete in the Douglass Theatre talent shows for the five-dollar prize. After winning 15 times straight, Otis was no longer allowed to compete.
Otis joined Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers in 1958, and would
also sing at the “Teenage Party” talent shows sponsored by local
celebrity disc jockey King Bee, Hamp Swain, on Saturday mornings
initially at the Roxy Theater and later at the Douglass Theatre in
Macon.
Otis drove Johnny Jenkins to Memphis, Tenn., for a recording session
in August 1962 at Stax Records. At the end of the session, Stax co-owner
Jim Stewart allowed Otis to cut a couple of songs with the remaining
studio time. The result was “These Arms Of Mine”, released in 1962. This
was the first of many hit singles (including classics “I’ve Been Loving
You Too Long”, “respect” and “Try A Little Tenderness”) that Redding
enjoyed during his tragically short career. After nine months, he was
invited to perform at the Apollo Theatre for a live recording and would
go on to showcase his dance movements with “Shake” and “Satisfaction.”
After years of ambition and drive, Otis Redding’s sacrifices paid
off. He appeared throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the
Caribbean. His concert tours were among the biggest box office smashes
of any touring performer during his time. He was nominated in three
categories by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences
(NARAS) for recordings he made during 1967. 1968 was destined to be the
greatest year of his career with appearances slated at such locations at
New York’s Philharmonic Hall and Washington’s Constitution Hall.
Redding was booked for several major television network appearances
including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Show. He was
posthumously inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1981 and
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. In 1999, he was recognized
with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.
In 1970, Warner Brothers released an album of live recordings from the June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival,
featuring Otis Redding on one side, and Jimi Hendrix on the other. This
record is evidence that the hip white audiences, better known as the
“love crowd”, were digging Otis Redding just as much as the black
audiences for whom he had always played. His energy and excitement, his
showmanship, and his relationship with the crowd made Redding a master
as a performer who had the rare gift of being able to reach audiences
the world over.
The song
It was unlike anything Redding had ever written, influenced by his
admiration for the Beatles’ classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band” album. Otis played The Beatles’ album constantly during a week he
had spent on a houseboat in Sausalito when performing at San Francisco’s
Basin Street West in August 1967. Just sitting’ on the dock, looking
out at the bay, it’s easy to see where Otis got the inspiration for the
song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”.
It had a lilt, memorable hook, and a great story. While it was
typical of Redding’s previous recordings, it signaled his creative
expansion as a writer and artist. That song became Otis Redding’s
biggest worldwide hit and signature. This was Otis’ final recording
before the plane crash that took his life in December 1967. In September
1987, Atlantic Records released “The Otis Redding Story”, a two volume
record set featuring Otis’ most unique and rare hits, such as “I’ve Been
Loving You Too Long.” “Respect,” “Pain In My Heart,” “Satisfaction” and
of course “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.”
Above all, Otis was a family man. He met his wife, Zelma Atwood, in
1959 and they married in August 1961. Together they have three children:
Dexter, Karla, Otis III, and Demetria, who was adopted after Otis’
death. His family was close to his heart and soul. In 1965, he moved
them into a spacious 300-acre property, “The Big O Ranch” in Round Oak,
Ga., affectionately named after “The Big O” himself.
Zelma has carried on as the family matriarch and continued to rear
their children to successful adulthood in honor of her late husband.
Sons, Dexter and Otis, III. are active music producers and songwriters,
both traveling internationally. Dexter, who resides in Jacksonville, FL
also is co-manager in two food franchise operations. Karla is a
successful and influential entrepreneur having founded and formerly
managed Karla’s Shoe Boutique with her mother and partner, in downtown
Macon for almost 20 years. Today, she is the executive director of the Otis Redding Foundation,
established in memory of her father. Zelma is the executrix over the
Redding Estate where she, along with Karla, manages daily requests for
songs in commercials, music sampling, the use of Otis’ name and image,
the Otis Redding Memorial Fund and the Scholarship Foundation. Demetria
is in public health administration.
As president of Redwal Music Co., Inc., Otis was very active in the
company’s operation and was directly responsible for the company’s
leadership in the music publishing field. To date, the company has
copyrighted over 200 commercially successful songs and published many
songs that have sold in excess of one million copies each.
The idea that music could be a universal force, bringing together
different races and cultures, was central to Otis’ personal philosophy
and reflected in his everyday life. At a time when it may not have been
considered politically correct, Redding had a white manager, Phil
Walden, and a racially mixed band. He took care of business, setting up
his own publishing and record label, Jotis Records, making unprecedented
moves for a black music artist in the ’60s. While it was not Otis’
prime motivation, he was seen as a role model by blacks. He was someone
who got paid and paid well without the usual horror stories of being
ripped off by promoters, agents, managers, or record company executives.
Otis Redding’s prowess as a businessman led him to form his own
label, Jotis records, in 1965. In addition to his many business
interests in fields related to music, he was engaged in other business
interests in his native state such as real estate, investments, stocks,
and bonds. His business acumen meant that Otis knew how to earn and
invest his money, unlike some of the other soul artists of the ’60s. In
addition to the 300-acre Big-O Ranch, complete with a three-story home,
livestock and a three and a half acre lake with fish, Redding acquired
two private planes. It was his twin-engine Beechcraft that he was riding
on that tragic day, December 10, 1967 when it crashed into Lake Monona
in Madison Wis. The world lost a great musician and a great man on that
day.
His music and his legacy, however, lives on.
HONORS
1966 – NAACP Lifetime Membership Award
1966 – Voted favorite for Home Of The Blues Award, London
1966 – Melody Maker Magazine, London, England. Awarded International
Male Vocalist of the Year (note: this honor had gone to Elvis Presley
for 10 years prior to Redding’s selection)
1967 – “Sweet Soul Music” reaches 1 million singles, Gold Award
1968 – Georgia House of Representatives expressed deep regrets for loss
1968 – Billboard Charts “History Of Otis Redding” #1
1968 – Annual R&B Award, Record World Magazine
1969 – Grammy Best R&B Vocal Performance for “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”
1969 – Grammy Best Rhythm & Blues Song for “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”
1969 – Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, Induction, Britain
1981 – The Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Induction
1986 – Black Gold Legend Award
1988 – Received Gold Album for “History of Otis Redding”
1989 – Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Induction
1993 – Governor’s Award, Memphis, Tennessee, Charter
1993 – United States Postal Service, Stamp Issued
1994 – National Academy of Popular Music presents Otis Redding with Songwriter’s Hall of Fame Induction.
1994 – BMI Songwriters Hall Of Fame
1998 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “Respect”
1999 – Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
2002 – Honored with a memorial statue in Macon, GA (Gateway Park)
2006 – Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Award
2006 – Billboard Excellence Award
2007 – Hollywood Rockwalk
2011 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”
2013 – Rhythm and Blues Hall Of Fame Induction
2014 – The Very Best Of Otis Redding Certified Double Platinum
2014 – Honored with Gibson Art Guitar on the Sunset Strip
2015 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “Try A Little Tenderness”
Otis
Redding is pictured performing at the Monterey Pop Festival in June,
1967. Later that year, the multitalented singer, songwriter, and
producer died at the age of twenty-six. Photograph by Bruce Fleming / AP
Fifty years ago, on December 10, 1967, a private plane
carrying Otis Redding and the members of his touring band stalled on its
final approach to the municipal airport in Madison, Wisconsin, and
crashed into the waters of Lake Monona, killing all but one of the eight
people onboard. Though Redding was only twenty-six years old at the time
of his death, he was regarded by growing numbers of black and white
listeners in the United States and Europe as the most charismatic and
beloved soul singer of his generation, the male counterpart to Aretha
Franklin, whom he had recently endowed with the hit song “Respect.” In
the preceding year, on the strength of his triumphant tours of Britain,
France, and Scandinavia, his appearances at the Fillmore Auditorium in
San Francisco, and his domineering performance at the Monterey Pop
Festival, Redding had pushed beyond the commercial constraints of the
so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit” of ghetto theatres and Southern night
clubs. He was determined to become the first African-American artist to
connect with the burgeoning audience for album rock that had transformed
the world of popular music since the arrival of the Beatles in America,
in 1964. Redding’s success with this new, ostensibly hip, predominantly white
audience had brought him to a turning point in his career. Thrilled with
the results of a throat surgery that left his voice stronger and suppler
than ever before, he resolved to scale back his relentless schedule of
live performances in order to place a greater emphasis on recording,
songwriting, and production. In the weeks before his death, he had
written and recorded a spate of ambitious new songs. One of these, the
contemplative ballad “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” became his
self-written epitaph when it was released as a single, in January of
1968. A sombre overture to the year of the Tet Offensive, the
assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert
Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, the song went
on to become the first posthumous No. 1 record in the history of the
Billboard charts, selling more than two million copies and earning
Redding the unequivocal “crossover” hit he had sought since his début on
the Memphis-based label Stax, in 1962. To this day, according to the
performance-rights organization BMI, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”
remains one of the most frequently played (and streamed) recordings in
the annals of American music. In an age of pop culture replete with African-American superstars like
Michael Jackson, Prince, Usher, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, it is
hard for modern audiences to appreciate how revolutionary the
self-presentations of soul singers like Otis Redding were when they
first came on the scene. Prior to the mid-fifties, it had simply been
taboo for a black man to perform in an overtly sexualized manner in
front of a white audience in America. (Female black entertainers, by
contrast, had been all but required to do so.) In the South, especially,
the social psychology of the Jim Crow regime was founded on a paranoid
fantasy of interracial rape that was institutionalized by the press and
popular culture in the malignant stereotype of the “black brute,” which
explicitly sexualized the threat posed by black men to white women and
white supremacy. Born in Georgia in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till,
Otis Redding grew up in a world where any “suggestive” behavior by a
black male in the presence of whites was potentially suicidal. This dire imperative began to change with the proliferation of
black-oriented radio stations, in the nineteen-fifties, which enabled
rhythm-and-blues singers like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ray
Charles to sell large numbers of their records, sight unseen, to white
teen-agers. Yet it was significant that these early black crossover
stars were piano players, who performed behind keyboards, and whose
sexuality was further qualified, in Domino’s case, by his corpulence; in
Charles’s case, by his blindness; and, in Richard’s case, by the
effeminacy that he deliberately played up as a way of neutering the
threat of his outlandish stage presence. It was no accident that the one
black crossover star of the nineteen-fifties who made no effort to
qualify his sexuality, the guitarist Chuck Berry, was also the one black
star to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, in 1960, on a trumped-up
morals charge. By that time, a new contingent of black singers led by
Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson was making its mark on white listeners with
a more polished style of self-presentation that became the model for
Berry Gordy’s carefully choreographed Motown groups. Otis Redding was something else again. When he came up, in 1962, he was
a completely unschooled performer who stood stock still onstage as he
sang the pining, courtly ballads that brought him his first success.
