Playlists and music including the artist Otis Redding from albums currently available. Listen now.
Otis Redding collaborated on tracks on these CDs
Biography of Otis Redding
We are left to guess the direction Otis Redding's music would have taken had he lived. His last hit, the gently affecting "Dock of the Bay," pointed away from the impassioned soul ballads with which he'd made his name and strayed further yet from the Little Richard imitations with which he'd begun his career. Like many others during the mid-'60s, Redding discovered what was special about his music in Memphis. He had been recording sporadically and unsuccessfully for three or four years when he arrived at Stax and cut "These Arms of Mine." It gave us everything we could expect from him for the next few years: the almost exaggeratedly impassioned vocals couched in the sparse elegance of the Stax/Volt rhythm and horn sections. Wrenching ballads such as "I've Been Loving You" and "That's How Strong My Love Is" were judiciously mixed with uptempo stomps like "Mr. Pitiful" and "Respect." The individual albums inevitably contain some duds, but Otis rarely fired blanks on his singles. Redding's appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival and on the West Coast club circuit was beginning to spread word of his music beyond the traditional confines of the R&B market when he was tragically killed in a plane crash in December 1967. ~ Colin Escott
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