The story of Otis Redding

A preacher's son in Macon

Otis Ray Redding Junior was born in Dawson, Georgia, on the ninth of September 1941. He was the fourth of six children and the first son of Otis Redding Senior, a sharecropper who later worked at Robins Air Force Base and sometimes preached in local churches, and his wife Fannie. When Otis was about three, the family moved to Tindall Heights, a public housing project in Macon. He sang in the choir at Vineville Baptist Church, picked up guitar and piano, and from the age of ten took drum and singing lessons. By his teens he was earning six dollars every Sunday singing gospel songs on the Macon radio station WIBB.[1] [2] [3]

Two singers shaped him more than anyone. One was Sam Cooke. The other was a Macon hero, Little Richard, who had grown up in the same town. Otis later said he got into the music business because of Richard, and that he used to sing exactly like him. At fifteen he had to leave school. His father had caught tuberculosis and was often in hospital, so his mother was carrying the family. Otis took whatever work he could find, digging wells and pumping gas, while playing music on the side. A local pianist named Gladys Williams, who led a band at the Hillview Springs Social Club, let him sit in and ran Sunday talent shows he attended with his friends.[1] [2]

His big local break came through a disc jockey called Hamp Swain, known on the radio as the King Bee. Swain hosted a talent contest called The Teenage Party at the Roxy and Douglass theatres in Macon. In 1958 a flashy local guitarist named Johnny Jenkins was in the audience, thought Otis's backing band was weak, and offered to play for him. Otis sang Little Richard's Heebie Jeebies. With Jenkins behind him he won the five dollar prize fifteen weeks in a row, and according to the family's official history, after fifteen straight wins he simply was not allowed to enter any more.[1] [2] [3]

At one of those Teenage Party shows Otis met a seventeen year old named Zelma Atwood. Their son Dexter was born in the summer of 1960, and they married in August 1961. Meanwhile Otis was trying to turn singing into a living. He fronted a group called Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers and briefly sang with the Upsetters, Little Richard's old band, after Richard quit rock and roll for the church. In mid 1960 he went to Los Angeles with his sister Deborah, leaving Zelma and the baby in Macon, and cut his first songs out there. One of them, Gamma Lamma, would soon come back to life under a new name.[1] [2]

The driver who sang

Back in Georgia, Otis worked the Chitlin Circuit, the string of venues across the segregated South where Black performers could play. Johnny Jenkins now led a band called the Pinetoppers, and Otis became their singer. He also became Jenkins's chauffeur, because Jenkins had no driver's license. Around this time Otis met Phil Walden, a white college student in Macon who was booking and managing local rhythm and blues acts. He also cut a single for a tiny label called Confederate Records, Shout Bamalama, his reworked Gamma Lamma. The bass player on that session was Wayne Cochran, a white Georgia singer who went on to write the teen tragedy song Last Kiss.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Walden's real hope was Johnny Jenkins. A Georgia promotion man for Atlantic Records, Joe Galkin, liked Jenkins too, and in 1962 he arranged a session at Stax, a young studio in Memphis that Atlantic distributed. Otis drove Jenkins the four hundred odd miles to Memphis. The session did not go well. Jenkins, backed by the Stax house band, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, failed to impress the studio's owner, Jim Stewart. With studio time left over, Galkin pushed Stewart to hear the big young man who had been unloading the gear. Otis first tried an uptempo song, Hey Hey Baby, which Stewart thought sounded too much like Little Richard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then Otis sang a ballad of his own, These Arms of Mine. Steve Cropper, the house guitarist, recalled the hair standing up on his neck. Jim Stewart said later that everyone had been about to go home, but there was something different in the way Otis poured himself into that song. Stewart signed him on the spot. The single came out on Volt, a new Stax sister label, in October 1962, with Hey Hey Baby on the other side. It climbed slowly, entering the charts the following spring, and eventually sold around eight hundred thousand copies. Otis Redding had walked into Stax as a driver and walked out as its future.[1] [2] [3]

That first single began a remarkable streak. According to the history of Stax, all seventeen singles Otis released in his lifetime made the charts, something no earlier Stax or Volt artist had done so consistently. The partnership with Phil Walden changed too. Walden stopped concentrating on Johnny Jenkins and became Otis's manager, a role he kept for the rest of Otis's life. Jenkins was gradually sidelined. He later drifted away from Otis's recordings, reportedly worried that Galkin, Walden and Cropper would copy his guitar style, and Steve Cropper became Otis's lead guitarist in the studio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mr. Pitiful learns his trade

