While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title “Dock of the Bay,” on rock impresario Bill Graham’s houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. While touring he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. In November of that year, he joined Steve Cropper, producer and guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s (Stax’s house band), at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, to record the song.
In a September 1990 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song:
Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. […] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got he was renting boathouse or stayed at a boathouse or something and that’s where he got the idea of the ships coming in the bay there. And that’s about all he had: “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.” I just took that… and I finished the lyrics. If you listen to the songs I collaborated with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. […] Otis didn’t really write about himself but I did. “Dock of the Bay” was exactly that: “I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay” was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.
When Redding first sang Steve Cropper the lines “Watching the ships roll in/And then I watch ’em roll away again,” Cropper says he “always envisioned a ship going under the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Me being a purist kind of guy I said, ‘Otis, did you ever think that if a ship rolls it’s going to take on water and sink,’” Cropper recalls, “and he said about the lyric, ‘Hell, Crop, that’s what I want,’ and Otis always got his way.”
Actually, the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t even visible from where Redding was, but Cropper never saw that spot until years later when he was on tour with Robert Cray; he got a bite to eat overlooking the water and saw ferries going back and forth and realized that “when a ferry goes to park it pushes up a big wake and comes in sideways and looks like it is rolling in. So a ferry was a ship in his mind.”
Together, they completed the music and melancholy lyrics of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” From those sessions emerged Redding’s final recorded work, including “Dock of the Bay”. Redding’s restrained yet emotive delivery is backed by Cropper’s memorably succinct guitar playing. The song is somewhat different in style from most of Redding’s other recordings.
While discussing the song with his wife, Redding stated that he had wanted to “be a little different” with “The Dock of the Bay” and “change his style”. There were concerns that “The Dock of the Bay” had too much of a pop feel for an Otis Redding record, and contracting the Stax gospel act the Staple Singers to record backing vocals was discussed but never carried out.
Redding had considered the song to be unfinished and planned to record what he considered a final version, but never got the chance. On December 10, his charter plane crashed into Lake Monona, outside Madison, Wisconsin. Redding and six others were killed.
The song features a whistled tune heard before the song’s fade. It was originally performed by Redding, who (according to Cropper) had “this little fadeout rap he was gonna do, an ad-lib. He forgot what it was so he started whistling.
Later, a rumor began swirling that Redding’s whistling wasn’t good enough and that Cropper used musician Sam “Bluzman” Taylor to dub in a stronger take. Cropper vehemently denies that. “I don’t even know where that story came from,” he says.
The whistling has been the subject of much debate. Cropper says that he always left space at the end of a song for Redding to add extra vocals, frequently ad-libbed on the spot. On this day, Cropper says, Redding simply forgot what he wanted to sing and whistled instead, merely as a placeholder to be fixed at a later date. “That was no placeholder,” says producer Al Bell. “That was Otis – the very essence coming out of him.”
At the end of the first take, Redding started whistling, poorly enough that engineer Ron Capone joked that he wasn’t “going to make it as a whistler.” Redding nailed it on the third take. “If he had come back that Monday, it would definitely have been different,” Cropper says.
While Redding and Cropper planned more work on the song, the fact that Redding whistled on all three takes gave many the impression that this was an intentional touch that perfectly suited the song’s mood.
After Redding’s death, Cropper mixed “Dock of the Bay” at Stax Studios. He added the sound of seagulls and waves crashing to the background, as Redding had requested, recalling the sounds he heard when he was staying on the houseboat. Cropper says he hadn’t yet even conceived of adding the sound of birds and waves that now feel so intrinsic to the song. Instead, he says, he and Redding felt the track was missing some special something and had a plan to give “Dock of the Bay” a more traditional soul feel. Cropper suggested background vocals and told Redding that the Staple Singers were coming in shortly, adding that “I know if I asked them they’d be more than happy to sing on the song. Otis said it was a great idea. He planned on being there.” There was no time for background vocals but Cropper knew the song “really needed something.”
“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was mix that song”. “I got to thinking about Otis clowning around on some of the outtakes. He was trying to make seagull sounds but he sounded like a dying crow.”
As homage to his friend and partner, Cropper went to a local jingle company and recorded an extended loop of seagulls and ocean waves on separate tracks. He then used trial-and-error to figure out where to bring the sounds up in the song.
“I stayed up 24 hours mixing the song. The next morning I went out to the airport, went out on the tarmac and a stewardess came down to the bottom of the steps and I handed her that master,” Cropper recalls. The tape was flown to New York and disc jockeys had preview copies in their hands by Christmas.
In 1999, BMI named the song as the sixth-most performed song of the twentieth century, with about six million performances. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was ranked twenty-eighth on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the second-highest of four Redding songs on the list.
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