Otis Redding and the Roxy

Otis Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, in September of nineteen forty-one, but Macon is where he grew up and where the world first heard him. His family moved to the city when he was young, and he sang in the Vineville Baptist Church choir, took drum and vocal lessons starting at ten, and by his teenage years was performing gospel songs on Macon radio station WIBB every Sunday for six dollars a performance.

The turning point came at the Roxy and Douglass Theatres. The Douglass was the heart of Macon's Black entertainment world, a venue on Broadway opened in nineteen twenty-one by an African American entrepreneur named Charles Henry Douglass, who ran it as part of the Theater Owners Booking Association, a cooperative circuit of dozens of Black-owned theatres across the South. Every significant Black performer of the era passed through this circuit. At the Roxy, in nineteen fifty-eight, Otis Redding entered a talent contest called the Teenage Party. He won. For fifteen consecutive weeks he won, each time pocketing the five-dollar prize before the audience decided they were done discovering him.

He found his way to Stax Records in Memphis, recorded These Arms of Mine in nineteen sixty-two, and spent the next five years recording songs that permanently altered what American rhythm and blues could say and how it could say it. Respect. Try a Little Tenderness. I've Been Loving You Too Long. He was twenty-six years old and at the absolute peak of his career when his plane went down near Madison, Wisconsin, on December tenth, nineteen sixty-seven.

More than four thousand five hundred people attended his funeral in Macon. He is memorialized by a bronze statue in Gateway Park and by the bridge that crosses the Ocmulgee River bearing his name. He was buried at his ranch north of Macon. His voice is buried nowhere.