In 1962, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers had an audition in Memphis for the rising new label, Stax Records. Jenkins blew his shot, but with time left at the end of the session, his driver persuaded the Stax team to let him take a turn at the microphone. The solemn, simmering performance of “These Arms of Mine” that followed stopped the musicians cold — and went on to alter the sound of pop music to come.
That opportunistic vocalist was named Otis Redding, who received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday.
Jimmy Jam, a music producer and the master of ceremonies for the unveiling of the star, lauded Redding as legendary. “And I say legendary with all capital letters,” Jam added.
“His groundbreaking moves as an artist and philanthropist continue to inspire to this day,” Jam said.
Jam introduced rapper Michael Santiago, aka “Killer Mike,” who praised Redding’s character, as well as his music. Santiago started off by thanking Zelma Redding, Otis Redding’s wife, who attended the ceremony.
“You don’t get Martin without Coretta, you don’t get Malcolm without Betty, and you don’t get Otis without Zelma,” Santiago said, referring to Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, and the wives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively.
Karla Redding-Andrews, Redding’s daughter, wished her mother, who will turn 82 on October 7, an early birthday. “I know Dad is saying, ‘I did this for you, Zelma,’” she said.
“We have so many honors at home… But this means the world, that here we are, traveling all the way to the West Coast for this honor that will live on forever as the legacy of Otis Redding does,” Redding-Andrews said.
Redding scored five Top 5 albums and 17 Top 20 singles on the R&B charts in less than six years of recording before he died in a plane crash in 1967 at the age of 26. At a time when airwaves and audiences were still heavily segregated, he became one of the country’s highest-grossing acts, forever defining the brawny intensity of Southern Soul.
Much of Redding’s greatest work came as an interpretive singer (often of such unlikely material as “Satisfaction” or his showstopping rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness”), but “The Big O” also wrote or co-wrote classics like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Respect” — which, in Aretha Franklin’s transformative version, was named by Rolling Stone in 2021 as the greatest song of all time.
Raised in Macon, Georgia, Redding first fell under the spell of hometown legend Little Richard’s singing. By the time of his unscheduled tryout at Stax’s studio, though, he had found a voice all his own. “Always think different from the next person,” he once said. “Don’t ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.”
His preference for ballads earned him the nickname “Mr. Pitiful” from a Memphis DJ, but he used the jab for inspiration; he co-wrote the lightly self-mocking “Mr. Pitiful,” which became a Top 10 hit.
Famously, Redding couldn’t dance much, and he wasn’t flashy — he was happiest at his farm in rural Georgia. When he and artist Carla Thomas playfully trade insults in the 1967 song “Tramp,” she says to Redding, “You’re country” and he replies, “That’s good.”
“He wasn’t just a magnificent talent,” his manager Phil Walden said, “he was a magnificent man.”
But his string of hits didn’t make a dent on the pop side during his lifetime. A series of performances at the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Whisky in Los Angeles, though, revealed that the rock counterculture was catching on to the power and catharsis of Redding’s delivery: Bob Dylan offered him “Just Like a Woman” to record, Janis Joplin took to proclaiming, “Otis Redding is God” and promoter Bill Graham said, decades later, “By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now.”
When he closed the second night of the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Redding mesmerized the audience. The reaction he got from the “Love Crowd” indicated that there could be new possibilities for his music.
That summer, Redding retreated to a houseboat in Sausalito and, inspired by the current sensation “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” began to explore different directions in his songwriting. Six months later, though, Redding was gone, killed when his rickety private plane plummeted into frigid Lake Monona en route to a show in Madison, Wis. The wistful, introspective “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” released a few weeks after his death, would fulfill the promise of Monterey and go all the way to the top of the pop charts.
“I am not a blues singer or an R&B singer,” Redding once said. “I’m a soul singer. We go into the studio without anything prepared, just record what comes out. That’s soul — the way you feel.”