The next two years were a steady climb. In June 1963 Otis recorded That's What My Heart Needs and a curious song called Mary's Little Lamb, the only Redding track with both backing singers and horns. It became his worst selling single. That September he cut Pain in My Heart, which sounded so much like Irma Thomas's Ruler of My Heart that it caused a copyright dispute. Even so, his debut album, also called Pain in My Heart, came out in March 1964. It mixed his own songs with covers of Little Richard's Lucille, Ben E. King's Stand by Me and Louie Louie. The title track reached number eleven on the rhythm and blues chart.[1] [2]

In November 1963 Otis went to New York to play the Apollo Theater in Harlem for a live Atlantic album. He took his brother Rodgers and a childhood friend, the former boxer Sylvester Huckaby. The pay was four hundred dollars a week, but he had to spend four hundred and fifty on sheet music for the house band, led by King Curtis. They were soon broke, staying at the run down Hotel Theresa and begging Walden for money. The headliner, Ben E. King, heard about it and handed Otis a hundred dollars. Around then both Walden and Rodgers were drafted into the Army, and Walden's younger brother Alan kept the business running.[1] [2]

So many of Otis's early records were slow, aching ballads that a disc jockey named A. C. Moohah Williams nicknamed him Mr. Pitiful. Steve Cropper heard about it and, the story goes, got the idea for a song while standing in the shower. He hummed it to Otis in the car on the way to the studio, and by the time they arrived it was written. Mr. Pitiful, recorded in December 1964, was their first songwriting collaboration and Otis's first top ten rhythm and blues hit. It anchored his second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, released in March 1965, which also featured That's How Strong My Love Is.[1] [2] [3]

Cropper became the most important musical partner of Otis's life. Cropper later said that the songs they wrote together were really about Otis himself, because Otis rarely wrote about his own life and Cropper did it for him. Otis, for his part, was a natural leader in the studio. He could not read music, but he would sing the horn parts to the players, making them up in his head. His biographer Jonathan Gould called him a head arranger. Booker T. Jones compared him to the conductor Leonard Bernstein, leading the band with his arms, his body and his fingers.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Blue in a day

In December 1964 Otis lost one of his idols. Sam Cooke was shot dead at a motel in Los Angeles. Otis's next album became, in part, a tribute. Three of its songs were Cooke's, including a searing version of A Change Is Gonna Come, Cooke's plea for racial justice. Around the same time Otis wrote I've Been Loving You Too Long with Jerry Butler of the Impressions, reportedly in a hotel near the Atlanta airport. Released as a single in April 1965, it reached number two on the rhythm and blues chart and number twenty one on the pop chart, his biggest hit so far.[1] [2] [3]

The album itself, Otis Blue, was made at astonishing speed. Apart from one track, it was recorded in two sessions between ten in the morning on Saturday the ninth of July 1965 and two in the afternoon the next day. There was a break in the middle so that the members of the house band could go and play their regular nightclub gigs around Memphis. According to the Redding estate, Otis walked in with only three original songs ready and decided much of the rest on the fly. Engineer Tom Dowd, who had worked with Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, came down from Atlantic and later called Otis a genius.[1] [2]

One of those originals was Respect. Otis sang it as a man on the road demanding respect when he comes home, and it gave him his second crossover hit, reaching the top five on the rhythm and blues chart and number thirty five on the pop chart. Just as striking was his cover of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction. Otis admitted he did not really know the words and made up his own. The horns played the famous riff, the way Keith Richards had originally imagined it, and Ronnie Wood later said the Stones' own concert versions came to follow Otis's arrangement.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Blue came out on the fifteenth of September 1965. The cover did not show Otis at all. Volt used a photograph of a young white woman, apparently believing it would sell better. It was his first album to top the rhythm and blues album chart and reached number six in Britain, where he was becoming a hero. Critics now rank it among the greatest albums ever made. Record Collector argued that its title did more than almost anything to establish the word soul as the name for what had been called rhythm and blues. It also sold steadily for years, making Otis what the trade called a catalogue artist.[1] [2] [3]

