Courtesy Zelma Redding Collection
James Alexander was 17 years old. It was December, cold and dreary. “I was numb,” he recalls now. Alexander rode the 80 miles from Milwaukee to Madison, Wisconsin, in the back of a police car, a grim job ahead. He would have to identify the bodies of young men who were his friends, his bandmates, and that of the man who had helped make them famous, Otis Redding.
Very few enterprises (if any) have brought more pride to the African-American citizens of Memphis than Stax Records. While Stax churned out hits that young people across the world loved, the music belonged to Memphis. And in the brief time before his death 50 years ago this month, Otis Redding represented not only what Stax was, but what it could be.
The tale of how Otis Redding got to Stax in the first place is entwined, myth-like, in the saga of the studio at 926 E. McLemore. The short version is this: Redding showed up driving the car for a Georgia guitarist named Johnny Jenkins, who had a flamboyant style but no driver’s license.
But Redding had his own motivation for driving to Memphis. By 1962, Stax had a reputation as an open door for undiscovered talent. Johnny Jenkins played that day and the tape rolled. But there was no magic. Meanwhile, the driver, a linebacker-sized man with an easy smile, was insistent to anyone who would listen that he could sing.
Courtesy API Photographers
Steve Cropper recalls drummer Al Jackson Jr. coming to him, saying, “Would you take two minutes and listen to this guy? He’s driving me nuts.”
Cropper didn’t really play the piano but he could play what Redding asked for; what he called “church chords.” Redding then started into a ballad loaded with yearning.
Courtesy Zelma Redding Collection
This is perhaps the only surviving photo of Otis Redding inside Stax, resting against a speaker.
“The hair on my arms stood up,” Cropper says. “I went to Jim Stewart [the founder, with his sister Estelle Axton, of Stax] and said, ‘You’ve gotta come listen to this guy. You’re not going to believe this.’”
That song, “These Arms Of Mine,” was the first of 17 hit singles for Otis Redding on Stax, a small label that was making noise. “If it made money, it was a hit,” Cropper says. “He could do no wrong.”
Singer Joyce Cobb heard the song recorded that day. “Otis was unique in the way he could project feel,” she says. “That’s not easy to do. It was in his DNA that he allowed listeners to feel his emotions.”
“He made you believe [the song] is actually happening to him,” says James Alexander, who played behind Redding as the bassist with the Bar-Kays. “What comes from the soul translates to the soul.”
Born in Missouri, Steve Cropper (shown here at Stax in the 1960s) of Booker T. and the MGs grew up in Memphis; he would go on to become one of the greatest guitarists of the classic rock-and-roll era.
“Otis was unique in the way he could project feel. That’s not easy to do. It was in his DNA that he allowed listeners to feel his emotions.”
— Joyce Cobb
How the Bar-Kays came to Stax is almost as unlikely as the story of Otis Redding.
“They were cute as could be,” says former Stax executive Deanie Parker. The names of the six young men roll off her tongue like they were the names of her own children: James Alexander, Ben Cauley, Carl Cunningham, Ronnie Caldwell, Jimmy King, Phalon Jones. But behind their youth was ambition. “Black kids had to seize every opportunity they could discover,” she says. “They wanted it. They wanted it.”
Band director Harry Winfield saw something in them when they were students at Porter Junior High School. He gave them the keys to the band room and by six-thirty each morning, before school, they were at it.
“Every single day. That’s how we got tight,” says Alexander. They already knew about Stax and the open door. Drummer Carl Cunningham shined shoes at King’s Barber Shop and afterward would walk down McLemore and into Stax where he sat, almost literally, at the feet of Booker T. and the MGs drummer Al Jackson.
The Bar-Kays were a local band, playing clubs and high school proms from Memphis to Little Rock and into Mississippi, when they auditioned, in early 1967, for Steve Cropper. Cropper was the guitarist with Booker T. and the MGs, and was Stax’s main A and R man, the guy with eyes and ears for new talent and hit songs.
“We thought we were hot. He didn’t,” says James Alexander. But Jim Stewart also heard the band and invited them back, on a Sunday. After playing a cover of a current hit, they started in on a song of their own. Trumpeter Ben Cauley used a bit of a nursery rhyme as an intro. The ending came from David Porter, who brought in some neighborhood kids for a chanted chorus at the end.
Courtesy Zelma Redding Collection
Photography courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music, ZELMA REDDING COLLECTION
“Just like that, that’s how ‘Soul Finger’ was born,” recalls Alexander. “It took 30 minutes.”
Alexander and sax player Phalon Jones were friends at Booker T. Washington High, members of a social club called The Esquires. “He was a good-looking guy. I was kind of like a Pillsbury doughboy,” Alexander recalls. “I hung around him because he could draw women.”
After “Soul Finger” was released in April 1967, they were stars. “Phalon would walk into assembly late,” recalls Alexander. “Girls would be screaming like it was the Beatles. We were teenagers in tailor-made suits with a thousand dollars in our pockets.”