Over time, however, as his repertoire broadened to include driving,
up-tempo songs, Redding found a way to use his imposing size and
presence as a foil for his heartfelt emotionality, eschewing the
conventions of graceful stagecraft in favor of a raw physicality that
earned him comparisons to athletes like the football star Jim Brown.
Marching in place to keep pace with the beat, pumping his fists in the
air, striding across stages with a long-legged gait that parodied his
“down home” origins, Redding’s confident yet unaffected eroticism
epitomized the African-American ideal of a “natural man.” White audiences of the time had never seen anything like it. The effect was so
powerful that Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, said, of Redding’s
performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, “I was pretty sure I’d seen
God onstage.” And then he was no more. Redding’s sudden death
thrust him into the
ranks of a mythic group of musical performers that included Bix
Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Buddy Holly,
Patsy Cline, and Redding’s own favorite, Sam Cooke––artists whose
careers ended not only before their time but in their absolute prime,
when there was every reason to expect that their finest work was yet to
come. (Eerily, within a few years, he would be joined in this company by
two of his co-stars at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.)
Redding’s record labels, Stax and Atlantic, culled enough material from
the unmixed and unfinished tracks he recorded in the fall of 1967 to
release a series of singles and albums in the years ahead. Some of these
records, such as the singles “Hard to Handle,” “I’ve Got Dreams to
Remember” (co-written with his wife, Zelma), and “Love Man,” stood with
his very best work. But, inevitably, they still only hinted at what
might have been. The informality of the Stax studio had afforded Redding
the freedom to function, uncredited, as the producer and arranger on the
records he made there. There is no question that he would have continued
in this vein, blazing a path that musical auteurs like Sly Stone, Marvin
Gaye, and Stevie Wonder would follow with the self-produced albums that
established them as mainstream pop stars, in the late nineteen-sixties
and early seventies. In 2007, forty years on, a panel of artists, critics, and music-business
professionals assembled by Rolling Stone ranked Otis
Redding eighth on
a list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” This placed him in a
constellation of talent that included his contemporaries Aretha
Franklin, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James
Brown, who together represented the greatest generation of church-bred
African-American singers in the history of popular music. What
distinguished Redding in this august company was the heartbreaking
brevity of his career. In his five short years as a professional
entertainer, his incomparable voice and vocal persona established him as
soul music’s foremost apostle of devotion, a singer who implored his
listeners to “try a little tenderness” with a ferocity that defied the
meaning of the word. His singular combination of strength and
sensitivity, dignity and self-discipline, made him the musical
embodiment of the “soul force” that Martin Luther King, Jr., extolled in
his epic “I Have a Dream” speech as the African-American counterweight
to generations of racist oppression. In the way he looked and the way he
sang and the way he led his tragically unfinished life, this princely
son of Georgia sharecroppers was a one-man repudiation of the depraved
doctrine of “white supremacy,” whose dark vestiges still contaminate our
world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jonathan Gould is the author of “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain & America,” and “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.”
Although his career was relatively brief, cut
short by a tragic plane crash, Otis Redding was a singer of such
commanding stature that to this day he embodies the essence of soul
music in its purest form. His name is synonymous with the term soul, music that arose out of
the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and
rhythm & blues into a form of funky, secular testifying. Redding
left behind a legacy of recordings made during the four-year period from
his first sessions for Stax/Volt Records in 1963 until his death in
1967. Although he consistently impacted the R&B charts beginning
with "Pain In My Heart" in 1964, none of his singles fared better than
Number Twenty-One on the pop Top Forty until the posthumous release of
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” That landmark song, recorded just four days before Redding’s death,
went to Number One and stayed there for four weeks in early 1968. It
marked a new direction for the singer toward a soul-folk-pop synthesis
that drew from such influences as Bob Dylan and the new breed of
performers at the Monterey International Pop Festival, at which Redding
performed. Redding’s relatively unspectacular showing on the pop charts at a
time when he was laying down some of the most titanic soul ever
recorded—classics like “Respect” (a song he wrote, later covered
by Aretha Franklin), “Try a Little Tenderness” and his terse, funky
deconstruction of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—may mean that he
was too intensely soulful for the mainstream market at that time. He
was, in many ways, larger than life. Redding, a proudly self-professed
country boy from Macon, Georgia, had it all: a big, gravelly voice, an
enormous natural talent for songwriting and arranging, a hard-working
nature and a generous disposition. As a singer, he styled himself
after Little Richard (a fellow Macon native) and Sam Cooke in the early
days, but he gradually acquired his own voice, imparting gruff,
syncopated inflections to ballad and uptempo material. Redding was discovered while singing with Macon guitarist Johnny
Jenkins’ band, the Pinetoppers, and first recorded as a member of that
group for the tiny Confederate label in 1960. When Jenkins was booked to
cut some sides at Stax Records in Memphis in October 1962, Redding was
given an opportunity at the end of a session, and he recorded “These
Arms of Mine,” a stately, self-penned ballad. Redding thereupon embarked
upon a fruitful recording career as a staple of the Stax roster,
collaborating with Booker T. and the M.G.s (house band at the Stax
studio), especially guitarist Steve Cropper. Redding himself was a
guitarist, and he integrally involved himself with the arrangements of
his songs, whistling parts he envisaged to the horn section. His
recording sessions were galvanic, impassioned and intense—the very
apotheosis of soul. Donald “Duck” Dunn, bassist with the M.G.s, recalls:
“Otis would come in, and he’d just bring everybody up. You wanted to
play with Otis. He brought out the best in you.” There was earthiness and candor in his every performance, be it slow,
soulful ballads like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” or fast-paced
numbers such as “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Such albums as Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul—which
was recorded in a single 24-hour period in 1965—are a virtual
soul-music primer. In concert, Redding routinely incited pandemonium
through the thunderous intensity of his performances, which included
vocal ad-libs and false endings—devices that were evident in his
memorable rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness” at the Monterey
International Pop Festival on June 17, 1967. Redding stole the show at
Monterey, as a wide-eyed new audience—the youthful
counterculture—enthusiastically opened up to him. Given that launching
pad and his songwriting breakthrough with “Sittin’ On (The Dock of the
Bay),” Redding was poised for superstardom at the time his twin-engine
Beechcraft crashed into Wisconsin’s Lake Monona on December 10, 1967,
killing him and four members of his touring band, the Bar-Kays.
Inductee: Otis Redding (born September 9, 1941, died December 10, 1967)
Otis Redding performs on the TV show Ready Steady Go in 1966. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
This year marks 50 years since Otis Redding died. He'd ignited the crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival
in the summer of 1967; later that year, he and his band were en route
to a show in Madison, Wisc., when their plane hit rough weather and
crashed in an icy lake. Redding was 26 years old. Half a
century later, Redding's influence as a singer and spirit of soul music
remains. Author Jonathan Gould, who's written a new biography called Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,
joined NPR's Scott Simon to discuss the singer's relatively short, yet
profoundly impactful career. Hear their conversation at the audio link,
and read on for an edited transcript.
Scott Simon: You open your book with the most stunning quote from Bob Weir, who had seen Otis Redding at Monterey.
Jonathan Gould: Bob Weir, of course, was the rhythm guitarist in the Grateful Dead,
and his comment about Otis was that he was pretty sure that he had seen
God onstage. I think that that sort of summed up the response of the
whole crowd there, which had never really seen anything onstage quite
like this. How did Redding walk into the door of Stax Records in Memphis? This
is the Hollywood aspect of Otis' story. He was a singer in a band that
was led by a very flamboyant guitarist named Johnny Jenkins. They were
managed by the young white college boy in Macon [Ga.] who eventually
went on to manage Otis as well — but at that time, the whole focus of
Phil Walden, his future manager, was on Johnny Jenkins. And Phil and a
colorful character named Joe Galkin engineered an opportunity for Johnny
Jenkins and Otis Redding to record at Stax Records in Memphis. The plan
called for Otis to drive Johnny to Memphis from Macon, and then
hopefully to find a chance to sing after Johnny had finished his work
there. And the way the session played out was that Johnny
impressed no one at Stax. After a few hours Jim Stewart, who was the
owner and engineer at Stax, announced to Joe Galkin that he really
didn't think that he was going to be able to make any kind of a record
with this fellow. And Galkin pointed out that Atlantic Records had
fronted a certain amount of money for this session and there was still
time on the clock, and [he] said, "Well, Otis had a ballad that he
wanted to sing." And the ballad turned out to be "These Arms Of Mine."
YouTube
It's just a little slip of a song; it's all Otis. But because
there's so little there, my sense is it gave him nothing but a feeling
to work with, and he was able to just fill all the available space on
that record with his voice.
Let me ask you about another song – it's
identified more with Aretha Franklin, but "Respect" is an Otis Redding
song, and he certainly made a hit out of it, too.
Well,
"Respect" was an important record for Otis — his first really
successful "groove song," as they called them at Stax. And, it's a
remarkable record, in part because of the power of the band. But at the
same time, Otis had developed an extraordinary ability as a horn
arranger, and it was all the more impressive because Otis was a "head
arranger." He would simply sing these horn lines to the horn players —
make them up in his head and put them together in the studio.
This is what I'll refer to as a complex love song. He was on the road.
Yes
indeed, Otis spent most of his life on the road. He was also enormously
devoted to his wife, Zelma, and their children, who lived back in
Macon. That said, he had innumerable liaisons with women on the road,
and this made for a complicated situation in his life. And "Respect" is a
little odd, because in some ways, he's sort of putting himself in the
position of his wife rather than himself. But it's a song about the idea
that when he comes home, he needs to be treated with respect, and what
happens elsewhere — that's another matter.
I didn't know until your book came along that Bing Crosby had recorded a version
of "Try A Little Tenderness" — written by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly
and Harry Woods — back in 1933. What did Otis Redding bring to this?
Because I think of it as an Otis Redding song.
YouTube
Well, I think everybody does. His cover of it was so revolutionary
that I think from that point on it became his song. But it had been a
Tin Pan Alley standard — everybody had recorded it. And it's a
sentimental song, and what Otis did with it was he transformed it
musically.
He begins by singing the song the way everybody
sings it, as a slow ballad. And slowly, over the course of the opening
verses, the instruments come in and the rhythmic intensity of the song
starts to increase. Then, at a certain point, it moves from his original
métier, which was the 12/8 ballad, into a ferocious, 4/4,
stomping groove. And at that point, of course, the whole tenor of the
lyrics change. It's a song about tenderness, but there's nothing tender
about the way Otis sings the last few verses of the song.
Finally,
as we're looking at Otis Redding's development as a singer, there's
"(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay." Did he really write it on the dock
of a bay?
I think he might have begun it there. He spent some time in
California toward the end of the summer of 1967. But Otis found himself
at the end of that summer — his voice was troubling him, he would have
to have a voice operation in a couple of weeks — looking back on what he
had achieved and what he hadn't achieved. What he hadn't achieved was
that — while he had big hits, including crossover hits that were top 40
hits — he hadn't achieved a No. 1 record. He hadn't achieved a
million-selling record. But in California, he had time to reflect on
where he had been and a little bit on where he was going.
There's
great melancholy in this song, in lines like "Cause I've had nothing to
live for / Looks like nothing's gonna come my way." But there's also a
sense of peace and acceptance.
It's a very complicated
song. It's about many things. The odd thing about the song is that at
the time he wrote [it], Otis had everything to live for. He had not
reached some kind of a dead end in his life. On the contrary, he was on
the cusp of a new kind of musical success – and, I truly believe, a new
kind of commercial success, also. It's a strange reflection on a moment
in his life, in that way. And then,
because it came out after his death and was so wildly successful after
his death, it has become regarded as kind of his epitaph. Yeah,
and it is that. It only adds to the question that hangs over his whole
career and his whole life, which is what might have been, where he might
have gone. And, of course, that's the premonition that lies in
"(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."
Fifty years ago, Otis Redding met his end in a tragic plane crash. He was 26. The sad irony was, his life was snuffed just as his creativity and career were ascending toward new heights. He
worked his way up from the bottom, a teenaged singer-chauffeur on the
chitlin' circuit who landed a deal with the then-struggling,
now-legendary Stax-Volt label.
There, starting with These Arms of Mine
in 1962, he rode a string of hit ballads, driven by his
smooth-but-scruffy timbre, sure-footed phrasing, seductive inflections,
and dynamic presence.
But he soon enough showed his more raucous side, on hits like Try A Little Tenderness and Respect;
his "got-ta-got-ta-got-ta" became his tagline. By the mid-1960s, he
toured far and wide and his records sold big. He proudly collected
status trophies, like a 300-acre ranch and private plane.
That
small craft, overloaded and needing maintenance, crashed into a
Wisconsin lake and killed him, mere months after his wildly acclaimed
appearance at Monterey Pop. After Redding's death, (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay
streaked to number one and copped two Grammy awards; his music
proliferated across movie and TV soundtracks; and he became immortal.
Here's how it happened.
Early Days
Born
in Georgia in 1941, Redding, like so many African-American musicians,
sang in the local Baptist church. The gospel melismas and dramatic
phrasing that marked his unique vocals were rooted in those ecstatic
Macon experiences.
He also learned guitar, piano, and drums; sang
and played with the high school band; and won the top five-dollar prize
at a Macon theater's talent show—fifteen times in a row.
At 15, he quit school to take Little Richard's
place fronting the Upsetters; the flamboyant rocker had quit "the
devil's music" and gone gospel. So the shy teenager filled in for his
outrageous idol and toured the chitlin' circuit, home to black acts in
the segregated South. A year later, he began singing with what became
Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers.
Jenkins, another Maconite, was a fiery left-handed
blues guitar slinger whose flashy onstage showmanship, common around the
chitlin' circuit, made him a local legend—and possibly one of Hendrix's influences. He'd later have a minor hit for Stax, called Spunky. On
the road with Jenkins in 1961, Redding inked a deal with a tiny label
with an ironic name: Confederate Records. His second single, "Shout
Bamalama," is a Little Richard knockoff. Predictably, it didn't go far. Because
Jenkins didn't have a driver's license, Redding doubled as his
chauffeur and roadie. And so it happened in August 1962 that he drove
Jenkins to Memphis for a recording session at a converted movie
theater—the studio for a regional label named Stax-Volt. The tall, handsome, athletic singer pestered Stax guitarist Steve Cropper
for an audition. Finally Cropper agreed to play piano while Redding
crooned. He recalls, "Hairs and goose bumps stood up on my arms."
Cropper suggested to label head Jim Stewart and
Jenkins' manager, Phil Walden, that they use the time left over from
Jenkins' session to roll the tape on Redding. With Jenkins on guitar and
Cropper on piano, 21-year-old Redding cut the ballad that riveted
Cropper, "These Arms of Mine." It was the beginning of everything.
The single went to number 9 on the Billboard Hot Charts, eventually
sold 800,000 copies, and would go on to grace a boxful of movie and TV
soundtracks.
If you took a little of Sam Cooke and a little of Little Richard and poured it in a jar and shook it up and poured it out, you'd get Otis Redding.
Mr. Pitiful
Phil Walden, yet another Maconite, was one shrewd, big-eared guy; he'd later start the Capricorn label and launch the Allman Brothers. What he saw and heard that day in Memphis got him to switch his focus from Jenkins to Redding.
Otis was soon back in the Stax studio, cutting tunes over the next year that became his debut album, Pain In My Heart. He was still feeling his way, as you can hear with Mary's Little Lamb, his worst-selling single. The aching title track sparked lawsuits because of its resemblance to Irma Thomas's Ruler of My Heart. The
road wasn't always smooth. But he had Walden's support, and was forging
a close creative relationship with Cropper, who'd co-write and arrange
most of his hits. And he kept honing his craft, slotting into the top
100 charts time after time with the slow, yearning ballads that became
his trademark: Chained and Bound, That's How Strong My Love Is, and Come To Me.
Now
married and constantly working, Redding was about to ratchet the pace
up—and redefine his musical persona in ways that made his rising star
shine brighter. In summer 1965, he and the Stax studio crew put together his next album,
after 10 of its 11 tunes were written in 24 frenetic July hours. The
sound was more expansive, more muscular, with varied tempos.
I've Been Loving You Too Long, which became one of his signature pleading smashes, was co-penned with Impressions' lead singer Jerry Butler. Ole Man Trouble,
with its powerful defining guitar lick, grittily synthesizes the
fundamental Stax-Volt sensibility: a combo of blues, soul, and country.
"Respect" unveils another facet of this rapidly polishing gem: a
hard-driving, uptempo plea that showcases Redding's gruff vocals with
their surgical timing surfing between the beats, tugging at heartstrings
while propelling dancing feet.
His lyrics and voice don't convey despair as much as recognition and resignation.
The
Stax house band, aka the MGs, usually concocted head
charts—arrangements worked out from Redding's ideas and their
improvisations. As Cropper explains, "With Otis, it was all about
feeling and expression. Most of his songs had just two or three chord
changes, so there wasn't a lotta music there. The dynamics, the energy,
the way we attacked it—that's hard to teach, and that's what made it."
Nothing if not driven, Redding plotted his next
moves with Walden and Stax carefully. In 1965, he released a heartfelt
homage to his idol Sam Cooke, A Change Is Gonna Come. Cooke's brooding but stirring civil-rights anthem had a seemingly unlikely pair of inspirations: Bob Dylan's Blowin' In The Wind and Paul Robeson's Ol' Man River. It became a massive posthumous hit for Cooke, eerily foreshadowing Redding's fate with "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."
But their situations otherwise were quite different.
Cooke was killed in murky circumstances by a female motel manager.
After the boy star of the gospel circuit had bolted from the church to
become a secular star, believers never forgave him; many saw his death
as divine retribution. But for everyone else, Cooke and Ray Charles
had laid the musical foundations for the soul music that mingled
gospel, blues, jazz, country, and rock and dominated much of the 1960s. Cropper
likes to say, "If you took a little of Sam Cooke and a little of Little
Richard and poured it in a jar and shook it up and poured it out, you'd
get Otis Redding." Like his heroes, Redding would mix up potent musical
blends that drew legions of fans across America's color lines.
Live at the Whisky A Go Go
Redding
and Stax were growing in tandem. His production companies, formed with
Walden, signed new artists, his tours were very hot tickets, and he
bought his 300-acre Georgia ranch, the Big O. Stax was claiming soul
preeminence on the charts with stars like him, Percy Sledge, Clarence Carter, and Eddie Floyd. All the vectors pointed up.
That's when he decided to cut a live album at L.A.'s famed Whisky A Go Go. It wouldn't be released until after his death. But those jaw-dropping shows at the venue that launched the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, the Mothers of Invention and the Doors, shook up the West Coast music scene—and helped reroute what was becoming classic rock. Taj Mahal, whose vocals owe Redding many debts, and Bob Dylan were among the many musicians who were blown away. Dylan offered Just Like A Woman
to Otis, who declined. And the glowing reviews in mainstream media like
the L.A. Times helped make white America more aware of him.
It's probably not surprising, then, that the song's publishers were
terrified that Redding's "negro perspective" would ruin their cash cow,
and tried to stop him from cutting it.
They were right about one thing: with charts by Stax producer Isaac Hayes and the MGs
behind him, Redding transfigures the old song into a timeless blend of
urgency and emotion, using dynamics and shifting instruments to propel
the long rideout with an uplifting power rarely equaled.
It hit
number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, number four on Billboard's
R&B charts; its popularity helped ease segregation on radio in many
markets and thrilled white kids, though his audience was still mainly
black.
Redding was now on the cusp of becoming a crossover star. For musicians, he already was. The Beatles
sent a limo to pick him up when he hit London on the 1966 Stax package
tour that crisscrossed Europe. Then he played the Fillmore to
transported white crowds.
In early 1967, though, he took Jim Stewart's advice and pivoted briefly in a different direction. King & Queen mated "country boy" Otis with Carla Thomas's spitfire urbanity—the daughter of soul-music patriarch Rufus Thomas (Walking the Dog) was earning her MA in English at Howard University. Stewart explained, "I knew his rawness and her sophistication would work." He was dead right. Tramp
plays their personas off against each other perfectly, creating
playful, crackling musical tension and release. The follow-up hit, Knock On Wood, finesses it.