The Big O goes west

Success brought money and ambition. Otis bought a three hundred acre property in Round Oak, about twenty miles north of Macon, and called it the Big O Ranch, with a lake, livestock and a three story house. With Walden he started a music publishing company called Redwal and a small label called Jotis, a blend of Joe Galkin's name and his own. Jotis launched a young Atlanta singer named Arthur Conley. At a time when it was rare, Otis had a white manager and a racially mixed band, and his family says he was proud never to be ripped off by promoters or record executives.[1] [2] [3]

In April 1966 Otis did something bold. His audience was still mostly Black, so he booked a run at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, a rock club full of young white fans. He was one of the first soul artists to play for rock crowds on the West Coast, and the Los Angeles Times gave him glowing reviews. Bob Dylan came to see him and offered him a song, Just Like a Woman. Otis turned it down because it had too many words. The shows were recorded, and decades later the complete Whisky tapes won a Grammy for their album notes.[1] [2] [3]

That same year Otis went to Britain. He flew into London in March 1966, days ahead of the Stax crew, to do television interviews, and when the musicians arrived the Beatles sent a limousine to collect them. British fans adored him. Later that year the readers of Melody Maker voted him the top male vocalist in the world, ending a ten year run by Elvis Presley. Back in America, the promoter Bill Graham booked him into the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in December 1966. Graham called it the best gig he ever put on in his entire life.[1] [2] [3]

In between tours, Otis cut his next album, Complete and Unbelievable, The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, released in October 1966. It opened with Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa, a song he wrote with Cropper about his own habit of singing the horn lines, with the Stax songwriter David Porter on backing vocals. It also included a rollicking version of the Beatles' Day Tripper and a country standard, Tennessee Waltz. Jon Landau, the critic, called it the finest record ever to come out of Memphis. But the song everyone remembers from it was an old Tin Pan Alley tune from 1932.[1] [2]

Try a Little Tenderness had been sung by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra as a gentle ballad. Otis recorded it on the thirteenth of September 1966 with an arrangement worked out with the young Stax pianist Isaac Hayes, influenced by Sam Cooke's live version. It starts as a slow ballad, then keeps building until it explodes into a pounding, shouting finale. Drummer Al Jackson said it was the only song he ever played softly on, at least at the start. It reached number four on the rhythm and blues chart, and Jim Stewart later said that if one performance sums up who Otis was, it is this one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The King and Queen of 1967

Jim Stewart had an idea for early 1967: a duet album pairing Otis's roughness with the polish of Carla Thomas, the daughter of Rufus Thomas and Stax's first star. Carla was then studying for a master's degree in English at Howard University. They recorded in January 1967, though Otis was so busy touring that he overdubbed some of his parts later. King and Queen came out in March and went gold. Its first single, Tramp, a playful Lowell Fulson blues in which Carla teases Otis as a country boy in need of a haircut, reached number two on the rhythm and blues chart and outsold Fulson's original.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1967 Stax sent a package tour to Europe, the Stax Volt Revue, with Otis as headliner alongside Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas and Otis's protege Arthur Conley. Some at the label were unhappy that Otis took Conley, who had been signed straight to Atlantic's Atco label, instead of established Stax acts like Rufus Thomas and William Bell. Many who were there felt Sam and Dave stole the show on some nights. Otis's set at the Paris Olympia on the twenty first of March became his first live album, Live in Europe, the only one released in his lifetime.[1] [2] [3]

Otis was also becoming a producer. He and Arthur Conley reworked a Sam Cooke song called Yeah Man into Sweet Soul Music, a roll call of soul stars. Recorded at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 and sold a million. There was a catch. Cooke's business partner, J. W. Alexander, sued Otis and Conley for taking the melody. They settled by adding Cooke's name to the writing credits, and Otis agreed to record some songs from Cooke's publishing company in the future.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile the Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler had taken Aretha Franklin into the studio. In early 1967 she recorded Respect, the song Otis had written, rearranging it with her sisters and adding the famous spelled out chorus. It went to number one on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts that spring and became her signature song. Otis took it with good humour. He is widely quoted as saying that the little girl had taken his song away from him. Aretha's version was still riding high when Otis sang Respect himself at the Monterey Pop Festival that June.[1] [2] [3]

Monterey was the turning point. The festival in California in June 1967 was the gathering of the hippie rock world, and Otis closed the Saturday night show, invited through Jerry Wexler's efforts. Backed by Booker T. and the M.G.'s in matching lime green suits, he opened with Sam Cooke's Shake and asked the audience if they were the love crowd. He tore through Respect, Satisfaction and I've Been Loving You Too Long, and ended with Try a Little Tenderness as the crowd stood and screamed. The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir later said he was pretty sure he had seen God onstage.[1] [2] [3]