But there was jealousy. Phalon Jones’ mother, Willie Campbell, remembers that someone, maybe other boys from the neighborhood, broke into their apartment and stole all her son’s clothes, including the suits he wore on stage.
The Bar-Kays met Otis Redding when he was looking for a regular band to back him. Booker T. and the MGs played on his Stax recordings but they were the house band, plus they had to tour to support their own hits. The Bar-Kays were playing the Hippodrome at 500 Beale, a skating rink in the daytime, at night a club. After performing at the Mid-South Coliseum, with energy to burn, Redding went to the Hippodrome to sit in. He called out one of his songs to see if the band could play it. It might have been “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” The Bar-Kays nailed it. After that, Redding said, “I want these boys to be my band.”
“They were so young, so good,” Cropper says.
Phalon Jones’ wasn’t legally old enough so his mother had to give permission for her son, her only child, to travel. “I had to sign for him,” she says.
“I was 17 and we skipped the graduation parties and flew to New York to play the Apollo Theatre,” says James Alexander. “Without rehearsal. We were just babies.”
Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Zelma Redding Collection
His Big Ranch outside Macon, Georgia, gave Otis Redding a place to relax from the pressures of touring and recording. “He was a rare type of brilliance,” says musician Roderick Cox. “We don’t give him enough credit for what he had done by age 26.” If he had lived, his widow believes, “he would have been one of the giants of music.” But she thinks he wouldn’t have forgotten his roots, and would have wanted to spend more time at home with his wife and children. “Otis never wanted to get old on the road. He would have been on the ranch raising cows. That’s the way he would have spent his life.”
Meanwhile, Otis Redding was plotting a new course. While spending time on a houseboat in Sausalito, California (the boat belonged to music impresario Bill Graham), he started on a new and different song. At the same time, Redding’s people had booked him into the Monterey Pop Festival. The event was small (7,500 on Saturday night) and the tickets cheap ($3 to $6.50 in 1967 dollars) but the roster was A-List: Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, the first major appearance by Janis Joplin, and the first major American appearance by Jimi Hendrix.
Redding, this time backed by Booker T. and the MGs and the Mar-Keys, would close the show that Saturday night. 1967 was the Summer of Love, of tie-dyed clothes and love-ins. Redding and his band were matching suits of South Memphis soul.
A documentary about the festival preserves Redding at his peak. He speaks to “the love crowd,” then rips through a five-song set of pure Stax soul, prowling, pleading, literally steaming in the cool California night. His voice is a driving staccato as he promises tenderness. Then he implores the crowd, “I’ve been loving you too long, don’t make me stop now.”
Something big happened at Monterey. Coming home to Macon, Redding told his wife, Zelma, “I’ve found an audience I didn’t know I had.”
And back in Memphis, Redding called Cropper at the studio, excited about the song he’d been writing on the houseboat. “‘I’ve got something that I think might be a hit. Get your gut-tar, get your gut-tar,’” Cropper remembers Redding saying, pronouncing it the way Redding himself did.
Otis Redding’s last visit to Stax was on Friday, December 8, 1967. “He stuck his head in the door and said, ‘I’ll see you Monday,’” Cropper recalls.
In his own plane, piloted by Dick Fraser, Redding and the band flew to Cleveland for an appearance on the local television show called Upbeat and a Saturday performance at Leo’s Casino. Then they packed out for the short trip to Madison, Wisconsin, for an appearance Sunday at The Factory. The plane would only hold seven so James Alexander and Carl Sims, who sang occasionally with the Bar-Kays, flew a commercial airline to Milwaukee.
Alexander remembers sitting in the Milwaukee airport for a long time that afternoon, waiting for the pilot to return after dropping the passengers in Madison. After a while, he made some calls but no one knew anything. Afternoon turned to night. Finally, someone paged him.
Later, the Dane County Sheriff’s Department sent a car to bring Alexander to Madison. Going back and forth between his hotel and the coroner’s office, he identified the friends with whom he had worked and dreamed since those days in the band room at Porter Junior High.
The plane, a Beechcraft 18, had been about a thousand feet over Lake Monona, the landing gear already down, when something went wrong. It was 3:25 in the afternoon, 40 degrees, heavy overcast. No one is absolutely sure what happened, even today. Most likely it had something to do with ice on the wings. The plane slammed into the lake, broke apart, and sank. Ben Cauley, the trumpet player, who could not swim, floated free and grabbed a seat cushion. He was the only survivor.
Joyce Cobb spoke with Cauley often before his death in 2015 and recalls anguish that would not go away. “He could save himself and could not save the others,” she says. “Why me? Always in the back of his head, ‘Why did God save me?’”
The Redding family was at their Big Ranch outside of Macon, the place that was both home and a symbol of Otis’ success.