A few months later, Redding was back touring Europe
on his own—taking it by storm, recording his concerts, and releasing
selections as Live In Europe. The only live album issued in his lifetime, it featured, along with some of his hits, his sly, romping version of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, and a wild revision of the Beatles' Day Tripper. Inside
Stax, some were nonplussed by this, worrying that he was losing
focus—and would lose his black listeners. As Donald "Duck" Dunn recalls,
"We weren't even aware of that rock stuff; it's not what we listened
to. But Otis did."
By this point, there were no limits to what
this sharecropper's son could pull into his expansive musical vision.
His ambition to break down racial lines with his music would not be
stopped.
For months, the word kept building about
the eclectic, star-studded rock festival proposed for the site of the
perennially popular Monterey Jazz Festival. The key San Francisco bands
birthing American psychedelia—the Dead, the Airplane, Country Joe, Big Brother—would share the bill with established acts like the Mamas and Papas, Eric Burdon, and the Who. It
would also showcase Hendrix and Redding, two black headliners, for the
fast-growing counterculture at its first mega-event. Redding got invited
thanks to Jerry Wexler, the owlish, sharp-eared genius behind
Atlantic's (and much of Stax's) soul-music catalog; he saw the chance to
break through to mass white audiences.
Closing the Saturday night
lineup, Redding rose to the occasion, delivering a performance that,
even by his high-energy standards, was over the top.
He wooed the
awestruck crowd like the women in his songs, and the music, driven to
peaks by the pumped MGs and the Mar-Keys horns, sealed the deal with
pungent rhythms, fierce dynamics, and razor-sharp ensembles.
"Tenderness" was the closer. Watching the movie clip now,
seeing Otis shot in that blue haze and chiaroscuro, feels like an
unsettling prophecy of his death. Then he's surfing that rideout against
the swelling strains, telling the transfixed thousands, "I got to go,
y'all, I don't wanna go." And then he was gone.
After the Festival hosannas, Redding
continued his tour, performing at the Fillmore in San Francisco and
wowing more white kids. He rented a houseboat in Sausalito, where he
sketched out this deathless classic. Cropper recalls, "That's
where he got the idea of the ships coming into the bay. And that's about
all he had: 'I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away
again.' I took that and finished the lyrics." Redding recorded a couple
of takes days before his death. Afterwards, Cropper mixed it, adding the
sounds of seagulls and crashing waves you'd hear on the shore, as his
late partner had planned. The whistling on the fadeout—very
different from his usual workouts—was redubbed by Redding's tour
bandleader; Otis, apparently, was a lousy whistler. But in one elliptical, ruminative song, he captured the elegiac sense of twilight descending across a torn and divided America. His
lyrics and voice don't convey despair as much as recognition and
resignation. The unusual major-chord progression hints at dusk's
lingering beauties as well as night's inevitable onset. Cropper's
understated guitar flanks his voice with deft counterpoint and
occasional jarring notes, suggesting conflicts that somehow might get at
least somewhat resolved. Then the bridge flares into a kind of banked
anger that's turned into self-awareness and some sort of resolution. Three days later, he got on the doomed plane his friend and fellow Maconite James Brown had warned him against using.
When Otis Redding Delivered the 20 Best Minutes of Pop Music Ever
A
half century ago, the Monterey Pop Festival showcased the rock bands of
San Francisco and Los Angeles, but the man who stole the show was
Macon, Georgia’s Otis Redding.
Late
on the evening of June 17, 1967, as Saturday night turned to Sunday
morning, the San Francisco–based rock group known as the Jefferson
Airplane concluded their 40-minute set to rousing applause from the
7,500 fans who filled the fairgrounds arena in the resort town of
Monterey, California, on the second night of an event billed as the
First International Pop Festival.
The Airplane were local heroes
to the crowd at Monterey, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and had
followed the band’s career from its inception in 1965. Along with other
whimsically named groups like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the
Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, they had gotten their start in
the folk coffeehouses and rock ballrooms of the Haight-Ashbury, a
neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
whose recent emergence as a bohemian enclave had captured the
imagination of young people across America. During the first half of
1967, a series of sensationalistic articles had appeared in newspapers
and national magazines describing this self-styled “psychedelic
city-state” and the long-haired, hedonistic “hippies” who populated it.
This rash of publicity had inspired tens of thousands of footloose
college students, college dropouts, teenaged runaways, and “flower children” of all ages to converge on San Francisco in anticipation of an idyllic “Summer of Love.” The
Monterey Pop Festival was timed to coincide with the start of that
summer. The idea for the festival had originated a few months before as a
gleam in the eye of a neophyte Los Angeles promoter named Alan Pariser,
who envisioned it as a pop-oriented version of the seaside jazz and
folk festivals at Newport and Monterey that had served as a fashionable
form of summertime entertainment since the ’50s. After booking the
fairgrounds and enlisting a well-connected Hollywood Brit named Derek
Taylor (who had previously worked for the Beatles) as their publicist,
Pariser and his partner, a talent agent named Ben Shapiro, approached
the Los Angeles folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas with the intent
of hiring them as headliners. The group’s leader, John Phillips, and
their producer, Lou Adler, responded with a vision of their own. They
proposed expanding the size and scope of the festival and using it to
showcase the explosion of creative energy that had enveloped the world
of popular music in the three years since the arrival of the Beatles in
America in 1964. They also proposed staging the festival on a nonprofit
basis, with the performers donating their services and the proceeds
going to charity. When Shapiro balked at this idea, Phillips and
Adler bought out his interest and formed a new partnership with Pariser.
They then set out to assemble a roster of some thirty acts, enough to
fill three nights and two days of music. Toward this end, they
established a tony-sounding “board of governors” that included such
prominent pop stars as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson, and
Brian Wilson. Though none of these luminaries actually attended or
performed, they gave the festival enough cachet to ensure that most of
the artists the promoters contacted accepted their invitation to appear.
In the deft hands of Derek Taylor, the advance publicity for the
festival also attracted some twelve hundred loosely credentialed
representatives of the press, as well as enough agents, managers, and
record company executives to lend the proceedings the feeling of an
open-air music business trade fair. Phillips and Adler recognized
that staging the festival on a nonprofit basis was essential to
realizing their more parochial goal, which was to celebrate California’s
sudden ascendancy in the world of popular music, with Los Angeles now
recognized as the pop recording center of America and San Francisco as
the home of the country’s most dynamic underground music scene. (Fully
half the acts that performed came from the West Coast, with the balance
drawn from points east, including the new pop capital of London.) Though
the Jefferson Airplane were hometown heroes to the crowd at Monterey,
they were not the headlining act on the second night of the festival. No
sooner had they finished their set than the harried stage crew, pressed
by a midnight curfew that had already expired, began replacing their
banks of amplifiers with the more modest gear of a four-piece rhythm
section called Booker T. and the MGs and a two-piece horn section called
the Mar-Keys. Their presence at Monterey owed to their role as the
studio band for Stax Records, a small Memphis label that specialized in a
distinctive brand of earthy, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues whose roots
in the fervent emotionalism of the black church had earned it the label
“soul music.” The most prominent and charismatic artist associated with
Stax was the singer Otis Redding, and it was as the prelude and
accompaniment to Redding’s eagerly anticipated performance that the MGs
and the Mar-Keys now prepared to take the stage.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jonathan Gould, author ofOtis Redding: An Unfinished Life, is a former professional musician and the author of Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain & America. He divides his time between a home in Brooklyn and a house near Hudson, New York.
Stories
Otis Redding: His Tragic 1967 In MOJO Magazine
The soul king’s greatest year
ended in unimaginable sadness. But 50 years on, as Geoff Brown gleans
from his friends and bandmates, his legacy is resurgent.
THE
DEATH OF OTIS REDDING in December 1967 was the crushing end to a year
in which The King Of Soul had grown his empire exponentially, writes
soul expert Geoff Brown in the latest issue of MOJO magazine. In
March of that year, Redding had blown Europe apart with his high-energy
stage show. In fact, his bandmates were still reeling from the riotous
reception years later. “The Beatles sent limos to pick us up from
the airport,” remembered trumpeter Wayne Jackson. “We went from session
musicians making a hundred, two hundred dollars a week to screaming,
superstar treatment. Otis could have kept going back with his band he
was such a phenomenon.”
“It was such a shock. Because he was a person that represented so much life.”--Isaac Hayes
With
Stateside hits on Memphis’s Stax label with Carla Thomas including
Tramp and Knock On Wood and a showstopping performance at June’s
Monterey Pop Festival, Redding’s star was climbing high. Even an
enforced layoff with throat problems brought out a new dimension in his
songwriting. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of A Bay emerged as he relaxed on a
houseboat in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco. But he
would not live to see its release, as on December 10, a light aircraft
containing Redding and the musicians of the Bar-Kays, approaching
Madison Municipal Airport in low cloud and freezing fog, crashed into
Lake Monona. The plane hit the icy waters with tremendous force, wildly
scattering debris. Redding, plus guitarist Jimmy King, keyboard player
Ronnie Caldwell, saxophonist Jones, drummer Carl Cunningham, their
valet/friend Matthew Kelly and pilot Dick Fraser were all killed. “We
cried,” Stax-signed producer/arranger/keyboardist Isaac Hayes said. “It
was such a shock. Because he was a person that represented so much
life. When they’re gone it’s like, ‘What do we do?’ It just stunned
Memphis.” For more on the life and music of Otis Redding, as we
approach the 50th anniversary of his death, and the inside story of the
Stax label’s recent restoration, pick up the latest MOJO magazine, in UK
shops now.
The American soul singer Otis Redding performs at the Monterey Pop Festival in California in June 1967.
Bruce Fleming / Getty
On
December 10, 1967, the plane carrying Otis Redding and his band the
Bar-Kays crashed into the frigid waters of Lake Monona in Wisconsin,
killing nearly everyone on board. Redding was only 26 years old when he
died. And while he was the life force of Memphis’s Stax Records and the
internationally acclaimed King of Soul, he had not yet reached the peak
of his powers. Such was indicated, anyway, by the new creative direction
of a song released the month after his death, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of
the Bay.” News of his passing dumbfounded his fans and loved ones, not
only because of how sudden it was, but also because Redding had seemed
unstoppable. The charismatic son of Georgia sharecroppers who, according to his siblings,
“was always in the spotlight about something,” Redding had become an
electrifying performer whom some witnesses compared to God incarnate. Yet his music was defined by vulnerability as well as dynamism. Redding’s
gift lay in his ability to synthesize the sentimental crooning of Nat
King Cole, the sanctified fervor of his early training in the Baptist
church, and the bombastic flair of his hometown hero Little Richard (who
was also from Macon). Some of Redding’s best-known recordings—“These
Arms of Mine,” “Mr. Pitiful,” “Pain in My Heart”—are full-voiced
petitions against loneliness and zealous efforts to stave off loss,
displaying his sensitivity to pain and desire.
Redding’s
attentiveness to both lyrical meaning and musical possibility made him a
brilliant interpreter of other artists’ songs, from Irving Berlin’s
“White Christmas” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, other great African
American artists covered songs by white writers (Ray Charles’s “Georgia
on My Mind,” Aretha Franklin’s “Let It Be”), announcing the sound of
soul while symbolically reversing the process by which white artists had
appropriated and profited on black musical innovation. Redding’s 1966 version of “Try a Little Tenderness” was his most stunning such coup d’état.
First popularized by Bing Crosby in 1933, this paternalistic ballad
about the power of male affection to revive female morale had been
covered by Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke in the years preceding
Redding’s version. But whereas Franklin and Cooke maintained the song’s
basic ballad structure, Redding revolutionized it. His version
begins in the usual maudlin mode: Interweaving horn lines arranged by
Isaac Hayes set the scene as if drawing a stage curtain. But when Al
Jackson Jr. strikes up rim shots on the drum like a metronome, the band
starts to build the kind of suspense the song’s lyrics describe:
You know she’s waiting, just anticipating
For things that she’ll never, never, never, never possess, yeah yeah
But while she’s there waiting, without them
Try a little tenderness
The recording owes its drama not just to Redding’s throaty vocals and lyrical embellishments—hold her, squeeze her, never leave her!—but also to the synergy of the band as a unit. As Jonathan Gould writes in his wonderful new biography Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,
“the track is … a musical microcosm of the Stax sound, a seamless
synthesis of the pleading ballads and pounding grooves that [Stax
artists] played better than anyone else.” Gradually, like a group of
friends adding their voices to a single appeal for kindness, the rhythm
section fills in the space between the spare drum beat and Redding’s
vocals: Here comes the churchy organ, crossed with an acoustic piano,
both soon joined by a chicken-scratch guitar, blaring horns, and
hard-driving drums. At this point, Redding manipulates the lyrics to
match the wordless intonations of the band: Got to try—ma nah nah—try—try a little tenderness! The
song was even more intense in live performance. As the
bring-down-the-house closing song of his sets, “Tenderness” became
Redding’s signature hit and a vehicle for his electric persona. The
musicians often rushed through the curtain-drawing introduction like a
formality, picking up speed until Redding was shouting, jumping, and
stalking around the stage like a stiff-limbed preacher while demolishing
the lyrics: ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gotta-tenderness! In a
crowd-pleasing church trick that showed Redding in thrall to his own
momentum, the group often “ended” the song only to strike it back up
again. In short, Redding’s “Tenderness” was a tour de force. Still, there was something bizarre about it—about a call for tenderness that was distinctly untender.
Singing (then shouting) about women but not to them, Redding enacts a
man-to-man aggression that seems to replicate the problem he wants to
address. To make sense of this irony, we might consider a level on which
Redding’s performance of “Tenderness” was not about a woman at all. We
might instead hear it—in the context of the civil-rights movement that
Redding had engaged with in his urgent 1965 recording of Cooke’s “A
Change Is Gonna Come”—as a veiled demand for proper treatment of black
people. In this reading, Black America itself is the “she” who is
“waiting, just anticipating” the change that Redding and his band want
to effect. If one imagines Redding singing on behalf of those citizens
subjected to gradualist approaches to integration and brutal
anti-protest measures including dogs, water hoses, and death, it seems
not odd but wholly appropriate for Redding to shake the song’s addressee
by the collar and insist that he try—for god’s sake—a little
tenderness. This
is not to suggest that Redding himself intended the song as a political
allegory. But his performances of it, in the mid-1960s, do make a space
for an otherwise verboten display of black male agitation. At a moment
when even the most peaceful bids for racial equality could be viewed as
attacks on white Southern mores—when sitting at a segregated lunch
counter or entering an integrated school could be perceived as a violent
provocation—the show of actual black aggression could be a
death sentence. This may partly explain the cathartic force of Redding’s
performances for his African American fans, as well as for an expanding
white fan base that may have sensed the power and rage black citizens
were often compelled to restrain. To hear Redding’s “Tenderness”
as a plea for interpersonal love and a demand for interracial civility
is also to perceive a political charge in his choice to keep ending and
restarting the song when performing it live. This was a showman’s
device, to be sure, but it could also be seen as a musical enactment of
resilience—a reminder that the struggle wasn’t over when it seemed to
be, that a band of compatriots could keep pushing, together, toward a
change that might have sometimes seemed like it would never come. When
the group played the song to close their legendary set at the Monterey
Pop Festival in June of 1967, Redding clearly wanted to go on reprising
it. But the band’s allotted time was up: “I have to go, I don’t want to
go,” he waved to the crowd before leaving the stage. His parting lament
becomes haunting in light of his imminent death, six months later. Even
the god-like icon couldn’t keep pushing as long as he wanted to. But,
like so many others, he still had to try.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Emily Lordi is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work has appeared on Slate, NPR, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and Donny Hathaway Live.
The Enduring Power of Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’
Otis
Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” became a hit after his
1967 death. This week in New York, it will be celebrated at the Apollo.CreditCreditMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
by Gavin Edwards
A
posthumous pop hit collapses triumph and sorrow into a single song.
Only a handful of performers have reached No. 1 with a single after
their deaths, including John Lennon, Janis Joplin and the Notorious
B.I.G. But the first person to do it was the soul singer Otis Redding,
who died in a plane crash in late 1967 at 26 and topped the charts for
four weeks the following March and April with a beautifully melancholy
song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”
The song ranked as the sixth-most-played composition on American radio and television in the 20th century. It has gone triple platinum and been covered by artists from Cher to Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone named it No. 26 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. To celebrate its endurance across 50 years, the Otis Redding Foundation is organizing a benefit concert on Thursday at the Apollo Theater,
hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring a lineup including Warren
Haynes, Aloe Blacc and Booker T. Jones. The Dap-Kings and the
Preservation Hall Jazz Band will provide the backup.
Paul
Janeway of St. Paul and the Broken Bones is scheduled to perform “Down
in the Valley” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at the event. He said
that before his band had any original material, it performed complete
albums by Redding. The lesson: “As a singer, range is great, but you got
to learn to sing the right notes the right way. Otis was one of the
masters of that — he was so emotive.” And the reason behind the success
of “Dock of the Bay”? “It sounds like the title,” Mr. Janeway said.
“Dock of the Bay” emerged from a period of Redding’s life when he was
going through dramatic transitions; had he lived, it might well have
been remembered as the beginning of the second half of his career. In
early 1967, Redding had made a name as the biggest star on the Stax
label and the author of “Respect,”
a song commandeered by Aretha Franklin. He was also famed for his
electrifying performances, which were expanding beyond the R&B
circuit.
Grace Slick, the
lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, saw him at the Fillmore West in San
Francisco in 1966. “It was the most stunning performance I had seen up
to that point,” she said in a phone interview from Malibu. She
remembered the stage swaying as he moved around it: “I’d never seen
anybody with that much positive thrust, for lack of a better term.”
The
next summer, Redding delivered a barnburner set at the Monterey Pop
Festival. “This was the ‘love crowd,’” the record producer and Monterey organizer Lou Adler
said in a phone interview. “He was aware of what he was getting into
but had no idea of what the response would be. As much as the performer
gave at Monterey, the audience gave it right back.”
Zelma
Redding, the singer’s widow, said that after her husband had flown from
the festival to their ranch in Macon, Ga., he told her, “I got a new
audience.”
Redding threw himself into the project of reinventing himself. “It was
clear that his bread and butter, which was these big 12/8 ballads, had
plateaued,” Jonathan Gould, the author of the recent biography “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,” said in an interview. “He had done what he could do with them, which was more than anybody else could do.”
Like most of the world, Redding spent the summer of 1967 listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“He thought it was the greatest thing he ever heard,” Ms. Redding said,
speaking from her office in Georgia. “I guess he was thinking about
‘How can I be this creative?’”
In
August 1967, Redding returned to San Francisco for a week of shows at
the jazz club Basin Street West. When he was besieged by female fans at
his hotel, the promoter Bill Graham let him stay at his houseboat in
Sausalito.
Redding spent his days
quietly looking at the water; freed from the usual demands of travel, he
could relax and write songs. His road manager, Earl Sims (known as
Speedo), said he was the only witness the day Redding picked up his
guitar and wrote a new song that began “Sittin’ in the morning sun/I’ll
be sittin’ when the evening comes.”
Mr.
Sims was used to tapping out a simple beat when his boss was writing
songs, acting as a human metronome. The rhythm of this new one was
totally different, he said in an interview. “It took me a minute to get
into what he was doing. He was away, and he was on the water, and he was
relaxed. That’s why he started that song.”
When
Redding returned home, he played the song for his wife. “My comment at
the time was that it was very different, unusual for him,” she said —
meaning she didn’t care for it. “He said, ‘Well, I’m going to change my
style, going to be different.’”
That
October, Redding had surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords;
while recuperating, he couldn’t speak, so he grew a beard and spent
hours in silent contemplation. Five weeks later, his voice sounded
better than ever, and he was eager to get some of his new ideas on wax.
Steve
Cropper, who regularly backed Redding up as the guitarist for Booker T.
and the MG’s (a.k.a. the Stax house band), remembered Redding calling
him from the Memphis airport to make sure he was at the studio. When
Redding arrived, the pair sat on beige folding chairs, hammering out the
song. “I helped him with the second verse a little bit, helped him with
the bridge,” Mr. Cropper said in a phone interview. “After he sang, ‘I
watch the ships roll in, watch them roll out again,’ I said, ‘Have you
thought that if a ship rolls, it’s going to take on water and sink?’”
Redding told him, “That’s the way I want it, Crop.”
The
duo went into the studio in November, joined by Donald Dunn (known as
Duck) on bass, Al Jackson on drums, Booker T. Jones on piano and three
horn players. In an interview, Mr. Jones remembered the sessions as
having “kind of a hectic feeling — so much so that I remember a number
of people sleeping over at the studio.” Redding and Mr. Cropper planned
to ask the Staple Singers to contribute backing vocals to “Dock of the
Bay,” which never happened. The whistling at the song’s end came in a
section earmarked for vocal ad-libbing; on one early take, Redding
sputtered and the engineer Ron Capone told him, “You’re not going to
make it as a whistler.”
