![]() ![]() Wayne Jackson called the song “simple and funky-like a call and response in church.” There was also something no one had done, with the possible exception of Guy Mitchell on his fifties hit “Singing the Blues”-whistling as a riff. When Otis thought there should be a better first verse than the one that had him bathed in the morning sun, Porter thought otherwise, and the immortal opening stayed where it should have. ![]() I put those flourishes around Otis’s voice.”Dave Porter also made a key contribution. I wanted to capture a maritime feel-the sound of a boat on the Mississippi River, and the sounds of gospel and New Orleans. Otis’s lyrics touched me-about leaving home and watching the bay, trying to figure things out as everyone’s pulling at you. called the song “beautifully simplistic-all major chords. The backing track was done totally off-the-cuff, shrouded in melancholy tones and tempo that matched the mood of what Otis was singing, and Cropper suggested a bridge sung at a higher key and slightly faster pace, taken from the Association’s “Windy”-an R&B/pop group Cropper thought was a gold mine of riffs and hooks. Otis played and sang a verse he had written.” That, of course, was the woebegone yarn of him lounging in the morning sun, and not moving from that spot until the evening came, the hours consumed watching the ships in the bay come and go.Ĭropper, as always, induced him to think of similar thoughts, in this case ones he’d had on that dock, where he landed after roaming two thousand miles from home, which became another line, as did the not wanting to do what ten people advised him to do. As Cropper would recall, “When Otis walked in, he said, ‘Crop, get your guttar.’ I always kept a Gibson B-29 around. ![]() It was simple, spare, just a couple of lines, and, unlike most of his other works, had no horn line. Washington, Al Jackson, Wayne Jackson, and Joe Arnold, all of whom were perplexed about the song Otis came in with. But the ultimate source, the massive archive of Atlantic session logs, confirms the December 7 date, and that the working quorum for the session was Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. There is a disagreement in the Redding literature about the date of the session some have it as happening on December 6 or 7, or both, and Rob Bowman in Soulsville U.S.A. Nobody knew it would be Otis’s last session, of course. Jim didn’t book me for it, and I’ll never forgive him for that. “That was the only Otis session that I didn’t play on. To his everlasting regret, Floyd Newman wasn’t called. After Cropper told Jim Stewart that Otis Redding was headed over to cut another song he was sure was “a hit,” Stewart rang up most of the usual core of sidemen. Excerpted from "Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records and the Transformation of Southern Soul"īack at East McLemore Street on December 7, 1967, most of the session players had dispersed for the day. ![]()
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