“(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay” by Otis Redding

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" finds Otis Redding easing way back. He began the words in August 1967, while he was staying aboard a rented houseboat in Sausalito, California, and finished it in Memphis with Steve Cropper, the Booker T. & the M.G.'s guitarist and Stax producer, who shares the writing credit and produced it. The record carries whistling and the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and it drifts along like a man with nowhere in particular to be.

Redding cut it twice that year, once just three days before the plane crash that killed him on December 10, 1967. Stax put it out on its Volt label in 1968, and it became the first posthumous number-one single in America, reaching number 3 in the UK too. Knowing he was gone before it came out gives all that calm a hard edge.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.