The new Otis

After Monterey, Otis wanted to grow. That summer he hired a new touring band, the Bar-Kays, a group of Memphis teenagers who had just scored a hit with Soul Finger. The trumpeter Ben Cauley remembered Otis running backstage after one of their shows to tell them how good they were. When they said they were still in school, Otis told them he would fly them to weekend gigs in his own plane. Their first job with him was a ten night stand at the Apollo. Otis was writing constantly now, carrying a cheap red acoustic guitar tuned to an open chord so he could strum ideas easily.[1] [2] [3]

In August 1967, during a run of shows in San Francisco, Otis was mobbed by fans at his hotel. Bill Graham offered him a quieter place to stay, a houseboat at Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito, across the bay. There Otis played the Beatles' new album, Sgt. Pepper, over and over, and began sketching a gentle, reflective song about sitting and watching the ships. Stax executive Al Bell had told him he risked being boxed in as a genre act, and suggested something folk like. Otis carried the idea around for weeks, adding lines on napkins and hotel stationery.[1] [2]

Then his voice gave out. Otis had developed polyps on his larynx, which he had been treating with tea, lemon and honey. In the autumn of 1967 he had surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and was told to stay silent while he healed. He communicated by writing notes and, according to Cropper, came back sounding better than ever. In a burst of creativity he wrote around thirty songs in two weeks. In the final weeks of his life he recorded more than thirty new tracks at Stax, including Hard to Handle, The Happy Song and I've Got Dreams to Remember, which grew from a poem by Zelma.[1] [2]

In late November Otis called Cropper from the Memphis airport, too excited to check into his hotel. He said he had a hit. Together they finished Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay, with Cropper supplying the bridge and a verse about leaving Georgia for San Francisco. Cropper strummed an acoustic guitar, with Duck Dunn on bass, Al Jackson on drums, Booker T. Jones on piano and the Memphis Horns. Not everyone loved it. Zelma worried he was changing too much. Dunn said it had no rhythm and blues in it at all and might hurt his career, and both Walden and Jim Stewart thought it too pop. Otis told Walden it would be his first million seller.[1] [2]

Lake Monona

On Friday the eighth of December 1967 Otis stopped by Stax to hear a rough mix of the new song. Cropper was setting up to add his electric guitar part. The last time he saw his friend, Otis poked his head into the control room and said he would see him Monday. That weekend Otis and the Bar-Kays flew in his twin engine Beechcraft to a gig at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, then on to Cleveland, where on Saturday they appeared on the television show Upbeat and played at a club called Leo's Casino. The writer Joe Eszterhas later said he interviewed Otis there until the early hours.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Sunday the tenth of December they set off early for Madison, Wisconsin, where they were due to play a club called the Factory. Bassist James Alexander stayed behind to return the rental car and take a commercial flight, because the plane had only seven seats. Ben Cauley remembered that the plane's battery seemed low that cold morning, but they took off without trouble. The weather over Wisconsin was bad, with rain and fog. At about half past three in the afternoon, four miles from Truax Field, the pilot radioed for permission to land. Moments later the plane went down into the icy water of Lake Monona.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cauley had been asleep. He woke to violent shaking and saw his bandmate Phalon Jones look out of the window and cry out. He unbuckled his seat belt, and the next thing he knew he was in freezing water. He could not swim, but he grabbed a seat cushion and stayed afloat. He heard Ronnie Caldwell calling for help and could not reach him. Rescuers pulled Cauley out within about seventeen minutes. He was the only survivor. The dead were Otis Redding, aged twenty six, the Bar-Kays Jimmie King, Phalon Jones, Ronnie Caldwell and Carl Cunningham, their seventeen year old valet Matthew Kelly, and the twenty six year old pilot Richard Fraser.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Divers found Otis's body the next day, still strapped into his seat. The cause of the crash was never determined. His family postponed the funeral so that more people could come, and on the eighteenth of December more than four thousand five hundred mourners crowded into and around Macon's City Auditorium, which held three thousand. Jerry Wexler gave the eulogy. Otis was laid to rest at the Big O Ranch in Round Oak. He left Zelma and their children Dexter, Karla and Otis the third. Zelma later adopted a fourth child, Demetria. Back in Memphis, Jim Stewart said the company was never the same for him after that day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Number one, too late

