Otis Redding and Lake Monona

On December seventh, nineteen sixty-seven, Otis Redding went into a recording studio in Memphis for what turned out to be the last session of his life. He was finishing a song he had started writing four months earlier on a rented houseboat in Sausalito. He called it Sittin On the Dock of the Bay.

Three days later, on the morning of December tenth, Redding boarded a twin-engine Beechcraft he had recently purchased and headed north for a concert in Madison. He was twenty-six years old, one of the transcendent soul voices of the nineteen sixties, and his career was accelerating. Eight people were aboard: Redding, members of his band the Bar-Kays, a valet, and the pilot.

The plane never reached the airport. For reasons that were never officially determined, the aircraft went down into Lake Monona at approximately three minutes before landing. The lake was frigid and the fuselage sank quickly. Seven of the eight people aboard were killed: Redding, pilot Richard Fraser, Bar-Kays members Jimmy King, Ronnie Caldwell, Phalon Jones, and Carl Cunningham, and valet Matthew Kelly. The sole survivor was trumpet player Ben Cauley, who managed to stay afloat until he was rescued.

The cause of the crash remains, officially, undetermined. No mechanical failure was conclusively established.

Sittin On the Dock of the Bay was released on January eighth, nineteen sixty-eight, with Redding's unmixed whistle filling the passage where lyrics were still unwritten. It reached number one in March. It was the first posthumous number-one single in the history of the American pop charts.

A memorial marker stands near the shore of Lake Monona. The water here is cold in December and it looks, on a gray afternoon, nothing at all like a dock in the sun.