Otis Redding

Redding said it plainly: "If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard — he is my inspiration," he told an interviewer in 1966. The debt started literal: at fifteen, Redding dropped out of school to tour with Richard's old band, the Upsetters, sending home $25 a week, according to his brother Rodgers. When Richard inducted Redding into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, he named the exact moment it clicked: "When I heard Otis sing 'Lucille,' I thought it was me!"

listen: upstream & heresource: Cheat Sheet — Otis Redding on Little Richard (Little Richard influence, 1966 interview quotes) ↗share

1957

LucilleLittle Richard

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1964

LucilleOtis Redding

listen forRichard's original rides a pounding piano triplet under a shredded, whooping shout of the title line. Redding's 1964 cover, the closing track on his debut album Pain in My Heart, keeps that tempo and the same repeated holler of "Lucille" but roughens it — Stax horns stand in for Richard's saxophones, and Redding's huskier, lower voice trades shriek for grit. It's close enough that when Little Richard introduced Redding into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decades later, he said hearing it back felt like hearing himself.

When Cooke was shot dead in December 1964, Redding was gutted. Otis Blue, cut months later, folds in a cover of Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" — Redding said he recorded it to "fill the silent void" Cooke's death left behind. The critic Peter Buckley, in his book The Rough Guide to Rock, heard the same debt in Redding's whole delivery, describing a voice that "combined Sam Cooke's phrasing with a brawnier delivery."

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1964

A Change Is Gonna ComeSam Cooke

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1965

A Change Is Gonna ComeOtis Redding

listen forCooke's original glides on strings and a church-trained control that barely rises above a murmur even as the lyric reaches for hope. Redding's Otis Blue version strips the orchestra for Stax's house band and horns, and lets the vocal go where Cooke held back — cracking, straining, nearly shouting the same lines Cooke sang smooth. It's the clearest place to hear what Redding took directly from Cooke, and what grit he added on his own.

Redding's first stage was the choir loft. One account of his early life records that he "got his first experience as a musician singing in the choir at Macon's Vineville Baptist Church," and by his teens he was on Sunday-morning gospel broadcasts on Macon's WIBB-AM. That churchgoing, radio-broadcast gospel — call-and-response, a shout building toward collapse — became the engine under his secular records. On "Try a Little Tenderness," one critic wrote, by the final verse "his voice cracks, shouts, and growls, pushing his vocal cords to their limits."

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1959

Oh Mary Don't You WeepBlack Gospel Quartet Tradition

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1966

Try a Little TendernessOtis Redding

listen forPut the Swan Silvertones' 1959 recording of the spiritual "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" beside Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness": both build from a calm, measured opening into a leader-and-chorus shout, the lead voice breaking apart under the weight of what it's saying while the group surges in behind him. Redding's is a horn section and the Stax house band standing in for the choir, but the architecture — restraint, then rupture — is the one he grew up singing every Sunday.