Otis Redding was one of the greatest talents that North American
Afro-roots music has presented to the world, but a large part of the Brazilian
public is still prone to confused chin-scratching, when someone asks about him.
It’s common to hear wild guesses such as: is he one of these 80-year-old blues
guitarists that plays here every once in a while? Is he that jazz saxophone
player who was addicted to heroin? Is he an ex-idol from Motown who became a
church minister?
Try again: Otis Redding is one of the
greatest soul men in history, composer of wonderful songs like These Arms of
Mine, (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay and Respect. This last
song, in the voice of diva Aretha Franklin, became an anthem of Black Pride and
a must at any dance party. If Ray Charles was the genius behind soul, and James
Brown was the godfather or the No. 1 soul brother, then Redding would win the
posthumous honor as the king of soul.
Posthumous, unfortunately, because this
extraordinary talent died at the early age of 26, on December 10, 1967, when
the jet Beechcraft that would take him to a show crashed in a storm in
Wisconsin, prematurely and tragically ending Redding’s brilliant career.
| Release |  |  | At the Monterey Festival |  |
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A few months earlier, with his
heart-wrenching ballads and exciting dance songs, Redding had set on fire a huge
crowd of young hippies and rock-lovers at the legendary Monterey Festival. It
was a glimpse to what his career promised to be. Jimi Hendrix, another star of
the festival, considered Redding a model to follow.
Unknown to many in the 1960’s and 70’s, Soul
Music and Motown fought for the market and role setting that African-American
music was to play. Born in Southern USA and very connected to Memphis, Tennessee, Soul was a
visceral style that earned great popularity among the African-Americans, later being
adopted as the musical genre that best represented and reflected the civil rights
protests of the 1960’s.
Soul music was meant to come from the soul of
the composers and interpreters with the fewest aesthetic filters possible. Historian
Paul Friedlander describes it as a faithful portrait of the feelings of African-Americans
from the 1960’s: “romance and disillusion, love and lust, pride, suffering and
struggle,” he affirms.
More popular with the greater public, Motown,
the recording studio located in Detroit directed by African-American producers
and executives, took a big bite out of the public that listened to pop music
with its more arranged, elegant and contained music. Paradoxically, the two
main labels that released Soul artists, Stax and Atlantic Records, were
directed by whites.
Both Soul music and the Motown artists were
influenced by R&B and gospel music. The songs that cried out and the
emotional tone of the American Baptist Church, where names like Aretha Franklin
- the daughter of a powerful reverend - and where Otis Redding himself came
from, influenced the Soul style of singing, which in turn, ended up becoming a
reference for much of pop music that would be made from then on, starting with
funk. Today, one only need hear an artist like Ben Harper to understand the
importance of Soul in the popular music of the 20th and present
centuries.
Although the circle of reverberating success
was restricted to young African-Americans, some Memphis Soul idols earned a
fortune. James Brown was even the owner of a private jet, two-hundred properties,
a Victorian castle and three radio stations.
Otis Redding died before he could make his
fortune, but is considered by many Soul lovers to be a superior artist even to
Ray Charles. A few months before he died, he wrote (Sittin’ on) The Dock of
the Bay, while he rested in a boat
moored to the port of Sausalito in California. The song ended up becoming his
greatest hit, even after his death.
Besides being a genius composer, Redding was
one of the greatest interpreters of the style. The spiritual fervor that he
sang with, always sweaty and completely surrendered to the music, alternating
moments of profound exaltation with others of incredible sensitivity, made him
a true legend. A short story really illustrates his talent: having abandoned
school in adolescence to help the family pay the bills, Redding decided to
enter a local talent show in the city of Macon, Georgia, where he grew up.
After winning fifteen consecutive editions of the contest, for which the prize
was the preposterous amount of $5, he was banned from continuing in the contest
under the allegation that it was impossible for another contestant to beat him.
Today, thanks to the Internet, we can see
incredible performances of the King of Soul, such as the classic interpretation
of Try a Little Tenderness, from a European tour the year he died, or Respect,
which took Aretha Franklin to the top of the charts in the USA.
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