When was otis redding popular

Everyone knew it, and Otis was the front man at Stax. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. You are no longer onsite at your organization. Please log in. It was no accident that the one black crossover star of the nineteen-fifties who made no effort to qualify his sexuality, the guitarist Chuck Berry, was also the one black star to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, in , on a trumped-up morals charge.

Otis Redding was something else again. When he came up, in , he was a completely unschooled performer who stood stock still onstage as he sang the pining, courtly ballads that brought him his first success. Over time, however, as his repertoire broadened to include driving, up-tempo songs, Redding found a way to use his imposing size and presence as a foil for his heartfelt emotionality, eschewing the conventions of graceful stagecraft in favor of a raw physicality that earned him comparisons to athletes like the football star Jim Brown.

And then he was no more. Eerily, within a few years, he would be joined in this company by two of his co-stars at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. But, inevitably, they still only hinted at what might have been. The informality of the Stax studio had afforded Redding the freedom to function, uncredited, as the producer and arranger on the records he made there. There is no question that he would have continued in this vein, blazing a path that musical auteurs like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder would follow with the self-produced albums that established them as mainstream pop stars, in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

It also appeared on the album The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads , but the irony is, considering the title and genesis of the song, it was not a ballad at all, but a more uptempo affair with a beat built for doing the jerk and the twine. Those dances may have died, but Mr Pitiful can still groove ya. Could he really have only been 21 when he sang it?

His voice revealed a level of experience far beyond his years…. At this point — — the singer was so at ease with his talent that he could perform a song as well-known as this yet effortlessly make it his own, imbuing it with all the sweat and soul that drips from all of the best Otis Redding songs.

There is a heartbreaking irony at the heart of this tender ballad. So cruel. Though the horns that introduce it have a few teardrops in them, this gem from is no tale of woe. Holding its own among the best Otis Redding songs, it finds the singer delivering a line, the horns imitating him, and his Sad Song doing exactly what its lyrics say it will do: cheer you up.

The strength of the self-penned song was evident when he sang it during the interval at a gig by Johnny Jenkins, a guitarist who employed Redding as a driver.

Released as a single, it was a slow-building hit, eventually shifting , copies. Otis had arrived. No shortage of the best Otis Redding songs come from — a year in which the singer could not put a foot wrong. Otis had the ability to take songs from any era and transform them into sweet soul music. Try A Little Tenderness was written in and was recorded by various swing orchestras as well as crooner Bing Crosby. Otis drove all the schmaltz out of it and, with the help of arranger Isaac Hayes, turned it into a soulful tour de force, building from a gentle opening to a climactic finale that became a highlight of his stage show.