Singled Out #5: "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" / "Sweet Lorene" -- Otis Redding

I spent the better part of this evening watching the latest of many documentaries and mini-series on the Menendez Brothers. It was fascinating and the acting is next-level, but I didn’t want to go to bed with the mildly disturbed feeling the story gave me. I figured it might help if I put something positive out into the world.

So here it is: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”, which has been my absolute favorite song forever. Or at least for the last 40+ years.

I feel like I’ve told the story before, but family history states that my first favorite song was “Winchester Cathedral”, a 1920s-style vaudeville parody that reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in late 1966. I will tell that tale another time.

I can’t remember the first time I heard “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” but it would have been around the same time I first heard the previous song in this series, “I Wish It Would Rain” by the Temptations. Unlike “Winchester Cathedral, which will always remain a cute song that capture the fancy of 17-month-old me, my appreciation for both “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” and “I Wish It Would Rain” has only grown over the years.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” and “I Wish It Would Rain” are linked by tragedy and coincidence. Roger Penzabene, the lyricist who wrote the mournful words to “I Wish It Would Rain” took his own life a week after the song’s release. Otis Redding never heard the completed “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” single — he was killed in a plane crash just days after recording the song. Within days of Redding’s death, his “Dock” co-writer, Steve Cropper, had the difficult task of preparing the final mix for release as a single, which was hit #1 on the Top 40 in early 1968.

The songs are both sad ballads, and in what is the oddest coincidence, both of them feature ambient nature sounds: seagulls, waves, rain. Maybe it was those sounds that drew me in to each of these songs when I first heard them as a boy. I will never know for sure what it was but maybe it was just that, my taste for goofy 1960’s vaudeville parody aside, even as a kid I could sense and appreciate deep and beautiful melancholy when I heard it.