Otis Redding

 

Singer, record producer and song writer Otis Ray Redding Jr (Otis Redding) needs no introduction, and is now regarded as one of the greatest singers in American popular music. Otis Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia on September 9th, 1941. His family moved to Macon, Georgia, when he was two. His early musical influences were gospel music, blues music, country music, Little Richard and especially Sam Cooke. He sang with the Vineville Baptist Church Choir. He quit school at 15 to support his family, due to his father contracting tuberculosis, and first found musical employment with Little Richard’s band The Upsetters, a band called Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, then in 1958 he found himself in Johnny Jenkins’ band The Pinetoppers as a featured vocalist (and driver and roadie) and toured the South extensively. In mid-1960 he moved to Los Angeles to see if he could get into the recording industry. The recordings he made there were his first experience of proper recording studios and session musicians who knew their stuff, and he learned a lot, but success eluded him and he was soon back in the South. In 1962 the Pinetoppers were booked to record at the Stax studio in Memphis in 1962, a session being financed by Atlantic Records and arranged by a publicist and talent scout, Joe Galkin, and Otis drove them there; there was time left at the end of the session, and he had a song he could sing, “These Arms of Mine”. They recorded it, and the Stax team saw his potential.

Otis Redding, who had just recorded the basic vocal track for his new song, “The dock of the bay”, died on December 10th, 1967 aged 26. He was flying his current band, The Barkays, with him to a performance in Madison, in Otis’ private Beechcraft H18 plane. The weather was poor but despite warnings the plane took off. Four air miles from their destination, pilot Richard Fraser requested permission to land. Shortly after the plane crashed into Lake Monona. The Barkays’ Ben Cauley was the only survivor. He had been sleeping and woke to hear Barkays’ Phalon Jones look out of a window and shout “Oh No!” Cauley remembered undoing his seat belt but the next second found himself in water. Otis Redding, Phalon Jones, Jimmy King, Ronnie Cauldwell, Carl Cunningham, Matthew Kelly and Richard Fraser all died. The exact cause of the crash was never determined.

Ben Cauley died in Memphis on 21 September 2015.

Image: Rolling Stone, GAB Archive/Redferns