Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. 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. Redding’s breakthrough came in 1958 on disc jockey Hamp Swain’s “The Teenage Party,” a talent contest at the local Roxy and Souglass Theatres. 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 dollars).
When Walden started to look for a record label for Jenkins he was sent to the Stax Studio studio in Memphis. The session with Jenkins was unproductive and ended early; Redding was allowed to perform two songs. The first was “Hey Hey Baby”. The second was “These Arms of Mine”, featuring Jenkins on guitar and Steve Cropper on piano. 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.” 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. It became one of his most successful songs, selling more than 800,000 copies.
Most of Redding’s songs from his first album, had a slow tempo. Disc jockey A. C. Moohah Williams accordingly labeled him “Mr. Pitiful”, and subsequently, Cropper and Redding wrote the eponymous song. That and top 100 singles ” Chained and Bound”, “Come to Me” and “That’s How Strong My Love Is” were included on Redding’s second studio album, released in March 1965. Around 1965, Redding co-wrote “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” with Jerry Butler, the former 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 recorded 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, was released in September 1965. Otis Blue also includes Redding’s much-loved cover of “A Change Is Gonna Come” in 1965.
In late 1966, Redding returned to the Stax studio and recorded several tracks, including “Try A Little Tenderness. Today often considered his signature song,] 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 Issac Hayes worked on the arrangement. “Try a Little Tenderness” was included on his next album. 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.
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. Until that point, Redding was still performing mainly for black audiences. At the time, he “had not been considered a commercially viable player in the mainstream white American market.” 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.” His act included his own song “Respect” and a version of the Roling Stones Satisfaction.
In early December 1967, Redding again recorded at Stax. One new song was “(Sitting On) The Dock of the Bay”, which was written with Cropper. Redding was inspired by the Beatles album Sgt Pepper 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. He whistled at the end, either forgetting Cropper’s “fadeout rap” or paraphrasing it intentionally.
After a concert Redding was due to fly home, although the weather was poor, with heavy rain and fog, and despite warnings, the plane took off. Four miles from their destination, pilot Richard Fraser radioed for permission to land. Shortly thereafter, the plane crashed into Lake Monona. The cause of the crash was never determined. James brown claimed in his autobiography The Godfather of Soul that he had warned Redding not to fly in the plane. 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 Fraser.
