The song is somewhat different in style from most of Redding’s other recordings. Redding’s restrained yet emotive delivery is backed by Cropper’s memorably succinct guitar playing.
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”. “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.”Īctually, 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. 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.” “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. Otis didn’t really write about himself but I did. If you listen to the songs I collaborated with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. 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. 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. He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. In a September 1990 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song: & the M.G.’s (Stax’s house band), at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, to record the song. In November of that year, he joined Steve Cropper, producer and guitarist for Booker T. While touring he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. 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.
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