The morning after the 50-year anniversary of the death of Otis Redding.

I put up a post last night, linking to a New Yorker tribute, with my own photograph from an airplane of the Madison lake where Redding's plane crashed. This morning, I'm clicking on my Otis Redding tag, because there's one thing I know is there and I want to find it. But I'm interested in all the old Otis Redding posts, and I'm going to list them here.

1. April 30, 2005 — "Songs transformed with the sex of the singer."

What songs well-known as girl songs would take on intriguing meaning sung by a guy?... The obvious actual example of this is Aretha Franklin singing Otis Redding's "Respect."... The trouble with a man singing that song is that it's a bit ugly: I make the money, so you owe me. It's the conventional arrangement. The lyrics are a bit awkward in the female re-sing. Why was Aretha giving this guy "all my money"? But we ignored that. It was the remnant of the Otis version. She sang through that and pulled out the better, female meaning through sheer force.

2. June 4, 2006 — "Convergences."

... I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title ["Coffee and Cigarettes"] and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.... [T]he theme [of "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan"] this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding.... Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes"...

3. March 4, 2007 — "It is [blank] that makes us human."

I just ran across an old page in a notebook with that heading. This scribbling is at least a few years old but not more than 10 years old. It is followed by 16 words, candidates for filling in the blank, written with some unknown level of seriousness. Here are my 16 words in the order I wrote them:

1. shame
2. remembering
3. planning
4. dread
5. joking
6. writing
7. politics
8. fashion
9. arrogance
10. history
11. theory
12. inhumanity
13. timekeeping
14. culture
15. believing
16. originality

Critique these items or the inquiry itself. Or just add to the list. Or make a record album, with those 16 song titles. And give me credit. And half your royalties.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill responds to my request for a 16-cut album by finding an Otis Redding recording for each item:

1. shame (I'm Sick Y'all)
2. remembering (Champagne and Wine)
3. planning (New Year's Resolution)
4. dread (Don't Leave Me This Way)
5. joking (Happy Song)
6. writing (I Love You More Than Words Can Say)
7. politics (Change Is Gonna Come)
8. fashion (Satisfaction--Otis pronounces it 'satisfashion;' so really it's about his inability to buy nice clothes)
9. arrogance (Tramp)
10. history (You Don't Miss Your water)
11. theory (Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song))
12. inhumanity (Cigarettes and Coffee)
13. timekeeping (I've Got Dreams To Remember)
14. culture (Respect)
15. believing (Look At The Girl)
16. originality (Love Man)

So here's the new game: Pick some artist you like and come up with 16 appropriate cuts.

4. November 23, 2010 — I quote the Keith Richards autobiography:

"In 'Satisfaction' I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded. I'd already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be in the horn line. But we didn't have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that's the sound that caught everybody's imagination. Next thing I know, we're listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, 'Hit of the Week,' and we didn't even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub.... And I learned that lesson — sometimes you can overwork things." —  "Life," page 177.

5. October 17, 2013 — "Great shakes," a post about the song (and dance) "Shake" with embedded video of Otis Redding in a performance that I liked much more than what was done by The Supremes, who were limited by the instruction: "Whenever you do a naughty step like the shake, add some class to it. Instead of shaking and acting tough, you should roll your buttocks under and keep smiling all the time."

6. July 7, 2014 — "Is depicting the 'Obama Presidential Library' as an outhouse racist?" I see I was asking the hard questions in '14. How did Otis Redding find his way into that?

This miniature outrage arrives from Norfolk, Nebraska. A float in a 4th of July Parade had a fake outhouse labeled "Obama Presidential Library" and, standing outside it, a mannequin of a dark-skinned man wearing overalls....

Now, let's move on to the overalls. What does it mean that the figure of the President is dressed in overalls? The association is to rural poverty (or rural work), but is it racial?

Thinking about race and overalls, I heard the line "You wear overalls!" What was that? Some recording from the 60s... Ah! I was thinking of Carla Thomas, singing with Otis Redding, in the 1967 song "Tramp." At 0:37, you hear:

You know what, Otis?
What?
You're country.
That's all right.
You're straight from the Georgia woods.
That's good.
You know what? You wear overalls, and big old brogan shoes, and you need a haircut, Tramp.

And, again, as the song is fading out, at 2:42, Thomas harps on those overalls:

You a tramp, Otis. You just a tramp.
That's all right.
You wear overalls. You need a haircut, Baby. Cut off some of that hair off your head. You think you're a lover?

There is zero chance that Thomas's problem with Redding is racial. She's rejecting him because he's country. His retort: That's good.

So I think the float used the iconography of poverty to express the point of view that Obama is utterly lacking in achievement worthy of a presidential library. Maybe you could build an argument that because so many black people have been poor, any depiction of a black person as poor is intended to associate him with black people in general, and that is enough to warrant an accusation of racism. But I think this float belongs in the innocuous category of traditional American disrespect for authority figures.

Looking at it that way, I suddenly see how it might be exactly what is appropriate for the 4th of July:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....

7. June 17, 2017 — "50 years ago today: It was Day 2 of the Monterey Pop Festival."

The performers on the second day were: Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Al Kooper, The Butterfield Blues Band, The Electric Flag, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller Band, Moby Grape, Hugh Masekela, The Byrds, Laura Nyro, Jefferson Airplane, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, The Mar-Keys, Otis Redding.

If I had to pick my favorites at the time from that group, it would probably be the same I'd still pick today: The Byrds, Laura Nyro, and Jefferson Airplane. But I think the best remembered set of the day was Otis Redding. You can watch the whole 19 minutes here:


Otis Redding - Live at Monterey Pop Festival... by cosmo2161

What was the old post I'd remembered and clicked the tag to find? "Songs transformed with the sex of the singer."