3 Comments on “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay: Otis Redding”

1. katry Says:

   
   May 16, 2010 at 12:30 pm

   yousendit link:

   http://rcpt.yousendit.com/872689047/51b68e05e9adc4f540a96c4f56ab6135
2. sblake Says:

   
   May 16, 2010 at 7:35 pm

   Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967, 6 weeks before this was released and 3 days after he recorded it. It was by far his biggest hit and was also the first ever posthumous #1 single in the US. Redding was a rising star moving toward mainstream success at the time of his death. There is a good chance he would have recorded many more hits if he had lived.

   Stax guitarist Steve Cropper wrote this with Redding. Cropper produced the album when Redding died, including this with various songs Redding had recorded the last few years. In a 1990 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cropper explained: “Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas. Anytime he came in to record he always had 10 or 15 different intros or titles, or whatever. He had been at San Francisco playing The Fillmore, and he was staying at a boathouse (in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco), which is where he got the idea of the ship coming in. 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. If you listen to the songs I wrote with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. He didn’t usually write about himself, but I did. ‘Mr. Pitiful,’ ‘Sad Song Fa-Fa,’ they were about Otis’ life. ‘Dock Of The Bay’ was exactly that: ‘I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay’ was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.”

   When Otis recorded this, he and Cropper didn’t have a last verse written, so he whistled it. He planned to return to Memphis and fill in the verse after performing in Madison, Wisconsin, but he died before he had the chance. When Cropper produced the song, he left the whistling in, and it fit the mood of the song perfectly. It is probably the most famous whistling in any song

   Redding recorded this with Booker T. & the MG’s, the house band for Stax Records.

   This was so unlike any other Otis Redding composition that Stax Records chief Jim Stewart did not want the song released in any form – even after hearing both Redding and Cropper insist that it would be his first #1 single. Stewart relented when he heard the finished master recording put together by Cropper after Redding’s deat
   • katry Says:

     
     May 16, 2010 at 10:08 pm

     sblake,
     I knew he had died before it was released, but I didn’t know any more of this background. I also didn’t know or had forgotten that Redding was one of the writers.

     I always thought the whistle was purposeful.

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