Otis died on a Sunday. By Cropper's account, on Monday Jerry Wexler was already calling Stax for a new single. On Tuesday morning Cropper went into the studio and spent twenty four hours mixing Dock of the Bay, while Otis's body was still being recovered. He remembered Otis clowning with seagull noises during the outtakes, so he fetched sound effects of gulls and waves from a local jingle company and faded them in. Then he drove to the airport and handed the master tape to a flight attendant on the tarmac. He called it one of the hardest things he ever had to do.[1] [2]

The single came out on the eighth of January 1968. In March it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for four weeks, the first posthumous number one in American chart history, and it topped the rhythm and blues chart too. It sold millions around the world and reached number three in Britain, where the album The Dock of the Bay became the first posthumous album to reach number one. In 1969 it won two Grammys, for best rhythm and blues song and best male rhythm and blues vocal. Jim Stewart remembered handing the gold record to Zelma and thinking that Otis never got to experience it.[1] [2] [3]

For Stax, the loss was a disaster on two fronts. Atlantic, which distributed the label, had been bought by Warner Brothers, and when Stax renegotiated it discovered that its old contract gave Atlantic ownership of the whole Stax catalogue, including Otis's recordings. Jim Stewart later admitted he had never read the contract. Stax cut ties with Atlantic in 1968, and Atlantic kept the unreleased Otis masters, issuing The Immortal Otis Redding, Love Man and Tell the Truth on its Atco label. Hits kept coming from beyond the grave, among them Hard to Handle, Amen and I've Got Dreams to Remember.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The survivors rebuilt as best they could. Ben Cauley and James Alexander reformed the Bar-Kays, who backed Isaac Hayes on Hot Buttered Soul and later became a hit funk band. Alexander named his son Phalon after their lost bandmate, and the boy grew up to be the producer Jazze Pha. More grief followed Stax. Al Jackson, the drummer on so many Otis records, was murdered at his Memphis home in 1975, and that same year Stax itself was forced to close. Phil Walden went on to found Capricorn Records in Macon and launch the Allman Brothers Band, but Otis's death stayed a wound he never forgot.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The legacy of the King of Soul

The honours kept arriving. In France, the Academie du Jazz created the Prix Otis Redding for the best rhythm and blues record, and Otis himself was its first winner. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, inducted by his boyhood hero Little Richard, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. The United States Postal Service put him on a stamp in 1993. In 2002 Macon unveiled a statue of him in Gateway Park beside the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge over the Ocmulgee River, and in 1997 a memorial plaque was placed beside Lake Monona in Madison.[1] [2] [3]

Musicians never stopped borrowing from him. George Harrison said Respect inspired the Beatles' Drive My Car. Janis Joplin said Otis taught her to push a song instead of sliding over it. The Bee Gees had written To Love Somebody for him, and he planned to record it before he died. The Black Crowes had a hit with Hard to Handle, the Grateful Dead played it around ninety times, and Michael Bolton's version of Dock of the Bay moved Zelma to tears. In 2011 Jay Z and Kanye West built their Grammy winning track Otis around a sample of Try a Little Tenderness, with the family's blessing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Otis's children carried the music forward. His sons Dexter and Otis the third formed a funk band called the Reddings with their cousin Mark Lockett, managed by Zelma. Their single Remote Control reached number six on the soul chart in 1980, and in 1982 they had a minor hit with their own version of Dock of the Bay. Otis Redding the third died of cancer on the eighteenth of April 2023, at the age of fifty nine. In 2007 Zelma founded the Otis Redding Foundation in Macon, which runs music camps, lessons and a creative arts centre for young people, in the spirit of the summer camp Otis had been planning when he died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026, the last voices from those Stax sessions are fading. Steve Cropper, Otis's closest collaborator, died in Nashville on the third of December 2025, at the age of eighty four, after a fall. In one of his last interviews about the song, he recalled that they had been searching for a crossover hit and knew at once that Dock of the Bay was it. Of Booker T. and the M.G.'s, only Booker T. Jones survives. Otis Redding recorded for barely five years and died at twenty six, yet Rolling Stone has ranked him among the ten greatest singers of all time, and he is still called simply the King of Soul.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Otis Redding

