Favorite BIG #1 HITS Through the Years: 1968 Pop

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Almost!! Almost back to normal at work (just two more messed-up days to go), and almost time -- FINALLY!!!!! -- for my first concert of 2018. But that's so 24 hours from now. Right now I'm going to give you another one of the #1 songs through the years. I'm picking them out year by year over the first 25 years of my life, just to give you a break from all the songs you don't know. Here's one that everyone knows. 1968 (Pop): (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding Poor Steve Cropper. He co-writes this classic, then ends up playing with Murph and the Magic Tones in a Holiday Inn! Yes, that Steve Cropper, a mainstay of Memphis session musicians and band member in The Blues Brothers, helped write this song. It would be R&B singing great Otis Redding's last recording session. On December 7, 1967 he finished recording this song in the studio. Three days later, his plane crashed into a lake in Wisconsin, killing him and all but one member of the Bar-Kays, his touring group. Ironically, the day of his plane crash a national wire story appeared in newspapers, proclaiming that the UK magazine Melody Maker had declared Redding "the top male vocalist," dethroning Elvis. We can only speculate if this song would have hit #1 without the "sympathy" plays and purchases, but I can't imagine people ignoring it. What an incredible song about a lonely man who leaves Georgia, ends up in San Francisco, and has nothing to do but have the loneliness eat him alive ("two thousand miles I've roamed just to make this dock my home"). As it is, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" became the first song top the Billboard pop charts by a deceased artist. It's in the Grammy Hall of Fame and a staple in American music history. It's just too bad that Otis never saw how much the song affected people. (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 #1 for four weeks I can't do what ten people tell me to do: