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He didn't usually write about himself, but I did.
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If you listen to the songs I wrote with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. 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. He had been at San Francisco playing The Fillmore, and he was staying at a boathouse, which is where he got the idea of the ship coming in. Anytime he came in to record he always had 10 or 15 different intros or titles, or whatever. Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas.
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In a 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper explained the "origins" of the song: In November of that year he joined producer and guitarist Steve Cropper at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. While touring in support of the LPs King & Queen (collaborations with female vocalist Carla Thomas) and his live set Live in Europe, he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. He had come off his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just months earlier in June 1967. Interestingly one theory of why he whistled at the end of the song is that he forgot the lyrics to the final verse.While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title "Dock of the Bay," on a houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California. Two days after recording "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" Redding died in an airplane crash on his way to Madison, Wisc. Redding disagreed saying it was his best song and believed it would be a hit. His wife Zelma did not like the melody, his recording company, Stax, did not care for the ballad-like sound, bassist Duck Dunn said it would damage Stax's reputation. Redding wrote and recorded "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" with Cropper but intially the song did not meet with approval of many in his inner circle. However with his performances at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angles and the Monterey Pop festival Redding became one of the first soul artists to perform for white rock-and-roll audiences in the west. When he recorded "Try a Little Tenderness" in 1966, arguably his signature song along with "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay," the publishers unsuccessfully tried to stop him from recording it from a "negro perspective." King, the Coasters, Doris Troy, Rufus Thomas, the Falcons, Steve Cropper, Booker T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, King Curtis, Ben E. Along the way he performed and recorded with acts such as Pat T.
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Over the next five years Redding's fame and popularity grew steadily. Stax released Redding's debut album, "Pain in My Heart," two years later. An unscheduled appearance on a Stax recording session led to a contract and his first single, "These Arms of Mine," in 1962. Every Sunday he earned $6 by performing gospel songs for Macon radio station WIBB.[In 1958, he joined Johnny Jenkins's band, the Pinetoppers, with whom he toured the Southern states as a singer and driver. On this day in 1967 Georgia born Otis Redding recorded "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay".īorn and raised in Dawson, Redding quit school at age 15 to support his family, working with Little Richard's backing band, the Upsetters, and performing at talent shows for prize money.