Otis Redding and Zelma Redding. Otis met Zelma Atwood at a Teenage Party talent show in Macon when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. Their son Dexter was born in 1960 and they married in August 1961, later having Karla and Otis the third. She stayed home in Macon while he spent most of his life on the road, where, his biographer says, he had many affairs. After his death she ran the estate, managed her sons' band and founded the Otis Redding Foundation.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Phil Walden. Phil Walden was a white Mercer University student booking Black bands in Macon when he met Otis. He first backed Johnny Jenkins, then became Otis's manager and close friend until the crash, founding their publishing company together, Redwal. Walden doubted Dock of the Bay, calling it too pop. After Otis died he founded Capricorn Records and launched the Allman Brothers Band, but he called the loss a devastating blow.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Steve Cropper. Steve Cropper, the white guitarist of Booker T. and the M.G.'s, played on nearly all of Otis's records and became his main songwriting partner, starting with Mr. Pitiful and ending with Dock of the Bay. Cropper said he wrote lyrics about Otis's life because Otis rarely did. After the crash he mixed Dock of the Bay in a single grieving day. He died in December 2025 at eighty four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Otis Redding and Johnny Jenkins. Johnny Jenkins, a flamboyant left handed guitarist, backed Otis at the talent shows that made his name and then hired him as the Pinetoppers' singer and his driver. Ironically it was Jenkins's own Stax session that gave Otis his break. As Otis's career took off, Jenkins was sidelined, and he later recorded with Duane Allman. He died in Macon in 2006.[1] [2]

Otis Redding and Jim Stewart. Jim Stewart, a former bank clerk and country fiddler, co founded Stax and signed Otis after hearing These Arms of Mine. He produced much of Otis's work and dreamed up the duet album with Carla Thomas, though Otis increasingly chafed at his caution and Stewart disliked Dock of the Bay at first. He later presented the gold record to Zelma, sad that Otis never saw it.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. Carla Thomas, the daughter of Rufus Thomas, was the polished Queen of Memphis Soul to Otis's rough King. Their 1967 album King and Queen went gold, and their duet Tramp, full of playful insults, reached number two on the rhythm and blues chart. Carla later said they had planned a second album that December, which Walden denied.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Arthur Conley. Otis heard the young Atlanta singer Arthur Conley in 1964 and had him recut a song for Otis's own Jotis label. He became Conley's mentor and producer, writing Sweet Soul Music with him, a million seller in 1967, and took him on the European tour over the heads of Stax veterans. Conley, who was gay, later moved to the Netherlands, took the name Lee Roberts and died there in 2003.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Jerry Wexler. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, the man who coined the term rhythm and blues, championed Otis and got him onto the bill at Monterey. He gave the eulogy at Otis's funeral. Yet Cropper remembered Wexler calling Stax for a new single the day after the crash, and it was Atlantic's contract that let it keep Otis's recordings when Stax broke away.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Otis Redding and Little Richard. Little Richard, another Macon native, was Otis's first idol. Otis won his talent shows singing Richard's Heebie Jeebies, briefly sang with Richard's old band the Upsetters, and said he entered music because of him. Stax even rejected Hey Hey Baby as too close to Richard's style. Decades later, in 1989, Little Richard inducted Otis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Aretha Franklin turned Otis's Respect into a number one hit in 1967, rearranging it and flipping its meaning into a demand from a woman. Otis joked that she had taken his song away from him. The admiration ran both ways. In 1969 Aretha won France's Prix Otis Redding, and she later covered I've Been Loving You Too Long and I Can't Turn You Loose.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Redding and Ben Cauley. Ben Cauley was the trumpeter in the Bar-Kays, the teenage band Otis hired in 1967 and promised to fly to gigs in his plane. He was the only survivor of the crash, a non swimmer kept afloat by a seat cushion. He rebuilt the band with James Alexander, survived a massive stroke in 1989, returned to Madison to play in Otis's memory in 2007, and died in 2015.[1] [2]

Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Otis modelled much of his phrasing on Sam Cooke, especially Cooke's live album at the Copa. After Cooke was shot dead in December 1964, Otis recorded three of his songs on Otis Blue. The debt had a cost too. Cooke's partner J. W. Alexander sued over Sweet Soul Music, which was based on Cooke's Yeah Man, and Cooke's name was added to the credits.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Otis Redding

• As a teenager Otis earned six dollars every Sunday singing gospel songs on a Macon radio station. Before any record deal, Otis sang gospel every Sunday on the Macon station WIBB for six dollars. He also sang in the choir at Vineville Baptist Church and in his high school band.[1]
• Otis won a Macon talent show fifteen weeks running and was then barred from entering again. The Teenage Party contest, hosted by disc jockey Hamp Swain, paid five dollars to the winner. After Otis won fifteen times in a row, according to his family's official biography, he was no longer allowed to compete.[1] [2]
• Otis got his big break partly because his bandleader had no driver's license. Johnny Jenkins could not legally drive, so Otis drove him to gigs, including the 1962 Stax session in Memphis. Stax planned to record Jenkins, but it was his driver who ended up with the contract.[1] [2]
• The bassist on Otis's early single Shout Bamalama was Wayne Cochran, who wrote the teen tragedy hit Last Kiss. Cochran, a white Georgia singer later called the White Knight of Soul, befriended Otis in Macon and played bass on Shout Bamalama and its flip side Fat Girl. His song Last Kiss later became a hit for other acts, including Pearl Jam.[1]
• Mary's Little Lamb was the only Otis Redding track with both backing singers and horns, and his worst selling single. Recorded in June 1963, the song was an odd experiment early in his Stax years. It flopped, and Otis never again combined a backing chorus and a horn section on the same record.[1] [2]
• At the Apollo in 1963 Otis spent more on sheet music than he earned, and Ben E. King bailed him out. Otis was paid four hundred dollars a week but owed four hundred and fifty for charts for King Curtis's house band. The headliner, Ben E. King, heard he was broke and gave him a hundred dollars.[1]
• Mr. Pitiful began as a disc jockey's teasing nickname for Otis. Radio host Moohah Williams called Otis Mr. Pitiful because his ballads sounded so mournful. Steve Cropper had the idea for a song in the shower and they finished it in the car on the way to Stax.[1] [2]
• Otis Blue was recorded with a six hour break so the band could go play their club gigs. The sessions ran from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon, the ninth and tenth of July 1965, but stopped from eight in the evening until two in the morning while Booker T. and the M.G.'s played their regular nightclub dates.[1] [2]
• Otis could not read music, so he sang the horn parts to the players himself. His biographer Jonathan Gould called him a head arranger. Otis would invent horn lines in his head and hum them to the Memphis Horns, a habit captured on the song Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa.[1] [2]
• When Stax musicians arrived in London in 1966, the Beatles sent a limousine to pick them up. Otis had flown in a few days early for television interviews in March 1966. The Beatles were big fans of the Stax sound and of Cropper's production on Otis's records.[1] [2]
• In 1967 Melody Maker readers voted Otis the world's top male singer, ending Elvis Presley's ten year run. The British weekly's readers had picked Elvis every year for a decade. Otis's popularity in Britain was so strong that his albums often charted higher there than at home.[1] [2]
• Bob Dylan offered Otis the song Just Like a Woman, and Otis turned it down for having too many words. Dylan saw Otis at the Whisky a Go Go in 1966 and offered him a version of the song. Otis believed in short, simple lyrics and felt it was too wordy.[1] [2]
• Bill Graham called Otis's run at the Fillmore the best gig he ever put on. The San Francisco promoter booked Otis into the Fillmore Auditorium in December 1966, paying him around eight hundred to a thousand dollars a night, and later called it the best show of his entire career.[1]
• The dramatic cymbal break in Try a Little Tenderness later turned up in Isaac Hayes's Theme from Shaft. Hayes helped arrange Otis's 1966 version of the old standard. He introduced a horn line inspired by Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come and a cymbal break he reused on his own Oscar winning hit.[1]
• Otis's small label Jotis was named by combining the names of Joe Galkin and Otis. Jotis Records released only four recordings, two of them by Arthur Conley. Otis also set up a publishing company, Redwal, named after Redding and Walden.[1] [2]
• At Monterey, Otis and Booker T. and the M.G.'s wore matching lime green suits. The M.G.'s played a few instrumentals first, then Otis joined them dressed identically. The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir later said he was pretty sure he had seen God onstage.[1] [2]
• The Bee Gees wrote To Love Somebody for Otis, who planned to record it after his final tour. Otis met Barry Gibb in New York and asked for a song. Barry said Otis loved it and meant to cut it on his return. After his death, the Gibbs dedicated it to his memory.[1] [2]