“Fifty years and people are still saying his name and hearing his music. His was a rare type of brilliance. We don’t give him enough credit for what he had done by the age of 26.”
— Roderick Cox
“I had a call from somebody who said the plane went down. Then they hung up,” Zelma remembers, calmly. She thought it might have been a prank call. “I called the pilot’s wife. She had got a call. I didn’t believe it. I went downstairs and then everything started happening. It was like the end of life.”
Their children, Dexter, Karla, and Otis III, were only 4, 6, and 7 years old.
At Foote Homes, Phalon Jones’ mother blocked incoming calls from people always trying to reach her famous son. Finally someone got through.
“They couldn’t find my son. It took them a week,” she says now. “I just walked, walked, walked, up and down the street. That’s what I did.”
On McLemore Avenue everyone was “absolutely, totally devastated,” according to Steve Cropper. “I didn’t have time to cave in to my feelings,” says Deanie Parker. “I knew that somebody had to do what needed to be done. It seemed like we had a funeral almost every day.”
Matthew Kelly, 17 and the valet, was on the flight. He was one of 10 children, raised by their father in an apartment near Stax. “The family had no resources to pay for this child, so Stax raised the money to bury him.” Deanie Parker also recalls trucks soon arriving at Stax with trunks packed with instruments and belongings, water still leaking out.
Atlantic Records, meanwhile, insisted that Stax put out new product by Otis Redding. “I told Jim Stewart I didn’t know if I could do it,” Steve Cropper says. “He said you have to.”
Finishing “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” which he co-wrote with Redding, became Cropper’s refuge. Wednesday morning he drove to Memphis International Airport where he handed the tape of the mixed recording to a flight attendant, who flew to New York where she handed it off to someone from Atlantic Records. In January 1968, the song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
“I literally, for about seven years, could not listen to an Otis record,” Cropper says. While he still records and tours with a band he’s led for 19 years, the past is always with him. “I’ll never get over it.”
Stax Records did survive the loss of Otis Redding and the original Bar-Kays. Talent ran deep on McLemore Avenue, with Isaac Hayes, Johnny Taylor, and The Staples Singers among those who followed Redding. But the label folded in 1975 amid sketchy business deals, lawsuits, and bitterness. The studio was demolished in 1989, but community support resulted in its rebirth, and today Stax — rebuilt in 2003 as a duplicate of the original building, and expanded — houses the Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Academy, offering music-related education, programs, and events.
The Bar-Kays, behind James Alexander and Ben Cauley, re-grouped after the crash and built a long career. And they aren’t done. When he spoke with us, Alexander was searching for a singer to replace the recently retired Larry Dotson. Alexander’s son, the Atlanta-based producer, singer, songwriter, and rapper known as Jazze Pha, is named after his friend, Phalon Jones.
Phalon’s mother is the only living parent of the original Bar-Kays. At her home Willie Campbell brings out the mementos of her son’s short, eventful life: a program with his photo from The Apollo, a backstage pass from a show in Montreal, and his high school yearbook. She remembers a frugal son who was working to get them out of Foote Homes. “He wanted to buy a house,” she says.
In the early 1980s, Otis Redding’s sons, Dexter and Otis III, started the funk/disco group The Reddings and had some success. Today, Otis III, who is primarily a guitar player, still performs, his brother occasionally joining him.
Says Otis III: “When I’m on stage, 50 percent are liking me, 50 percent say he sure ain’t his dad. I cannot fill those shoes.” While he says that “I’m done with what might have been,” he does love playing his dad’s music and meeting his dad’s fans. And he cherishes “the great image he left behind.”
In Macon, Karla Redding-Andrews and her mother run the Otis Redding Foundation. “Progress Through Education, Enlightenment Through Music” is their mission. Through the foundation they are launching a charter school and they operate music camps, all with the goal of influencing young people. Zelma Redding met Roderick Cox when he was 17. “I believed in him when he was a kid,” she told us, and she bought him his first instrument, a French horn. Today, at 29, Cox is the associate conductor of the Minnesota Symphony, a rising star in classical music, having led orchestras from Seattle to Santiago, and a Macon, Georgia, Redding Foundation legacy.
“The foundation gave me opportunities to get exposure and opportunities to go forward,” Cox says today. And he thinks that Redding, in a very real way his mentor, is underappreciated.
“Fifty years and people are still saying his name and hearing his music. His was a rare type of brilliance. We don’t give him enough credit for what he had done by the age of 26,” says Cox. “In his death his family has gone on to fulfill his dreams. When someone is that brilliant you only wish for what could have happened.”
“If he had lived, he would be one of the giants of music,” Redding’s widow says. But she thinks he would have stayed close to home. “Otis never wanted to get old on the road. He would have been on the ranch raising cows. That’s the way he would have spent his life.”
As for her life, and that love affair that ended so soon: “I still have great memories,” she says. “Until I die I will be the happiest person in the world because I am Mrs. Otis Redding.”
