Purchase
Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul
Liveright
June 2015
On Sale: June 1, 2015
Featuring: Otis Redding
400 pages
ISBN: 0871408732
EAN: 9780871408730
Kindle: B00OD8Z1CW
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Biography
A soul icon and the southern music he helped
popularize come to life in this moving
requiem. When he died in one of rock's string
of tragic plane crashes, Otis Redding was only twenty-six,
yet already the avatar of a new kind of soul music. The
beating heart of Memphis-based Stax Records, he had risen to
fame belting out gospel-flecked blues in stage performances
that seemed to ignite not only a room but an entire
generation. If Berry Gordy's black-owned kingdom in Motown
showed the way in soul music, Redding made his own way,
going where not even his two role models who had preceded
him out of Macon, Georgia―Little Richard and James Brown―had
gone. Now, in this transformative work, New York
Times Notable Book author Mark Ribowsky contextualizes
his subject's short career within the larger cultural and
social movements of the era, tracing the crooner's rise from
preacher's son to a preacher of three-minute soul sermons.
And what a quick rise it was. At the tender age of
twenty-one, Redding needed only a single unscheduled
performance to earn a record deal, his voice so "utterly
unique" (Atlantic) that it catapulted him on a path
to stardom and turned a Memphis theater-turned-studio into a
music mecca. Soon he was playing at sold-out venues across
the world, from Finsbury Park in London to his ultimate
conquest, the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival in California,
where he finally won over the flower-power
crowd. Still, Redding was not always the affable,
big-hearted man's man the PR material painted him to be.
Based on numerous new interviews and prodigious research,
Dreams to Remember reintroduces an incredibly
talented yet impulsive man, one who once even risked his
career by shooting a man in the leg. But that temperament
masked a deep vulnerability that was only exacerbated by an
industry that refused him a Grammy until he was in his
grave―even as he shaped the other Stax soul men around him,
like Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Booker T. and The
MG's. As a result, this requiem is one of great
conquest but also grand tragedy: a soul king of truth, a
mortal man with an immortal voice and a pain in his heart.
Now he, and the forces that shaped his incomparable sound,
are reclaimed, giving us a panoramic of an American original
who would come to define an entire era, yet only wanted what
all men deserve―a modicum of respect and a place to watch
the ships roll in and away again.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy