I own a 100 song 5 cd box set of Otis Redding's music plus six of his best studio albums he recorded for Stax/Volt. What was amazing about Otis' talent was he never recorded a throwaway track and he poured his heart and soul into every song he recorded.
By all reports Otis was a shy and humble man who was often unaware of the depth of his own musical talent. Early in 1963 Redding tagged along to the audition of one of his band members to audition for Stax Records in Memphis. At that time Redding was the singer for an unrecorded soul band that mostly performed for black audiences in rural Georgia. When Redding's band-mate completed his audition in the Stax studio he asked label owner Jim Stewart to record an audition song for Otis. Otis sang one of his own songs "These Arms of Mine" and halfway through the song Jim Stewart knew he had discovered the star he needed to keep his struggling record label from bankruptcy. Otis' single take audition tape of "These Arms of Mine" was so good it was included in his first album for Stax and has become a soul music classic.
Another Otis story: When Otis appeared at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the festival's producer Lou Adler had to coax a nervous Otis Redding to go onstage. Otis was the only soul music performer at Monterey and Redding was worried that his rootsy soul music wouldn't appeal to the nearly all white audience, who were blown away by the pyrotechnics of the Who & the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Adler told Otis to calm down and just be himself and Otis turned out to be the most talked about performer at Monterey. His show stopping performance at Monterey transformed Redding into soul singer who only sold records in the all-black R&B market into a crossover artist who appealed to both black and white audiences.
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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt
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