Otis Redding

The following contains excerpts from the book, Otis Redding (An Unfinished Life) (Jonathan Gould).

This was an extensively written book, giving light not only to Otis Redding’s short career, but also the many other artists surrounding him who helped shape his journey. The book also gives an immersive view into the culture of our nation, particularly the state of Georgia, during Otis’ early years and his rise to fame.

“The long and remarkably diverse history of commercial popular music in America has been marked at regular intervals by moments in which a particular artist has connected with a particular audience in a way that would serve to redefine the parameters of popular taste…Otis Redding lived and died before the advent of rock journalism in America…For many years, what little the public knew of his life came from the flurry of obituaries, articles, and tributes that appeared in the wake of his death.”

“Otis Redding was born into a world whose parameters had been determined by the cotton gin, not the printing press…By any measure, his was one of the preeminent voices in what may have been the greatest generation of African American voices in the history of popular music. In 2007, forty years after his death, a panel of artists, critics, and music business professionals assembled by Rolling Stone ranked Redding eighth among the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, placing him in a constellation of contemporaries that included Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown.” These are all artists we encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study.

“Fortunately, though the written record is thin, the musical record could hardly be more robust, consisting of scores of studio recordings, three live albums, and nearly eighty original songs.”

Otis Redding’s parents, living in rural Georgia eventually navigated to Macon. “One of the main ways the Reddings went about assimilating themselves into their new surroundings was by joining a local church…church was the social hub of African American life in the South…Otis also joined the junior choir at the Vineville Baptist Church. Without fanfare or formality, his musical education had begun.”

“African American religious practice had evolved over the course of the nineteenth century as a rapturous form of worship in which Protestant teaching and preaching were combined with vestiges of the animism and spirit possession the slaves had retained from their West African ancestry. The music of the black church was shaped by a similar synthesis, in which the words of Protestant hymns were animated by call-and-response singing, collective vocal improvisation, and forms of rhythmic interplay that had their roots in the indigenous folk music of West Africa.”

“Churchgoing for them was a cathartic experience, in which the trials and tribulations of their daily lives were transcended every Sunday by a corrective force of hellfire preaching and collective singing. In a weekly ritual of improvised rapture, hymns were ‘lined out’ by a deacon and answered by a congregation whose individual members were free, in this one place, to express themselves as the spirit moved them, with shouts, moans, screams, cries, and spontaneous embellishments of every kind. This was the style of worship that Otis Redding’s parents and grandparents had grown up with in the rough-hewn Baptist churches they attended in Monroe and Terrell.”

“Whereas black Baptists and Methodists traditionally proscribed the use of musical instruments in their services (apart from an occasional piano or organ), the new sanctified churches encouraged the practice, finding sanction in a passage from the Book of Psalms that listed a full orchestra’s worth of instruments as being suitable for praising the Lord. Employing pianos, guitars, horns, and drums along with the ubiquitous tambourine, musicians in the sanctified churches played with the same spirit of abandon as the singing they accompanied, and they drew on many of the styles and techniques that were associated with the use of their instruments in popular music.”

The influence of Thomas Dorsey was profound on these churches. “His hybrid genre of gospel blues became the common denominator of black worship across the United States, spreading from the urban centers of the North…By the early 1940s, the choir in most black churches was a gospel choir, and the music performed in those churches was a mixture of jubilee songs, spirituals, and gospel blues.”

“Dorsey’s work as a composer combined the tonality of blues and the syncopated rhythms of jazz with lyrics that adapted the personalized outlook of popular songs to sacred themes…In the words of his great protégé Mahalia Jackson, ‘He was our Irving Berlin.’”

“The best form of music education that Macon had to offer was found in the pews of its black churches, in the shows Clint Brantley promoted at the City Auditorium, and most of all, on the radios, phonographs, and jukeboxes that had the capacity to turn any living room, soda shop, or automobile into an impromptu music conservatory.”

“By not merely participating but performing in church at such an early age, he began to make a visceral connection between the gospel singing he heard on records and radio, and something he could actually do.” We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand the relationship between music and spiritual expression.

“‘The church was the main area of social life in which Negroes could aspire to become the leaders of men,’ the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier observed. ‘It was the area of social life where ambitious individuals could achieve distinction and the symbols of status.’ This meant that church life in the African American community generally consisted of a few strong men- pastors and deacons- commanding the attention and admiration of a mostly female congregation. Small wonder that so many young boys like Otis felt themselves drawn to this role. Not only did a high proportion of the black professional singers who grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s learn to sing in the gospel church, but a surprising number of them, including Nat King Cole, Clyde McPhatter, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Johnny Ace, Ruth Brown, Don Covay, James Carr, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin, were, life Otis Redding, the songs and daughters of preachers.”

