Only a few performers have reached No. 1 with a single after their deaths. John Lennon and Janis Joplin ,for example. But the first person to do it in the US  was the dynamic Otis Redding. Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967 in Lake Monona in Madison Wisconsin. He was only 26 years old. Also killed were four members of his backing band The Bar-Kays, an assistant and the pilot . Ben Cauley, The Bar-kays’ 20 year old trumpet player and singer was the only one of eight people on board to survive the crash.

What’s The Story Behind “(Sittin On) The Dock Of The Bay

So what’s the story behind the song “Sittin On The Dock Of The Bay”? Redding played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. He knew it was a big deal but he didn’t know what the response from the crowd would be. They loved him! After the show he flew home to his ranch in Macon Ga. to share some great news with his wife Zelda. Redding said “I got a new audience”. Redding rested for a few weeks and In August 1967 he returned to San Francisco to perform at a jazz club. When he was mobbed by female fans at his hotel, the promoter Bill Graham told him “you can stay on my houseboat in Sausalito”. Redding spent his days quietly looking at the water, he could relax and write songs. One day he picked up his guitar and wrote a new song that began “sittin in the morning sun/I’ll be sittin when the evening comes.” That fall Redding stopped touring because he required surgery to remove polyps from his vocal chords. 

I got a hit

After healing from his surgery, in November 1967 Redding flew in to the Memphis airport and called his friend Steve Cropper who was the backing guitarist for Booker T. And The MGs (a.k.a.) the Stax House Band. He called Cropper to make sure he was going to be at the studio. When Redding arrived he ran into the studio and told Cropper “Get your gut-tar”, as he pronounced it “I got a hit”. They sat and hammered out the song. Cropper added the line “I left my home in Georgia” because he wanted to make it personal. Otis was born in Dawson and lived in Macon. Cropper says” I finished the second verse, wrote the bridge, helped on the third verse and arranged it. He says ships thats what I am thinking? San Francisco, Frisco Bay, ships going under the Golden Gate Bridge. That was not what he was talking about. He was talking about the ferries that went across to Oakland to Sausalito. When a ferry comes to park and let people off in their cars, they kind of roll in and when they do that they push up a big wave on the bank. So a ferry was a ship in his mind. That’s what he was talking about.” So they finished writing and go in to record.

Redding thought it needed background and Cropper agreed with him. The Staples Singers earlier on had been signed to Stax and Cropper had been working with them and suggested that they be on the record but it never happened.

Who’s doing the whistling ?

The whistling toward the end of the song has been the subject of a lot of discussion. Cropper says he left space at the end of the song for Redding to add extra vocals in case he wanted to do it at a later date. During this session Redding forgot what he wanted to sing and whistled instead. Engineer Ron Capone said jokingly “he wasn’t going to make it as a whistler”. After three takes he nailed it. Later gossip started whirling that Redding’s whistling wasn’t sufficient and that Cropper hired Musician Sam “Bluzman” Taylor to do a stronger take. Cropper denies that and says “I don’t even know where that story came from”.

Otis never heard the finished song

“Sittin On The Dock Of The Bay” was recorded two weeks before Otis’s death.   Cropper played acoustic guitar on the session. But Otis never heard the electric guitar because Cropper overdubbed it on a Friday afternoon and Redding died in the plane crash Sunday morning, plus he never heard the ocean waves and the seagulls on the record. After Redding’s death Cropper gets a call from Atlantic records saying they had to have a record to release immediately. Cropper told the record executive “We don’t have anything that’s finished, everything is raw and in the can”. Atlantic Records insisted so Cropper, even though he had a difficult time doing the final mix on the track, because of Otis’ death decided to release “(Sittin On) The Dock Of The Bay”. About three months later, On March 16, 1968, ” Sittin On The Dock Of The Bay” reached no. 1 on the Billboard charts and became Redding’s Posthumous signature song.