• Otis and fellow soul stars once asked Atlantic Records for a million dollars to rebuild Black neighbourhoods. In the Soul Clan, Otis joined Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, Don Covay and Ben E. King. Burke said they wanted to buy and refurbish housing in poor Southern areas, but Atlantic shelved the idea.[1] [2]
• Otis kept his cheap red acoustic guitar tuned to an open E chord so he could play chords easily. Cropper explained that the open tuning let Otis play major chords easily. Stanley Booth described the guitar as a bright red dime store model with a cracked front.[1] [2]
• Otis wrote around thirty songs in two weeks while recovering from throat surgery. Polyps on his larynx forced an operation at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in 1967. Unable to talk, he communicated in notes and poured the time into songwriting.[1] [2]
• I've Got Dreams to Remember grew out of a poem written by Otis's wife Zelma. It was one of more than thirty songs Otis recorded in his last weeks at Stax, and it became a posthumous hit in 1968.[1] [2]
• The seagulls and waves on Dock of the Bay came from a Memphis jingle company's sound effects library. Cropper remembered Otis making silly seagull noises during takes. After the crash he borrowed a sound effects record from Pepper Records, made tape loops and faded them in while mixing.[1] [2]
• During the Dock of the Bay session an engineer joked that Otis would never make it as a whistler. Otis's first attempt at the closing whistle was shaky, and engineer Ron Capone teased him about it. By the third take he had it.[1]
• Cropper delivered the Dock of the Bay master by handing it to a flight attendant on the airport tarmac. After mixing for twenty four hours straight, Cropper drove to the Memphis airport and passed the tape to a stewardess bound for New York, and disc jockeys had copies by Christmas.[1]
• Otis gave a broke horn player his last twenty dollars two days before he died. Saxophonist Mickey Gregory, who overdubbed a part on Dock of the Bay on the eighth of December, asked Otis for a loan. Otis said he had just given away two hundred dollars, but handed over his last twenty.[1]
• Duck Dunn's first Fender bass went down with Otis's plane in Lake Monona. Dunn had lent the bass to the Bar-Kays' James Alexander. Alexander himself missed the flight because there was no seat for him on Otis's small plane.[1] [2]
• The producer Jazze Pha is named after Phalon Jones, a Bar-Kay who died with Otis. Bassist James Alexander, who survived by taking another flight, named his son Phalon in memory of his bandmate. The boy grew up to become the rapper and producer Jazze Pha.[1]
• Ben Cauley, the crash's only survivor, could not swim and stayed afloat on a seat cushion. He lost one cushion in the waves and caught another. Rescuers reached him in about seventeen minutes, perhaps minutes before hypothermia would have killed him.[1] [2]
• At his death Otis was booked to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. His family says 1968 was set to be his biggest year, with shows planned at New York's Philharmonic Hall and Washington's Constitution Hall as well as network television.[1] [2]
• Otis was planning a summer camp for disadvantaged children when he died. He was keen to support Black youth. Decades later the Otis Redding Foundation, founded by Zelma in 2007, began running music camps for young people in Macon.[1] [2]
• France's Prix Otis Redding for the year's best rhythm and blues record was first awarded to Otis himself. The Academie du Jazz created the prize after his death and gave it to The Otis Redding Story. Later winners included Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner and Curtis Mayfield.[1] [2]
• Every one of the seventeen singles Otis released in his lifetime made the charts. He was the first Stax or Volt artist to chart consistently with every release, starting with These Arms of Mine in 1962.[1]
• Jay Z and Kanye West's track Otis credits Otis Redding as a featured artist. Built on a sample of Try a Little Tenderness, the 2011 song won a Grammy for best rap performance. Karla Redding said the family was honoured and checked that the lyrics suited her father's legacy.[1] [2]
• The Grateful Dead played Hard to Handle about ninety times, sung by Pigpen McKernan. They performed Otis's posthumous hit from 1969 to 1971, then revived it twice in 1982 with Etta James singing. The Black Crowes later made it a hit in 1990.[1] [2]
• Michael Bolton's cover of Dock of the Bay moved Zelma Redding to tears. She wrote that his 1987 version reminded her so much of her husband that it became her all time favourite version. The framed letter hangs in Bolton's office.[1]
• The pilot who died with Otis, Richard Fraser, was twenty six, the same age as Otis. Fraser came from Warner Robins, Georgia. Also killed was Otis's valet Matthew Kelly, who was just seventeen.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.