This was the era and seed-bed of the birth of ‘Soul Music’ “Now soul I find easy to define. It’s a feeling you can acquire only from some sort of depression from a hard life, hard times.” (Ray Charles)

“Though the origins of what came to be known in the 1960s as ‘soul music’ were diverse and complex, its existence as a distinct musical style dates form the records that Ray Charles made during the second half of the 1950s, beginning with the release of a song called ‘I Got a Woman’ in 1955…In 1954 he formed his own seven-piece band…he adapted the rhythms, chord progressions, verse structures, and vocal conventions of gospel music to songs with overtly secular and often sexualized lyrics. Some, like ‘This Little Girl of Mine’ and ‘Leave My Woman Alone,’ were taken virtually note for note from the gospel standards ‘This Little Light of mine’ and ‘Leave That Liar Alone’…retaining the emotional rhetoric and testimonial style of the sacred songs he adapted, applying the gospel themes of devotion, protection, companionship, and celebration to expressions of romantic and sexual desire.”

“By exalting profane emotions in a voice suffused with the ecstatic fervor of gospel singing, Ray Charles laid the groundwork not merely for a new musical style but for love and the satisfactions of sex were imbued with the ardor of salvation.”

“Adding to the impact and influence of these records was the sound of Charles’ band, a tight, hard-swinging ensemble modeled on Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five and staffed with jazz-trained musicians who could sight-read, meld styles, and generally fulfill their leader’s perfectionist demands…horn charts employed sophisticated voicings…the use of Latin American rhythms in R&B.”

“Previously, it had been unusual for women to sing behind a male lead in any genre of popular music…but their presence turned Charles’s songs into male-female dialogues, in which the male lead and female chorus variously teased, taunted, questioned, and answered one another. This call-and-response interaction was drawn directly form gospel quartet, but the sexual tension generated by the mixture of genders produced an entirely different effect.”

Charles and other artists were being heard on the radio. “In the long run, the unintended consequences of black radio would prove even more important that its commercial success…The ‘personalized’ nature of radio- its ability to speak to people on an individual basis in the privacy of their own homes and automobiles- was the medium’s saving grace.”

“Teenagers liked to listen to music, and teenagers liked to dance. Both of these activities figured heavily in the social lives of American adolescents regardless of color or creed…White teenagers had access to the same radio frequencies as black teenagers, and they had the same musical needs…Black popular music…was exploding with vitality and innovation…For the white Southerners in the mid-1950s, the sound of black music, speech, and humor on the radio was like nothing they had ever heard.”

The early beginnings of Rock ‘n Roll started to take shape. The author cites one particular instance in which the progression from jazz to R&B began to take shape as early Rock. “New Orleans in the mid-1950s was the center of an infectious brand of piano blues that was the legacy of several generations of indigenous keyboard styles…(Fats) Domino’s records were produced by the trumpeter Dave Bartholomew, who led the house band at the city’s one recording studio…In their work behind Domino, Lloyd Price, and nearly every other singer who recorded in New Orleans during these years, Bartholomew’s band, anchored by their drummer Earl Palmer, had perfected a distinctive rhythmic style that combined the rolling triplets associated with gospel pianists like Robert Martin with a steady jolting accent on the second and fourth beats of the bar. For musicians schooled in the principles of swing and bebop, this insistent accent sounded like a throwback to the march two-beat feel of early New Orleans jazz. But its real genesis came from the long-standing practice of black church congregations to keep time by stomping their feet and clapping their hands. When this simple alternation was transposed to the drum set, the dull thud of the bass drum contrasted with the sharp smack of the snare to produce a so-called ‘backbeat.’ In and of itself, a backbeat was nothing new. But by transforming an effect that had once been reserved for the climactic ‘shout choruses’ of big-band arrangements into a regularized rhythm, Dave Bartholomew’s band was orchestrating a sea change in the sound and feel of American popular music.” We teach the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the influence jazz had on R&B and Rock.

“While Ray Charles drew on the vocal embellishments, ‘preacher chords,’ and devotional lexicon of gospel music to bring new depths of emotion to the shopworn clichés of the blues, Little Richard was tapping into the fervent, unhinged frenzy of the storefront Holiness churches to lay the groundwork for a new style of music that was based less on emotion than on raw sensation. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was as loud, flashy, freakish, and superficial as the wildly camp persona Richard had adopted as a mode of self-expression and self-defense. Both musically and attitudinally, it marked the moment when black popular music gave birth to its bastard child, whose biracial appeal would mandate a change in the nomenclature, from ‘rhythm and blues’ to ‘rock ‘n ‘roll.’”

As black performers were beginning to have white audiences, touring the chitin’ circuit, they “were walking a very fine line indeed… ‘The reason we looked like a bunch of gay guys with loud-color pants and shirts and swishing on the stage was that we could play the white clubs and we wouldn’t be a threat to the white girls,’” according to Little Richard’s drummer, Chuck Conners. “Twenty-six states still had laws on their books forbidding interracial marriage in 1957, and 96 percent of the white Americans in a recent Gallup poll had expressed their disapproval of the practice.”

Otis’s career began, as he listened to Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs to the point that he could imitate them, and entered a local talent show at the Roxy Theater. “Otis began winning the talent show on a weekly basis during the summer of 1958, cycling through his repertoire of Little Richard and Chuck Berry.”

After that, joining forces with Johnny Jenkins and Pat Teacake and his band, he eventually made his debut with the group at a club called the Showbar on Cotton Avenue. During this time Otis was “introduced to the white college boy who had been hiring Pat Teacake and the Mighty Panthers to play at high school and college fraternity parties.” Phil Walden later became highly involved with Otis’ career management.

Otis began dating Zelma Atwood in 1959 and she turned up pregnant in February 1960. Otis was eighteen. “Shortly after learning that Zelma was pregnant, he announced plans to spend some time with his relatives in Los Angeles, ostensibly in an effort to get something happening with his singing career.”

“By the start of the 1960s, the major black recording stars who had made Los Angels their home included all three of the singers who exerted a primary influence on Otis Redding: Little Richard, Ray Charles, and Sam Cooke.” We hope to impart the value of listening to other artists to the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.

While in L.A., through the opportunities leveraged by an up-and-coming record producer James McEachin, Otis was able to record with the same backup musicians as Sam Cooke and Little Richard at the Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. “These Gold Star recordings are the first known examples of Otis Redding’s voice on record. As recording debuts go, this one is remarkable for the extraordinarily high quality of the accompaniment and production; two months shy of his nineteenth birthday, Otis is supported, not by the usual collection of bar band amateurs, but by one of the most accomplished studio bands in the world.”

Just as things were starting to move forward for Otis, he decided to buy a bus ticket back home. “Otis had left Los Angeles with little to show for his stay there.”

Phil Walden began to start promoting Otis as a ‘recording artist’ on the club and college circuit during the fall of 1960. Otis and Zelma were married after the birth of their first son.

Joe Galkin, was “an established figure in the Broadway demimonde of agents, managers, song publishers, and record men who formed the human infrastructure of the music business in New York.” He was “flat broke, (so) he moved to Atlanta and reinvented himself as the world’s first freelance record promotion man.

This is when Joe Galkin met Phil Walden and they came together to make something happen with Otis’ career. Joe Galkin saw that potential in Otis, while Phil Walden was still trying to promote the local band.

Memphis was a hot-bed for black musicians, and this is where the Stax record company was located. Galkin negotiated what was originally a session featuring the band Otis travelled with. When things didn’t work out so well with the band, it provided Otis with an opportunity to record. Otis sang ‘These Arms of Mine.’ “The result in this case, rough and halting as it is at times, was the first recording on which Otis Redding sounded like the singer the world would come to know- a singer, like Ray Charles on ‘I Got a Woman’ or Little Richard on ‘Tutti Frutti,’ who suddenly sounded like nobody else.” Soon thereafter, Otis had a management contract.

The single “These Arms of Mine” sold more than 100,000 copies. This was enough to persuade Jim Stewart to invite Otis back to Memphis for a recording date.”

“The major issue facing Otis at this point in his recording career centered on the fundamental question of what he was going to sing…Still another constraint on Otis’s efforts at songwriting was his insecurity about language…Otis’s self-consciousness about his diction and his vocabulary was a major source of inhibition when it came to the quasi-poetic formality of writing song lyrics.”

As he grew in his ability to make other’s songs his own, he had success in his recording and was offered a debut at the Apollo. “An Apollo debut was an intimidating experience for any aspiring black entertainer, especially one as green as Otis Redding…In Jerry Wexler’s view, ‘He was inept on stage. He simply stood in front of the microphone, arms outstretched, body motionless.’ And yet, Wexler added, ‘Despite his inertia, the women at the Apollo loved him.’ We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand that each person is unique in their talent and ability.

