Ten Favorite Bodies of Water Songs: (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay (#4)

Tweet

After a day off for some experimentation in my plans for post-retirement traveling I'm back with another one of those songs from my countdown of tunes that have a body of water mentioned in the title. Tall cotton time with today's song, and probably one of the more obvious tunes to be on the list. Here it is. #4: (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding There's probably a rule book somewhere that says if you're going to discuss songs with a body of water mentioned in the title, you'd better include this song. Yep. As far as quality goes, I'd say this is the best song on the list. Otis Redding was a legend in R&B. In addition to his own hits, he wrote "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," one of the signature tunes for Aretha Franklin. His pop chart success was respectful as well. On November 22, 1967, he recorded a song that he had started in the summer of '67 and co-wrote with Steve Cropper, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay." On December 7, 1967, he finished the overdubs for the song. Three days later, Otis Redding was dead. After appearing in Cleveland on Saturday, December 9, Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, flew to Madison, Wisconsin for a show. The plane crashed in a lake three miles from the airport, killing the 26-year-old Redding and four of the five members of the Bar-Kays. (The sole survivor, Ben Cauley, died in 2015.) After the Christmas holidays, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released as a single. It became the first posthumous #1 single in pop music history (country music had already scored a significant amount of them, thanks to acts like Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves). The song was #1 for a month. I wish Redding had survived to see the success of this masterpiece, the final song he ever worked on. And I wonder if he knew what magic he'd created. (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay Written by Otis Redding and Steve Cropper Recorded by Otis Redding From The Dock of the Bay, 1968 I can't do what ten people tell me to do: