坐在湾边码头上 (1968)

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song co-written by the soul singer Otis Redding and the guitarist Steve Cropper. Redding recorded it twice in 1967, including just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. It was released on Stax Records' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous number 1 single in the US. It reached number 3 on the UK Singles Chart.

Redding started writing the lyrics in August 1967 while staying on a rented houseboat in Sausalito, California. He completed the song in Memphis with Cropper, a Stax producer and the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.'s. It features whistling and sounds of waves crashing on a shore.

Origins

While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding had grown in popularity and was inundated with fans at his hotel in San Francisco. Rock concert impresario Bill Graham offered Redding a respite, staying at his houseboat at Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito, California. On the houseboat, Redding listened obsessively to the Beatles' recently released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and found inspiration to develop a new sound for himself. Redding started writing the lines, "Sittin' in the morning sun, I'll be sittin' when the evening comes" and the song's first verse, under the abbreviated title "Dock of the Bay."

Redding had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. While touring in support of the albums King & Queen (a collaboration with vocalist Carla Thomas) and Live in Europe, he continued writing lines for the song on napkins and hotel paper. That November, Redding joined Cropper at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, where they completed and recorded it.

In a September 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper said:

Otis was one of those [guys] who had 100 ideas. [...] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got, he was renting a 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 on with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. [...] Otis didn't really write about himself but I did. Songs like "Mr. Pitiful," "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)"; they were about Otis and Otis' life. "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.

From those sessions emerged Redding's final recorded work, including "Dock of the Bay," which was recorded on November 22, with additional overdubs on December 7. Redding's restrained yet emotive delivery is backed by Cropper's succinct guitar playing. The song is somewhat different in style from most of Redding's recordings. While discussing it with his wife, Redding said that he wanted it to "be a little different", to "change his style". There were concerns that the song had too much of a pop feel. There were discussions of contracting the Stax gospel act the Staple Singers to record backing vocals, but this was never carried out. Redding considered the song unfinished, and planned to record what he considered a final version, but never got the chance.