In the middle
of the sessions, Redding went back on the road. “I’ll see you on
Monday,” were his last words to Mr. Cropper. He had recently acquired a
Beechcraft Model 18 airplane so he and his touring band, the Bar-Kays,
could fly around the country to play shows on weekends, letting him
regularly return to Memphis. But on Dec. 10, 1967, as he flew into
Madison, Wis., the plane stalled and crashed into Lake Monona, killing
seven people, including Redding. It fell to a shattered Mr. Cropper to
finish “Dock of the Bay” for a rush release. “If I had a week to work on
it, it probably would have been overembellished,” he said. (He finished
the job in 24 hours.)
Different
lines of the song resonate with those who have covered it over the
years. Michael Bolton recorded the second-most-successful version of the
track (a No. 11 hit in 1988). In an email, he said he thinks the song’s
key lyric is “look like nothing’s gonna change, everything remains the
same.” “It states the obvious lack of our evolution as a society,” he
wrote.
Mr. Jones agreed that line has
a special power. “It’s one of those lyrics that has the capability of
touching anyone who’s been through changes, loneliness, trying to find a
secure place in the world,” he said. Over the past 50 years, that’s
proved to be just about everyone.
An Evening of Respect: Celebrating Otis Redding & 50 Years of ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ January 25, 2018 at the Apollo Theater, Manhattan; apollotheater.org.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Still Sittin’ in the Mornin’ Sun. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
THE MUSIC OF THE OTIS REDDING: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH OTIS REDDING:
Otis Ray Redding Jr. (September 9, 1941 – December 10, 1967) was an American singer, songwriter, record producer, arranger, and talent scout. He is considered one of the greatest singers in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues.
Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music
that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul
artists of the 1960s. During his lifetime, his recordings were produced by Stax Records, based in Memphis, Tennessee. Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, and at the age of 2, moved to Macon, Georgia. Redding quit school at age 15 to support his family, working with Little Richard's
backing band, the Upsetters, and by performing in talent shows at the
historic Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia. In 1958, he joined Johnny Jenkins's
band, the Pinetoppers, with whom he toured the Southern states as a
singer and driver. An unscheduled appearance on a Stax recording session
led to a contract and his first single, "These Arms of Mine", in 1962. Stax released Redding's debut album, Pain in My Heart,
two years later. Initially popular mainly with African-Americans,
Redding later reached a wider American pop music audience. Along with
his group, he first played small gigs in the American South. He later performed at the popular Los Angeles night club Whisky a Go Go and toured Europe, performing in London, Paris and other major cities. He also performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Shortly before his death in a plane crash, Redding wrote and recorded his iconic "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" with Steve Cropper. The song became the first posthumous number-one record on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts. The album The Dock of the Bay was the first posthumous album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart. Redding's premature death devastated Stax. Already on the verge of bankruptcy, the label soon discovered that the Atco division of Atlantic Records owned the rights to his entire song catalog. Redding received many posthumous accolades, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In addition to "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," "Respect" and "Try a Little Tenderness" are among his best-known songs.
Early life
Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, U.S., the fourth of six children, and the first son, of Otis Redding, Sr., and Fannie Roseman. Redding senior was a sharecropper and then worked at Robins Air Force Base, near Macon,
and occasionally preached in local churches. When Otis was three the
family moved to Tindall Heights, a predominantly African-American public
housing project in Macon.[3] At an early age, Redding sang in the Vineville Baptist Church choir and learned guitar and piano. From age 10, he took drum and singing lessons. At Ballard-Hudson High School, he sang in the school band. Every Sunday he earned $6 by performing gospel songs for Macon radio station WIBB,[4][5] and he won the $5 prize in a teen talent show for 15 consecutive weeks.[6] His passion was singing, and he often cited Little Richard and Sam Cooke
as influences. Redding said that he "would not be here" without Little
Richard and that 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."[7][8] At age 15, Redding left school to help financially support his family; his father had contracted tuberculosis and was often hospitalized, leaving his mother as the family's primary income earner.[3]
He worked as a good digger, as a gasoline station attendant and
occasionally as a musician. Pianist Gladys Williams, a locally
well-known musician in Macon and another who inspired Redding, often
performed at the Hillview Springs Social Club, and Redding sometimes
played piano with her band there.[9] Williams hosted Sunday talent shows, which Redding attended with two friends, singers Little Willie Jones and Eddie Ross.[10] Redding's breakthrough came in 1958 on disc jockey Hamp Swain's "The Teenage Party," a talent contest at the local Roxy and Douglass Theatres.[11][5]Johnny Jenkins,
a locally prominent guitarist, was in the audience and, finding
Redding's backing band lacking in musical skills, offered to accompany
him. Redding sang Little Richard's "Heebie Jeebies." The combination
enabled Redding to win Swain's talent contest for fifteen consecutive
weeks; the cash prize was $5 (US$43 in 2018 dollars[12]).[13] Jenkins later worked as lead guitarist and played with Redding during several later gigs.[14] Redding was soon invited to replace Willie Jones as frontman of Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, featuring Johnny Jenkins.[10] Redding was then hired by the Upsetters when Little Richard abandoned rock and roll in favor of gospel music. Redding was well paid, making about $25 per gig (US$217 in 2018 dollars[12]),[3][4] but did not stay long.[15] At age 18, Redding met 15-year-old Zelma Atwood at "The Teenage
Party." She gave birth to their son Dexter in the summer of 1960 and
married Redding in August 1961.[16] In mid-1960, Otis moved to Los Angeles with his sister, Deborah, while Zelma and Otis' children stayed in Macon, Georgia.[17]
In Los Angeles Redding wrote his first songs, including "She's
Allright," "Tuff Enuff," "I'm Gettin' Hip" and "Gamma Lamma" (which he
recorded as a single in 1962, under the title "Shout Bamalama").[4]
Career
Early career
A member of Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, Redding toured the Southern United States on the chitlin' circuit, a string of venues that were hospitable to African-American entertainers during the era of racial segregation, which lasted into the early 1960s.[18]Johnny Jenkins left the band to become the featured artist with the Pinetoppers.[19] Around this time, Redding met Phil Walden,
the future founder of the recording company Phil Walden and Associates,
and later Bobby Smith, who ran the small label Confederate Records. He
signed with Confederate and recorded his second single, "Shout Bamalama"
(a rewrite of "Gamma Lamma") and "Fat Girl", together with his band
Otis and the Shooters.[4][20] Around this time he and the Pinetoppers attended a "Battle of the Bands" show in Lakeside Park.[21]Wayne Cochran, the only solo artist signed to Confederate, became the Pinetoppers' bassist.[19] When Walden started to look for a record label for Jenkins, Atlantic Records representative Joe Galkin showed interest and around 1962 sent him to the Stax studio in Memphis. Redding drove Jenkins to the session, as the latter did not have a driver's license.[22] The session with Jenkins, backed by Booker T. & the M.G.'s, was unproductive and ended early; Redding was allowed to perform two songs. The first was "Hey Hey Baby", which studio chief Jim Stewart thought sounded too much like Little Richard. The second was "These Arms of Mine", featuring Jenkins on piano and Steve Cropper
on guitar. Stewart later praised Redding's performance, saying,
"Everybody was fixin' to go home, but Joe Galkin insisted we give Otis a
listen. There was something different about [the ballad]. He really
poured his soul into it."[16][23] Stewart signed Redding and released "These Arms of Mine", with "Hey Hey Baby" on the B-side. The single was released by Volt in October 1962 and charted in March the following year.[24] It became one of his most successful songs, selling more than 800,000 copies.[25]
Apollo Theater and Otis Blue
"These Arms of Mine" and other songs from the 1962–1963 sessions were included on Redding's debut album, Pain in My Heart.
"That's What My Heart Needs" and "Mary's Little Lamb" was recorded in
June 1963. The latter is the only Redding track with both background
singing and brass. It became his worst-selling single.[24][26] The title track, recorded in September 1963, sparked copyright issues, as it sounded like Irma Thomas's "Ruler of My Heart".[24] Despite this, Pain in My Heart was released on January 1, 1964, and peaked at number 20 on the R&B chart and at number 85 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In November 1963, Redding, accompanied by his brother Rodgers and
an associate, former boxer Sylvester Huckaby (a childhood friend of
Redding's), traveled to New York to perform at the Apollo Theater for the recording of a live album for Atlantic Records. Redding and his band were paid $400 per week (US$3,273 in 2018 dollars[12]) but had to pay $450 (US$3,683 in 2018 dollars[12]) for sheet music for the house band, led by King Curtis,
which left them in financial difficulty. The trio asked Walden for
money. Huckaby's description of their circumstances living in the "big
old raggedy" Hotel Theresa is quoted by Peter Guralnick in his book Sweet Soul Music. He noted meeting Muhammad Ali and other celebrities. Ben E. King, who was the headliner at the Apollo when Redding performed there, gave him $100 (US$818 in 2018 dollars[12]) when he learned about Redding's financial situation. The resulting album featured King, the Coasters, Doris Troy, Rufus Thomas, the Falcons and Redding.[27]
Around this time Walden and Rodgers were drafted by the army; Walden's
younger brother Alan joined Redding on tour, while Earl "Speedo" Simms
replaced Rodgers as Redding's road manager.[28] Most of Redding's songs after "Security", from his first album,
had a slow tempo. Disc jockey A. C. Moohah Williams accordingly labeled
him "Mr. Pitiful",[29] and subsequently, Cropper and Redding wrote the eponymous song.[16] That and top 100 singles " Chained and Bound", "Come to Me" and "That's How Strong My Love Is"[30] were included on Redding's second studio album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, released in March 1965.[31]
Jenkins began working independently from the group out of fear Galkin,
Walden and Cropper would plagiarize his playing style, and so Cropper
became Redding's leading guitarist.[32] Around 1965, Redding co-wrote "I've Been Loving You Too Long" with Jerry Butler, the lead singer of the Impressions.
That summer, Redding and the studio crew arranged new songs for his
next album. Ten of the eleven songs were written in a 24-hour period on
July 9 and 10 in Memphis. Two songs, "Ole Man Trouble" and "Respect", had been finished earlier, during the Otis Blue session. "Respect" and "I've Been Loving You" were later recut in stereo. The album, entitled Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, was released in September 1965.[33] Redding also released his much-loved cover of "A Change Is Gonna Come" in 1965.
