"
(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song co-written by
soul singer
Otis Redding and guitarist
Steve Cropper. It was first recorded by Otis Redding in 1967, shortly before his death. It was released posthumously on
Stax Records' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous number-one single in U.S. chart history.
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 a houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California.[1] He had come off his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just months earlier in June 1967. While touring in support of the LPs King & Queen (collaborations with female vocalist Carla Thomas) and his live set Live in Europe, he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. In November of that year he joined producer and guitarist Steve Cropper at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee.
In a 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper explained the "origins" of the song:
Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas. Anytime he came in to record he always had 10 or 15 different intros or titles, or whatever. He had been at San Francisco playing The Fillmore, and he was staying at a boathouse, which is where he got the idea of the ship coming in. That's about all he had: "I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again." I took that and finished ...
