Born Sept. 9, 1941 in Dawson, Georgia, Otis Redding broke racial barriers and wrote the blueprint for soul music in his short life. Tragically, the 26-year-old died in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin, on Dec. 10, 1967. Just three days earlier, on this day in 1967, Redding had been in the studio recording music’s first-ever posthumous No. 1 hit, (“Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay.”
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The titular body of water is San Francisco Bay, which Otis Redding was overlooking at when he stayed on promoter Bill Graham’s houseboat at Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito, California. That’s where he wrote the first verse, continuing to scribble out lines for the song on napkins and hotel paper while on the road.
Later, Redding joined guitarist Steve Cropper at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, where they completed and recorded “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay.”
“Dock Of The Bay has a bluesy melody, but those chords don’t come from any single stylistic source,” New York University music education professor Ethan Hein wrote in a Dec. 5 article for Music Radar. “They’re the result of Steve Cropper’s guitar tuning, and Otis Redding’s playfully intelligent exploration of that tuning’s possibilities.”
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How Cropper Made Sure “Dock of the Bay” Was a Hit
Three days after re-recording “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” Redding and his backing band, the Bar-Kays, were traveling to a gig in Madison, Wisconsin, on the singer’s Beechcraft H18 airplane. Four miles from their final stop, amid heavy rain and fog, the plane plummeted into Lake Monona. Redding perished, along with four Bar-Kay members—guitarist Jimmy King, tenor saxophonist Phalon Jones, organist Ronnie Caldwell, and drummer Carl Cunningham—their valet, Matthew Kelly, and pilot Richard Fraser.
“And I said, ‘I just lost my best friend,” Steve Cropper told CBS Mornings in 2017.
With the label determined to release an Otis Redding song, Cropper headed into the studio to put the finishing touches on “Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay.” He added the sounds of seagulls crying and crashing waves, as Redding had requested.
“I started on a Tuesday morning and I handed it to a flight attendant on Wednesday morning,” said Cropper, who died earlier this week at age 84.
In January 1968, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100.
Featured image by Bob Buchanan/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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