Whisky a Go Go and "Try a Little Tenderness"
Redding's success allowed him to buy a 300-acre (1.2 km2) ranch in Georgia, which he called the "Big O Ranch."[36] Stax was also doing well. Walden signed more musicians, including Percy Sledge, Johnnie Taylor, Clarence Carter and Eddie Floyd, and together with Redding, they founded two production companies. "Jotis Records" (derived from Joe Galkin and Otis) released four recordings, two by Arthur Conley and one by Billy Young and Loretta Williams. The other was named Redwal Music (derived from Redding and Walden), which was shut down shortly after its creation.[37] Since Afro-Americans still formed the majority of fans, Redding chose to perform at Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip
in Los Angeles. Redding was one of the first soul artists to perform
for rock audiences in the western United States. His performance
received critical acclaim, including positive press in the Los Angeles Times, and he penetrated mainstream popular culture. Bob Dylan attended the performance and offered Redding an altered version of one of his songs, "Just Like a Woman".[16] In late 1966, Redding returned to the Stax studio and recorded several tracks, including "Try a Little Tenderness", written by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly and Harry M. Woods in 1932.[34] This song had previously been covered by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra,
and the publishers unsuccessfully tried to stop Redding from recording
the song from a "negro perspective". Today often considered his signature song,[38]
Jim Stewart reckoned, "If there's one song, one performance that
really sort of sums up Otis and what he's about, it's 'Try a Little
Tenderness'. That one performance is so special and so unique that it
expresses who he is." On this version Redding was backed by Booker T.
& the M.G.'s, while staff producer Isaac Hayes worked on the arrangement.[39][40] "Try a Little Tenderness" was included on his next album, Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul. The song and the album were critically and commercially successful—the former peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and at number 4 on the R&B chart.[41] The spring of 1966 marked the first time that Stax booked concerts for its artists.[42] The majority of the group arrived in London on March 13,[40][43]
but Redding had flown in days earlier for interviews, such as at "The
Eamonn Andrews Show". When the crew arrived in London, the Beatles sent a limousine to pick them up.[42] Booking agent Bill Graham proposed that Redding plays at the Fillmore Auditorium
in late 1966. The gig was commercially and critically successful,
paying Redding around $800 to $1000 (US$7,722 in 2018 dollars[12]) a night.[44][40] It prompted Graham to remark afterward, "That was the best gig I ever put on in my entire life."[45] Redding began touring Europe six months later.[46]
Carla Thomas
In March 1967, Stax released King & Queen, an album of duets between Redding and Carla Thomas,
which became a certified gold record. It was Jim Stewart's idea to
produce a duet album, as he expected that "[Redding's] rawness and
[Thomas's] sophistication would work".[47] The album was recorded in January 1967, while Thomas was earning her M.A. in English at Howard University.
Six out of ten songs were cut during their joint session; the rest were
overdubbed by Redding in the days following, because of his concert
obligations. Three singles were lifted from the album: "Tramp" was released in April, followed by "Knock on Wood" and "Lovey Dovey". All three reached at least the top 60 on both the R&B and Pop charts.[47] The album charted at number 5 and 36 on the Billboard Pop and R&B charts, respectively.[30] Redding returned to Europe to perform at the Paris Olympia. The live album Otis Redding: Live in Europe was released three months later, featuring this and other live performances in London and Stockholm, Sweden.[36]
His decision to take his protege Conley (whom Redding and Walden had
contracted directly to Atco/Atlantic Records rather than to Stax/Volt)
on the tour, instead of more established Stax/Volt artists such as Rufus
Thomas and William Bell, produced negative reactions.[40][48]
Monterey Pop
In 1967, Redding performed at the influential Monterey Pop Festival as the closing act on Saturday night, the second day of the festival. He was invited through the efforts of promoter Jerry Wexler.[49] Until that point, Redding was still performing mainly for black audiences.[50] At the time, he "had not been considered a commercially viable player in the mainstream white American market."[51]
But after delivering one of the most electric performances of the
night, and having been the act to most involve the audience, "his
performance at Monterey Pop was therefore a natural progression from
local to national acclaim,...the decisive turning-point in Otis
Redding's career." [51] His act included his own song "Respect" and a version of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."[52] Redding and his backing band (Booker T. & the M.G.'s with the Mar-Keyshorn section) opened with Cooke's "Shake", after which he delivered an impulsive speech, asking the audience if they were the "love crowd"[53] and looking for a big response.
The ballad "I've Been Loving You" followed. The last song was "Try a
Little Tenderness", including an additional chorus. "I got to go, y'all,
I don't wanna go", said Redding and left the stage of his last major
concert.[38]
According to Booker T. Jones, "I think we did one of our best shows,
Otis and the MG's. That we were included in that was also something of a
phenomenon. That we were there? With those people? They were accepting
us and that was one of the things that really moved Otis. He was happy
to be included and it brought him a new audience. It was greatly
expanded in Monterey."[54] According to Sweet Soul Music, musicians such as Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix were captivated by his performance; Robert Christgau wrote in Esquire, "The Love Crowd screamed one's mind to the heavens."[55] Before Monterey, Redding wanted to record with Conley, but Stax
was against the idea. The two moved from Memphis to Macon to continue
writing. The result was "Sweet Soul Music" (based on Cooke's "Yeah Man"),[37] which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.[56][57] By that time Redding had developed polyps on his larynx, which he tried to treat with tea and lemon or honey. He was hospitalized in September 1967 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York to undergo surgery.[58]
"Dock of the Bay"
In early December 1967, Redding again recorded at Stax. One new song was "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", which was written with Cropper while they were staying with their friend, Earl "Speedo" Simms, on a houseboat in Sausalito.[59] Redding was inspired by the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and tried to create a similar sound, against the label's wishes. His
wife Zelma disliked its atypical melody. The Stax crew were also
dissatisfied with the new sound; Stewart thought that it was not
R&B, while bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn
feared it would damage Stax's reputation. However, Redding wanted to
expand his musical style and thought it was his best song, correctly
believing it would top the charts.[60] He whistled at the end, either forgetting Cropper's "fadeout rap" or paraphrasing it intentionally.[61]
Death
By 1967, the band was traveling to performances in Redding's Beechcraft H18 airplane. On December 9, 1967, they appeared on the Upbeat television show produced in Cleveland. They played three concerts in two nights at a club called Leo's Casino.[56][62][63] After a phone call with his wife and children, Redding's next stop was Madison, Wisconsin; the next day, Sunday, December 10, they were to play at the Factory nightclub, near the University of Wisconsin.[62][64] Although the weather was poor, with heavy rain and fog, and despite warnings, the plane took off.[65] Four miles (6.4 km) from their destination at Truax Field in Madison, the pilot radioed for permission to land. Shortly thereafter, the plane crashed into Lake Monona. Bar-Kays member Ben Cauley, the accident's only survivor,[56] was sleeping shortly before the accident. He woke just before impact to see bandmate Phalon Jones
look out a window and exclaim, "Oh, no!" Cauley said the last thing he
remembered before the crash was unbuckling his seat belt. He then found
himself in frigid water, grasping a seat cushion to keep afloat.[58] A non-swimmer, he was unable to rescue the others.[66] The cause of the crash was never determined.[67]James Brown claimed in his autobiography The Godfather of Soul that he had warned Redding not to fly in the plane.[68] The other victims of the crash were four members of the Bar-Kays—guitarist Jimmy King, tenor saxophonist Phalon Jones, organist Ronnie Caldwell, and drummer Carl Cunningham; their valet, Matthew Kelly; and the pilot, Richard Fraser.[69] Redding's body was recovered the next day when the lake was searched.[70] The family postponed the funeral from December 15 to December 18 so that more could attend.[71] The service took place at the City Auditorium in Macon.
More than 4,500 people came to the funeral, overflowing the 3,000-seat
hall. Johnny Jenkins and Isaac Hayes did not attend, fearing their
reaction would be worse than Zelma Redding's.[72] Redding was entombed at his ranch in Round Oak, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Macon.[73]Jerry Wexler delivered the eulogy.[74] Redding died just three days after re-recording "The Dock of the Bay".[75][56] He was survived by Zelma and three children, Otis III, Dexter, and Karla.[76] Otis, Dexter, and cousin Mark Lockett later founded the Reddings, a band managed by Zelma.[77] She also maintained or worked at the janitorial service Maids Over Macon, several nightclubs, and booking agencies.[78] On November 8, 1997, a memorial plaque was placed on the lakeside deck of the Madison convention center, Monona Terrace.[79]
Posthumous releases and proposed recordings and television appearances
"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released in January 1968. It became Redding's only single to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the first posthumous number-one single in U.S. chart history.[80] It sold approximately four million copies worldwide and received more than eight million airplays.[81][82] The album The Dock of the Bay was the first posthumous album to reach the top spot on the UK Albums Chart.[83] Shortly after Redding's death, Atlantic Records, distributor of the Stax/Volt releases, was purchased by Warner Bros.
Stax was required to renegotiate its distribution deal and was
surprised to learn that Atlantic actually owned the entire Stax/Volt
catalog. Stax was unable to regain the rights to its recordings and
severed its Atlantic relationship. Atlantic also held the rights to all
unreleased Otis Redding masters.[84] It had enough material for three studio albums—The Immortal Otis Redding (1968), Love Man (1969), and Tell the Truth (1970)—all issued on its Atco Records label.[84] A number of successful singles emerged from these LPs, among them "Amen" (1968), "Hard to Handle" (1968), "I've Got Dreams to Remember" (1968), "Love Man" (1969), and "Look at That Girl" (1969).[84] Singles were also lifted from two live Atlantic-issued Redding albums, In Person at the Whisky a Go Go, recorded in 1966 and issued in 1968 on Atco, and Monterey International Pop Festival, a Reprise Records release featuring some of the live performances at the festival by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on side one and Redding on side two.
Redding had at least two television appearances booked for 1968; one on The Ed Sullivan Show and the other on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
In September 2007, the first official DVD anthology of Redding's live performances was released by Concord Music Group, then owners of the Stax catalog. Dreams to Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding featured 16 full-length performances and 40 minutes of new interviews documenting his life and career.[85] On May 18, 2010, Stax Records released a two-disc recording of three complete sets from his Whisky a Go Go date in April 1966.[86] All seven sets from his three-day residency at the venue were released as Live at the Whisky a Go Go: The Complete Recordings in 2016,[87] a 6-CD box set that won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.[88] Carla Thomas claimed that the pair had planned to record another
duet album in December the same year, but Phil Walden denied this.
