In 1962, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers had an audition in Memphis for the rising new label, Stax Records. Jenkins blew his shot, but with time left at the end of the session, his driver persuaded the Stax team to let him take a turn at the microphone. The solemn, simmering performance of “These Arms of Mine” that followed stopped the musicians cold —and went on to alter the sound of pop music to come.
That opportunistic vocalist was named Otis Redding, who is receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Oct. 3. Redding scored five Top 5 albums and 17 Top 20 singles on the R&B charts in less than six years of recording before he died in a plane crash in 1967 at the age of 26. At a time when airwaves and audiences were still heavily segregated, he became one of the country’s highest-grossing acts, forever defining the brawny intensity of Southern Soul.
Much of Redding’s greatest work came as an interpretive singer (often of such unlikely material as “Satisfaction” or his showstopping rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness”), but “The Big O” also wrote or co-wrote classics like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Respect” — which, in Aretha Franklin’s transformative version, was named by Rolling Stone in 2021 as the greatest song of all time.
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Raised in Macon, Ga., Redding first fell under the spell of hometown legend Little Richard’s singing. By the time of his unscheduled tryout at Stax’s studio, though, he had found a voice all his own. “Always think different from the next person,” he once said. “Don’t ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.”
His preference for ballads earned him the nickname “Mr. Pitiful” from a Memphis DJ, but he used the jab for inspiration; he co-wrote the lightly self-mocking “Mr. Pitiful,” which became a Top 10 hit.
Famously, Redding couldn’t dance much, and he wasn’t flashy — he was happiest at his farm in rural Georgia. (When he and Carla Thomas playfully trade insults on 1967’s “Tramp,” she says to Redding, “You’re country” and he replies, “That’s good.”) No one ever seemed to say a bad word about him; “He wasn’t just a magnificent talent,” his manager Phil Walden said, “he was a magnificent man.”
But his string of hits didn’t make a dent on the pop side during his lifetime. A series of performances at the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Whisky in Los Angeles, though, revealed that the rock counterculture was catching on to the power and catharsis of Redding’s delivery: Bob Dylan offered him “Just Like a Woman” to record, Janis Joplin took to proclaiming, “Otis Redding is God” and promoter Bill Graham said, decades later, “By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now.”
When he closed the second night of the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Redding mesmerized the audience. The reaction he got from the “Love Crowd” indicated that there could be new possibilities for his music.
That summer, Redding retreated to a houseboat in Sausalito and, inspired by the current sensation “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” began to explore different directions in his songwriting. Six months later, though, Redding was gone, killed when his rickety private plane plummeted into frigid Lake Monona en route to a show in Madison, Wis. The wistful, introspective “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” released a few weeks after his death, would fulfill the promise of Monterey and go all the way to the top of the pop charts.
“I am not a blues singer or an R&B singer,” Redding once said. “I’m a soul singer. We go into the studio without anything prepared, just record what comes out. That’s soul —the way you feel.”
Tipsheet
WHAT: Otis Redding receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
WHEN: 11:30 a.m., Oct. 4
WHERE: 6150 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
WEB: walkoffame.com