56 years ago today, Otis Redding's plane went down in Madison (2024)

(Editor's note: This story was originally published on Jan. 7, 2018, 50 years after the posthumous release of what might be Otis Redding's best-known hit.)

The song is so memorable that just hearing its title brings the melody to mind.

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” the hit single by Otis Redding that would become an American musical touchstone, was released 50 years ago this week, on Jan. 8, 1968.

Catchy, sing-able, yet filled with images of longing, “The Dock of the Bay” has a special — though tragic — connection to Madison. It was here that Redding perished, after his twin-engine plane crashed into the 34-degree waters of Lake Monona the afternoon of Dec., 10, 1967, killing the singer, his pilot, a young assistant and four teenaged members of his band the Bar-Kays.

Redding was booked for two Madison shows that night at the Factory nightclub, which once stood at State and Gorham streets and where ticket-holders were already lining up outside the door.

The 26-year-old singer was on the cusp of super-stardom. A prolific songwriter, he’d just recorded “The Dock of the Bay,” co-written with guitarist Steve Cropper, in the Stax Records studio in Memphis, Tennessee. After its early January release, “Dock of the Bay” would become the first posthumous No. 1 single in U.S. chart history, reach No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles charts at the same time, win two Grammy Awards and become part of a bittersweet soundtrack to troubled times.

“He was coming to Madison because there was an enthusiastic — more than enthusiastic — response from white listeners to what Otis was offering,” said cultural historian, author and UW-Madison professor of Afro-American studies Craig Werner, whose living room overlooks the lake where Redding died. “And that was just opening up at this period of his life.”

Waunakee native Jeff Kollath, who today is executive director of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, notes that the plane crash has become part of Madison’s local lore. And yet there is more to the story.

“It wasn’t just that the plane went down in Madison,” Kollath said.

Redding’s “wasn’t just a career cut short,” he said. “It was a career at a meteoric rise cut short.”

‘So connected to Madison’

Redding was raised in Macon, Georgia, and he made his “Big ‘O’ Ranch” outside the city his home. Already a giant in the world of rhythm and blues, Redding was a sensation in Europe following a successful Stax Records tour there in the spring of 1967. An astonishing performance in the Monterey International Pop Festival that June secured his spot as a crossover performer.

Then Madison became part of the Otis Redding story.

“One of 8 Aboard Plane Saved; 5 Still Missing,” a Wisconsin State Journal headline reported the day after Redding’s plane nose-dived into Lake Monona, four miles short of Madison’s municipal airport. Only trumpet player Ben Cauley survived the crash; another band member had taken a commercial flight.

Today a memorial plaque, once in Law Park and now outside Monona Terrace, marks the tragedy; a “Try a Little Tenderness” mural on the side of the building at 1148 Williamson St. honors Redding’s spirit. Pieces of Redding’s plane, pulled from Lake Monona, have long been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

Redding’s musical legacy continued here in part through the late Clyde Stubblefield, Madison’s “Funky Drummer,” noted Roy Elkins, founder and CEO of Broadjam, Inc. and the Between The Waves Madison Music Festival.

Stubblefield, who died last February at age 73, is best known for his work with James Brown, but also toured with Redding and “eventually settled here, tutoring hundreds of Madison musicians in his life,” Elkins said.

Energetic crowds attended last month’s Otis Redding tribute concert performed at the Majestic by Don’t Mess With Cupid, a band named for a Redding song and fronted by Madison musician Kevin Willmott II.

“One of my favorite things about the show is that people come up to me afterwards and say ‘I didn’t know those were Otis’ songs,’” Willmott said. The musician, 28, moved to Madison eight years ago.

“When I first heard Otis Redding died here, I didn’t believe it for awhile,” Willmott said. “The more you live here, the more you hear about it. His life is so connected to Madison.”

Pain and peace

James Danky was a 20-year-old student at Ripon College when he and four friends piled into a Volkswagen Beetle and drove to Madison in December 1967 to see the Otis Redding show that never took place. Though he didn’t own a turntable, Danky did own a copy of Redding’s “Live in Europe” LP that he’d listen to with headphones in the college listening room.

Three of his friends had worn black shirts to the Factory with “Otis Redding” embroidered on the back in gold, Danky said. When they heard the news of the crash, they made the mournful drive back to Ripon.

Redding “created the most extraordinary music,” said Danky, who would later teach journalism at UW-Madison. “When we bought our tickets and made the plan (to see the show), obviously we had no idea ‘Dock of the Bay’ was coming.”

Written on a houseboat when he was visiting Sausalito, California, “The Dock of the Bay” was a turning point for Redding. Today it is ranked at No. 26 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”

Madison-based Werner and Doug Bradley, co-authors of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” discovered during their research how much “The Dock of the Bay” meant to Vietnam veterans. Redding also had a following on Madison’s working-class East Side, said Werner, who views “Dock of the Bay” as a song about “loneliness, mixed with a sense of survival and peace.”

“You heard it once, and you knew you loved it,” he said.

It has special resonance for musicians, too, Elkins said.

“I think just about every musician will say they have played that song at some point in their career,” Elkins said.

“The simplicity of this melody defined the greatness of Otis Redding as a songwriter and the depth of his vocal ability as well. Very few can deliver a melody with pain and peace in the same phrase. When you hear him sing it, it sounds like he’s in pain, but at peace with it.”

‘A bad year’

When it was announced that Redding was coming to Madison to perform in late 1967, “it was a really big deal,” recalled Sharon Brewer Scanlan, who was a sophom*ore at UW-Madison at the time. She was a big fan of soul music, especially the Memphis sound, and bought tickets with a friend on her dorm floor to see Redding’s show at the Factory. They were standing outside in the cold when the news of his death was announced.

“It was pretty stunning when that happened,” she said. “It’s something you always remember. Fifty years later, you still remember exactly where you were and what it was like.”

The plane crash came at a time the U.S. was engaged in war in Vietnam, in a decade of political assassinations, racial tensions and cultural revolution. Scanlan recalled armed National Guardsmen on campus in response to anti-war protests there.

Redding’s death served as “punctuation on a bad year,” said historian Stu Levitan, whose book “Madison in the Sixties” is due out this fall. With the anti-war Dow Chemical protests, local strikes and a serious traffic crash involving a campus beauty queen, the plane crash was yet another “tragic mark of distinction.”

‘A place in our hearts’

In 2007, Redding’s widow Zelma wrote a letter, published in the State Journal, personally thanking the Madison responders who assisted after the plane crash 40 years earlier, including divers and Red Cross workers.

“I have often thought of those people and their families,” she wrote. “...(P)lease know that you will always hold a special place in our hearts.”

Today, Zelma Redding oversees the Otis Redding Foundation, which runs a center for creative arts, a summer music camp for children and has plans to open a charter school with an arts emphasis. A concert scheduled for January 25 at New York City’s historic Apollo Theater, to be hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring many musical notables, will benefit the foundation and mark the 50th anniversary of “The Dock of the Bay.”

On Tuesday, Rhino records will release a 7-inch single of the song – in its original recording, not the version best known today – on gold vinyl. In a few weeks, Don’t Mess With Cupid will bring another live night of Redding’s music to Madison.

“The part that’s really fun with the band is playing the music, and getting people out there enjoying it, rather than reminiscing on his passing,” said musician Willmott, whose band will play March 22 at the North Street Cabaret, 610 North St.

“I think there should be an Otis Redding Street in Madison,” Willmott said. “He didn’t get to play the show (here), but he wanted to.”