Then, in two recording sessions, the first on November 22 and the last on December 8, 1967, Otis Redding recorded “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay.”Īfter laying down the vocal for “Dock Of The Bay,” Otis, along with his backup band, the Bar-Kays, left for a series of road appearances. Then Otis played and sang a verse he had written: Sittin' in the mornin' sun/I'll be sittin' when the evenin' come/Watching the ships roll in/And then I watch 'em roll away again.'įrom that beginning, Otis and Cropper fashioned the rest of the lyrics and the melody of the song. He grabbed it, tuned it to an open E-chord, which made the guitar easier to play slide.

'When Otis walked in, he said, 'Crop, get your gut-tar.' I always kept a Gibson B-29 around. 'Usually when Otis came to town, he waited until he checked into the Holiday Inn before calling me to work with him on songs in his room. Steve Cropper remembers the day Otis shared the beginnings of the new song with him. So, he began composing a song unlike anything he had written or recorded before. The thought that kept running through his mind was “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.” He would literally sit and watch the ferry boats run back and forth. Otis had gone to San Francisco to perform at the Fillmore, and while there he stayed at a boathouse in Sausalito, just across the bay. But the down time had given him a season for musical reflection that now took him in a somewhat different direction. To everyone’s relief, Otis sounded even better after he recovered from the operation than before. Naturally, there was some trepidation concerning what this might mean for his voice. Under doctors’ orders, he was forbidden to sing or talk for six weeks after the procedure. He had to have surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords. “We had our own Woodstock,” says wife, Zelma Redding.Īt this high point of his career, there was only one cloud on Otis Redding’s horizon.

In the wake of his success on the worldwide stage provided by the Monterey festival, he hosted a huge barbecue for about 300 guests involved in the music industry at his 300-acre Big O Ranch about 25 miles north of his former home in Macon, Georgia.

As the only soul music act at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Otis gave a scintillating performance that, according to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, “stole the show from Janis Joplin, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix.” He now became an ascending star, not just among African Americans, but with pop music fans all over the world. Then came the event that catapulted Otis Redding to fame with an audience he had never reached before.

Dock of the bay singer