Otis was soon afforded an opportunity to participate as the opening act for the Motortown Review, the road show sponsored by Motown Records. “Otis’s dates at the Howard with two of Motown’s most choreographed acts, the Miracles and the Temptations, were an education in self-presentation and stagecraft. Show after show, he got to observe how these groups dressed and moved onstage, how they engaged with the audience, and how they paced their short sets.”

“The real model for Motown was the ‘star system’ as it functioned during the heyday of Hollywood, when the big studios set out to industrialize the production of movies and the talent it needed to make them by recruiting young actors, teaching them their craft, creating personas for them to inhabit on the screen, and- in return for their obedience to the studio’s every directive- rewarding them with the trappings of success. Along these lines, Motown set its singers and groups to an in-house ‘charm school’ where they were taught how to walk, talk, dance, dress, and behave with proper decorum on and off the stage.”

“In April, Otis joined a thirty-city Supersonic Attractions tour headed by James Brown…By 1964, Brown’s unbridled egotism had made him one of the most widely disliked figures in the world of black entertainment. But like many grandiose personalities, he was also capable of behaving magnanimously toward younger performers whose talent he respected- provided they gave him his due. Otis knew precisely how to deal with Brown, massaging his ego by calling him ‘Bossman’ and treating him like all the other petty tyrants he had grown up with in the Jim Crow South. In return, Brown enjoyed playing the role of mentor to his fellow Maconite.”

“It was Brown’s style as a bandleader and businessman that Otis sought to emulate. In the spring of 1964, Brown was touring with a trio of male backup singers, a quartet of female dancers, and a thirteen-piece band composed of a rhythm section, four trumpets, four saxes, and a trombone.”

“In the midst of a performance, if Brown detected an errant note or a scuffed shoe, he would hold up any number of fingers, each of them worth five dollars, to indicate the severity of the violation and the penalty it required.”

By 1962 Otis had matured, “the emotional range of his singing had grown by leaps and bounds. By rehearsing and performing with his own band on a regular basis, Otis was learning how to exert much greater control over the sound of his music. His bass player Mack Robinson had begun to function as his music director, helping him translate his ideas to the other musicians in the band, and a newly hired trumpet player from Macon, Sammy Coleman, had begun to work with Otis on his horn arranging.”

In 1964, Sam Cooke was shot to death in an event with a prostitute. Ray Charles was arrested for possessing marijuana and heroin. “In the summer of 1965…Charles would check himself into a clinic in Santa Monica…leaving, as Otis Recognized, a vacuum that begged to be filled.”

The Beatles at this time hit the scene. “Like the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll in the 1950s, the Beatles and their fellow British bands represented an insurgency in the eyes of the music business establishment. They came as yet another reminder that the wellsprings of innovation in popular music have always arisen on the social and geographical margins of society, not in its metropolitan centers. Atlantic Records’ success in the 1950s had rested on this realization, and on the readiness of the label’s founders to seek out the provincial locales and backwaters where great vernacular music was being made.”

“Ottis Redding spent the winter of 1965 shuttling back and forth between the grinding southern circuit of clubs and colleges that paid his bills and a series of northern theater dates…The theater dates functioned as weeklong residencies that gave Otis an opportunity to build his fan base and cultivate the disk jockeys who controlled access to the airwaves in the major black radio markets of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C.”

Otis continued to have success with his recordings and Billboard ratings. Motown was using the new process of ‘overdubbing,’ while in Memphis, Stax engineer Jim Stewart refused the technology, insisting the recordings be done live in order to retain the spontaneity and chemistry of the performances. It was Stax that re-signed Otis. According to Wexler, Otis was Stax.

An interviewer once asked John Lennon, “If you were sitting at home listening to record albums of other recording artists, who are some of the American recording artists you prefer? Lennon’s answer: Otis Redding.

“Decca took a mono mix of ‘My Girl’ form Otis Blue and released it as a single in the UK. The result was a masterstroke. ‘My Girl’ entered the British Top 30 at the end of November, rose to #11 in January, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the charts, thereby becoming the bestselling R&B single that Atlantic had released in Britain since the Drifters’ 1960 recording of ‘Save the Last Dance for Me.’ Even more impressive was its effect on the sales of Otis Blue, which rose to #5 on the British LP charts in February, rubbing shoulders with the latest releases by the Beatles and the Beach Boys.”

“By the end of 1965, Otis was earning a substantial living from his live performances, record royalties, and song publishing. He had traveled all over the country, spent time in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and gained a sense of how life was lived outside the South.”

