Otis Redding

Otis Ray Redding Jr. was born on the ninth of September 1941 at Dawson, Georgia, the fourth of six children of the Reverend Otis Redding Sr. — a Baptist preacher and a sharecropper — and Fannie Mae Roseman Redding, a homemaker. The family moved to the federal housing projects at Bellevue in Macon, Georgia, when he was three. He attended Ballard Hudson Senior High School at Macon through tenth grade and left in 1957 at fifteen to work as a well-digger and as a singer in the local Macon Black-club circuit. He won the weekly talent contest at the Macon Douglass Theatre fifteen successive weeks until the management retired him.

He joined Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers in 1958 as the lead vocalist and drummer. The Pinetoppers travelled to the Stax Records studios at Memphis on the fourteenth of October 1962 to record an audition for Jenkins. Redding — sitting at the studio piano while Jenkins's session was completing — was invited by the Stax house arranger Steve Cropper to record one song at the end of the session. He recorded "These Arms of Mine" in approximately twenty minutes. The single — released in December 1962 — produced his Stax contract and the body of recorded work that would constitute the principal solo vocal canon of the Stax-Volt label.

He recorded across the following five years the Stax-Volt singles — "Pain in My Heart" (1963), "I've Been Loving You Too Long" (1965), "Respect" (1965), "Try a Little Tenderness" (1966), "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)" (1966) — that established him as the principal male soul vocalist of the period. The 1965 Stax album Otis Blue, recorded in a single twenty-four-hour studio session at the McLemore Avenue Stax studios in Memphis, is regularly identified by present critical consensus as one of the great soul albums of the twentieth century.

His decisive international moment was the Monterey International Pop Festival of the sixteenth of June 1967 — at which his closing-set performance for an estimated thirty-two thousand audience members of the predominantly white San Francisco rock circuit produced his cross-over career. The single "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" — co-written with Steve Cropper and recorded at the Stax studios on the eighth of December 1967 — was completed three days before his death. The recording was released in January 1968 and reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1968, becoming the first posthumous Black artist's single to top the chart.

He died on the tenth of December 1967 when his chartered Beechcraft H18 aircraft crashed into Lake Monona near Madison, Wisconsin. He was twenty-six.

He is honored here as the principal vocalist of Stax.