Since that time an impressive list of musical talent has joined Otis Redding, for producing # 1 songs released after the artist was gone. Dock of the Bay reached #1 on the billboard Hot 100 on Maand stayed there, for four weeks. The song shot to the top of R&B charts and pop charts, weren’t far behind. Rhythm & Blues stations were quick to add the song to playlists already saturated, with Otis Redding. True to his word, Cropper mixed Dock of the Bay as he said he would, adding in the crashing waves and the seagulls and keeping the outro, the way Otis had left it. Ben Cauley remembers waking from a nap to see band-mate Phalon Jones look out a window and cry out “Oh No!” He then found himself alone, clutching a seat cushion in the 34-degree waters of Lake Monona. The plane took off despite warnings of foul weather. The band had played two nights in Cleveland. The kid who once pumped gas to help support the family boarded his own Beechcraft H-18 aircraft on Decemalong with Bar-Kays guitarist Jimmy King, tenor saxophonist Phalon Jones, organist Ronnie Caldwell, trumpet player Ben Cauley, drummer Carl Cunningham, their valet Matthew Kelly and the pilot, Richard Fraser. That second session was never meant to be. He forgot what it was so he started whistling.” No trouble, it could all be fixed an a second recording session session, after the tour. Cropper explains there’s “this little fadeout rap he was gonna do, an ad-lib. The “outro”, the twenty-five seconds’ whistling at the end, were nothing but a place holder. Redding remembered those sounds from the rented houseboat in Sausalito where he wrote the first lines and asked Stax producer and guitarist Steve Cropper, to dub them in. If you listen to the song – the seagulls, the sound of lapping waves – that’s what he was going for. Redding wanted to expand his musical footprint beyond the soul and R&B genre and took strong influence from the Beatles, particularly the layered sounds of Sgt. The song wasn’t intended to turn out the way it did.
The album by the same name was the first posthumous album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart. Redding’s iconic song and #1 hit, “ Sittin’ on the Dock of the bay“, became the first posthumous number-one record on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts. His initial recordings were mainly popular with black audiences, but Redding and others crossed the “color barrier”, performing at “white owned” venues like Whisky a Go Go in LA, the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, and venues throughout Paris, London and other European cities. It was he who wrote the ballad R-E-S-P-E-C-T made famous by the “Queen of Soul”, Aretha Franklin. Musicians from Led Zeppelin to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Janis Joplin and virtually every soul and R&B musician of the era have taken musical influence from Otis Redding. Singer-songwriter-musician Otis Redding became STAX Records’ biggest star in the five years before the plane crash that took his life: the “Big O”, the “King of Soul”. The label’s use of a single studio and a small stable of musicians and songwriters produced a readily identifiable sound based on black gospel and rhythm & blues which came to be known as Southern soul, or Memphis soul. No one could complain about the album then, and it still holds more than four decades later.Redding joined STAX Records in 1962, a portmanteau of the founding partners and siblings Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (STewart/AXton = Stax). Cropper chose his tracks well, selecting some of the strongest and most unusual among the late singer's orphaned songs: "I Love You More Than Words Can Say" is one of Redding's most passionate performances "Let Me Come on Home" presents an ebullient Redding accompanied by some sharp playing, and "Don't Mess with Cupid" begins with a gorgeous guitar flourish and blooms into an intense, pounding, soaring showcase for singer and band alike.
Despite the mix-and-match nature of the album, however, this is an impossible record not to love. There's little cohesion, stylistic or otherwise, in the songs, especially when the title track is taken into consideration - nothing else here resembles it, for the obvious reason that Redding never had a chance to follow it up. Dock of the Bay is, indeed, a mixed bag of singles and B-sides going back to July of 1965, one hit duet with Carla Thomas, and two, previously unissued tracks from 19. What could have been a cash-in effort or a grim memorial album instead became a vivid, exciting presentation of some key aspects of the talent that was lost when Redding died. Producer/guitarist Steve Cropper had a difficult task to perform in pulling together this album, the first of several posthumous releases issued by Stax/Volt in the wake of Redding's death. It was never supposed to be like this: "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was supposed to mark the beginning of a new phase in Otis Redding's career, not an ending.