“Defying one of the most cherished sterotypes of black physical prowess, Otis was by all accounts a notably inept dancer. (He shared this professional handicap with two of his most illustrious contemporaries, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, both of whom went to great lengths to learn how to move onstage.) As a singer and arranger, Otis’s sense of rhythm was acute; it was rather that his sense of rhythm didn’t translate easily to his oversize frame.” He gradually learned to simply ‘march’ with the up-tempo songs.

In August of 1965, “Otis played a week at the Regal Theater in Chicago on a bill that included the twenty-four-year-old Columbia Records artist Aretha Franklin…Though Otis and Aretha had never performed together before, they had known each other casually and admired one another from afar…Otis told Aretha that he planned to record his own version of ‘Tenderness’ on his next album. She responded by telling him that she was working on her own arrangement of ‘Respect.’”

“‘Try a Little Tenderness’ went on to become Otis’s bestselling ballad since ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,’ rising to #4 in R&B, #25 in Pop, and selling 300,000 copies during the winter of 1967.”

In 1967, Otis leased a twin-engine, six-seat Cessna to aid his busy travel schedule. Several other artists owned their own planes, as well.

Although Otis was very successful, he was somewhat saddened by the fact that he “was the only contemporary black singer of his stature who had not yet had a #1 R&B hit” like James Brown and Wilson Pickett were getting.

He discovered that his vocal chords were badly inflamed and had polyps. He underwent surgery to remove them and thought he would never sing again, although he eventually nursed his singing back for a recording session at Stax.

“When Otis called home on Sunday morning to check in with Zelma, she felt he sounded ‘depressed.’ They discussed household matters, and Otis said he would phone her when he got to Madison. ‘I was about to hang up, ‘Zelma recalled, ‘and I heard his voice and I put the phone back to my ear and he said, ‘Most of all, you know what I want you to do? I want you to be real good for me and I want you to take care of my children.’ I said, ‘Otis, I always take care you your children and I’m always good!’ I tried to turn it into a joke, but he was very serious.’”

Due to freezing fog, the Beech aircraft he was travelling in went into a sudden stall freefalling into the surface of Lake Michigan. Otis died in the plane crash. According to an expert’s analysis of what happened, “What Fraser (the pilot) did not know enough to take into account, however, was the capacity of the autopilot to mask the effects of ice building up on the Beech’s airframe, silently correcting for the increased drag and aerodynamic instability until things reached the point, most likely caused by the lowering of the landing gear, where it couldn’t correct anymore…He was not alone in this. NTSB records show that of the six other fatal accidents involving Beech 18s on final approach between 1967 and 1983, all of them involved icing conditions, and all but one of them took place in the Great Lakes region.”

“All told, Stax and Atlantic would sell 2.6 million singles and 1.3 million albums by Otis Redding in the United States during the year that followed his death- more than double his sales totals for any previous year. That The Dock of the Bay and The Immortal Otis Redding were composed almost entirely of original songs made their success even more unprecedented in the world of R&B.”

“In song after song, on record after record, from the start to the finish of his tragically abbreviated career, Otis was soul music’s greatest apostle of devotion. Of all the emotions that the black singers of his generation derived from their collective upbringing in the church and the myriad joys and sorrows of their lives in the world- the carnal rapture of Ray Charles, the sublime sensuality of Sam Cooke, the elegant anguish of Marvin Gaye, and the transcendent glory of Aretha Franklin- Otis’s special distinction turned on his desire to have and to hold. He sang of yearning and tenderness, security and respect, of one more day, and a lover’s prayer. He had the capacity to reduce human emotion to its absolute essence, to bring things down to a level of simplicity that nevertheless defied simplification.” Understanding the value of conveying emotion is a core principle we teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.

“Otis didn’t get to be with his wife and children as much as he wanted.” (Steve Cropper) And while on the road, he had liaisons with other women frequently. The tabloids didn’t hawk artists in Otis’s day, so the fact was little known. Having grown up in a wholesome church environment, he did retain vestiges of decency and kindness, but he couldn’t escape the difficulties of being a touring artist that are so common to the profession.

His career success came as a result of several things: 1) His God-given talent, 2) His immersion in church music culture, 3) His emulation of role-models he admired, 4) His willingness to go where those role-models were, 5) His hard work and consistency, 6) His desire to keep learning and growing, 7) His ability to get along with others, 8) His ability to push past his own insecurities and inherent weaknesses.

He seemed to be a kind and gentle man, who genuinely cared for his art. He seemed grateful for the successes he achieved and never expected anything be given to him that he didn’t earn.

His posthumous success shows again the fickleness and the tides of change in the world of the arts and entertainment.