Redding had proposed to record an album featuring cut and rearranged
songs in different tempos; for example, ballads would be uptempo and
vice versa.[47] Another suggestion was to record an album entirely consisting of country standards.[89]
Personal life and wealth
Redding, who was 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg), was an athletic family man who loved football and hunting.[90][91] He was described as vigorous, trustworthy,[92] full of fun[76]
and a successful businessman. He was active in philanthropic projects.
His keen interest in black youth led to plans for a summer camp for
disadvantaged children.[93] Redding's music made him wealthy. According to several
advertisements, he had around 200 suits and 400 pairs of shoes, and he
earned about $35,000 per week for his concerts.[94] He spent about $125,000 in the "Big O Ranch". As the owner of Otis Redding Enterprises, his performances, music publishing ventures and royalties from record sales earned him more than a million dollars in 1967 alone.[71] That year, one columnist said, "he sold more records than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin combined."[95] After the release of Otis Blue, Redding became a "catalogue" artist, meaning his albums were not immediate blockbusters, but rather sold steadily over time.[37]
Musicianship
Style
Early on Redding copied the rock and soul style of his role model Little Richard. He was also influenced by soul musicians such as Sam Cooke, whose live album Sam Cooke at the Copa was a strong influence,[92] but later explored other popular genres. He studied the recordings of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. His song "Hard to Handle" has elements of rock and roll and influences of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.[96] Most of his songs were categorized as Southern soul[97] and Memphis soul.[98] His hallmark was his raw voice and ability to convey strong emotion. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic noted his "hoarse, gritty vocals, brassy arrangements, an emotional way with both party tunes and aching ballads."[99] In the book Rock and Roll: An Introduction,
authors Michael Campbell and James Brody suggested that "Redding's
singing calls to mind a fervent black preacher. Especially in up-tempo
numbers, his singing is more than impassioned speech but less than
singing with precise pitch."[100]
According to the book, "Redding finds a rough midpoint between
impassioned oratory and conventional singing. His delivery overflows
with emotion" in his song "I Can't Turn You Loose".[100]
Booker T. Jones described Redding's singing as energetic and emotional
but said that his vocal range was limited, reaching neither low nor high
notes.[101] Peter Buckley, in The Rough Guide to Rock,
describes his "gruff voice, which combined Sam Cooke's phrasing with a
brawnier delivery" and later suggested he "could testify like a
hell-bent preacher, croon like a tender lover or get down and dirty with
a bluesy yawp".[102] Redding received advice from Rufus Thomas about his clumsy stage appearance. Jerry Wexler said Redding "didn't know how to move",
and stood still, moving only his upper body, although he acknowledged
that Redding was well received by audiences for his strong message.[103] Guralnick described Redding's painful vulnerability in Sweet Soul Music, as an attractive one for the audience, but not for his friends and partners. His early shyness was well known.[104]
Songwriting
In his early career Redding mostly covered songs from popular artists, such as Richard, Cooke and Solomon Burke.
Around the mid-1960s he began writing his own songs—always taking along
his cheap red acoustic guitar—and sometimes asked for Stax members'
opinion of his lyrics. He often worked on lyrics with other musicians,
such as Simms, Rodgers, Huckaby, Phil Walden, and Cropper. During his
recovery from his throat operation, Redding wrote about 30 songs in two
weeks.[90] Redding was the sole copyright holder on all of his songs.[105] In "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" he abandoned familiar
romantic themes for "sad, wistful introspections, amplified by
unforgettable descending guitar riffs by Cropper".[106]
The website of the Songwriters Hall of Fame noted that the song "was a
kind of brooding, dark voicing of despair, ('I've got nothin' to live
for/Look like nothin's gonna come my way')" although "his music, in
general, was exultant and joyful." According to journalist Ruth
Robinson, author of the liner notes for the 1993 box set, "It is
currently a revisionist theory to equate soul with the darker side of
man's musical expression, blues. That fanner of the flame of 'Trouble's
got a hold on me' music, might well be the father of the form if it is,
the glorified exaltation found in church on any Sunday morning is its
mother." The Songwriters Hall of Fame website adds that "glorified
exaltation indeed was an apt description of Otis Redding's songwriting
and singing style."[107] Booker T. Jones compared Redding with Leonard Bernstein, stating, "He was the same type person. He was a leader. He'd just lead with his arms and his body and his fingers."[104] Redding favored short and simple lyrics; when asked whether he
intended to cover Dylan's "Just Like a Woman", he responded that the
lyrics contained "too much text".[92] Furthermore, he stated in an interview,
Basically, I like any music that
remains simple and I feel this is the formula that makes "soul music"
successful. When any music form becomes cluttered and/or complicated you
lose the average listener's ear. There is nothing more beautiful than a
simple blues tune. There is beauty in simplicity whether you are
talking about architecture, art or music.[93]
Redding also authored his (sometimes difficult) recordings' horn
arrangements, humming to show the players what he had in mind. The
recording of "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)" captures his habit of humming
with the horn section.[108]
Legacy
"Otis
Redding Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", statue in Gateway Park by
Bradley Cooley and Bradley Cooley, Jr of Bronze By Cooley, 2003
Redding has been called the "King of Soul",[109] an honorific also given to Brown[110] and Cooke.[111][112][113] He remains one of the genre's most recognized artists. His lean and powerful style exemplified the Stax sound;[102][114][115] he was said to be "the heart and soul of Stax",[116] while artists such as Al Jackson, Dunn and Cropper helped to expand its structure.[115] His open-throated singing,[114] the tremolo/vibrato, the manic, electrifying stage performances[117] and perceived honesty were particular hallmarks, along with the use of interjections (such as "gotta, gotta, gotta"), some of which came from Cooke.[92][116] Producer Stewart thought the "begging singing" was stress-induced and enhanced by Redding's shyness.[104] Artists from many genres have named Redding as a musical influence. George Harrison called "Respect" an inspiration for "Drive My Car".[118] The Rolling Stones also mentioned Redding as a major influence.[119][120] Other artists influenced by Redding include Led Zeppelin,[121][122]Grateful Dead,[123]Lynyrd Skynyrd,[124]the Doors,[123] and virtually every soul and R&B musician from the early years, such as Al Green, Etta James,[36] William Bell,[123] Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Conley.[125]Janis Joplin was influenced by his singing style, according to Sam Andrew, a guitarist in her band Big Brother and the Holding Company. She stated that she learned "to push a song instead of just sliding over it" after hearing Redding.[126] The Bee Gees' Barry Gibb and Robin Gibb wrote the song "To Love Somebody"
for him to record. He loved it, and he was going to "cut it", as Barry
put it, on his return from his final concert. They dedicated the song to
his memory.
Awards and honors
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
inducted Redding in 1989, declaring his name to be "synonymous with the
term soul music that arose out of the black experience in America
through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm and blues into a form of
funky, secular testifying."[127] Readers of the British music newspaper Melody Maker voted him the top vocalist of 1967, superseding Elvis Presley, who had topped the list for the prior 10 years.[81][125][128] In 1988, he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.[82] Five years later, the United States Post Office issued a 29-cent commemorative postage stamp in his honor.[129] Redding was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994,[107] and in 1999 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[130]
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included three Redding recordings,
"Shake", "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", and "Try a Little
Tenderness," on its list of "The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll."[131] American music magazine Rolling Stone ranked Redding at number 21 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time"[132] and eighth on their list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".[101]Q ranked Redding fourth among "100 Greatest Singers", after only Frank Sinatra, Franklin and Presley.[133] Five of his albums, Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, Dreams to Remember: The Otis Redding Anthology, The Dock of the Bay, Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul and Live in Europe, were ranked by Rolling Stone on their list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The first album was singled out for praise by music critics; apart from the Rolling Stone listing at number 74, NME ranked it 35 on their list of the "Greatest Albums of All Time".[134] Music critic Robert Christgau said that Otis Blue was "the first great album by one of soul's few reliable long-form artists",[135] and that Redding's "original LPs were among the most intelligently conceived black albums of the '60s".[136] In 2002, the city of Macon honored its native son by unveiling a memorial statue (32°50′19.05″N83°37′17.30″W) in the city's Gateway Park. The park is next to the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Ocmulgee River. The Otis Redding Memorial Library is also housed in the city.[137] The Rhythm and Blues Foundation named Redding as the recipient of its 2006 Pioneer Award.[138]Billboard awarded Redding the "Otis Redding Excellence Award" the same year.[36] A year later he was inducted into the Hollywood's Rockwalk in California.[82]
On August 17, 2013, in Cleveland, Ohio, the city where he did his last
show at Leo's Casino, Redding was inducted into the inaugural class of
the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame at Cleveland State
University.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Community Development Project. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved January 2, 2019.
Ribowsky, Mark (2015). Dreams to Remember : Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul. Liveright Publishing Corporation. pp. 229–232. ISBN978-0-87140-873-0.
Seidenberg, Robert (December 9, 1994). "Death of the King of Soul". Entertainment Weekly (252). Retrieved November 25, 2012. Paying tribute to the King of Soul – Twenty-seven years after his death, Otis Redding's influences is still strong
"James Brown Crowned "King of Soul' at the Apollo Theater". Jet. 43 (3): 59. October 12, 1972. ISSN0021-5996. To Mark the ten years, officials at the Apollo crowned Brown 'King of Soul'
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Brown, Geoff (2001). Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness (new ed.). Edinburgh: Canongate. ISBN978-1-84195-316-8.
Browne, Pat; Browne, Ray B. (2001). The Guide to United States Popular Culture. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. ISBN978-0-87972-821-2. OCLC44573365.
Ripani, Richard J. (2006). The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm & Blues, 1950–1999. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN978-1-57806-862-3. OCLC69732900.
Rolling Stone Magazine Staff (1967). The Rolling Stone Record Review. 1. Pocket Books. ISBN978-0-671-78531-4.
White, Charles (2003). The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorized Biography (3 ed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN978-0-7119-9761-5. OCLC52947711.
Further reading
Schiesel, Jane (1973). The Otis Redding Story (1st ed.). Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN978-0-385-02335-1.
Delehant, Jim (2004). "The Blues Changes from Day to Day: Otis Redding Interview". In David Brackett. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN9780195125702. OCLC628872571.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.