Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay—Murfin Corona Confinement Music Festival

Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding.

Note—This is the first song suggested by a reader/listener—Nancy Fred.  You are all invited to make requests.  We are looking for the eclectic, unusual, or forgotten across genres and styles.  Dig into your memories and dust off the moldy oldies!

Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay may be the ultimate chill song.  It was co-written by blues and soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just days before his death in a plane crash. The song was released on Stax Record’s Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous single to top the charts in the U.S.

Redding was 26 when he recoded the final version of the song at Stax’s Memphis studio and was a rapidly rising star.  Blusier than most Soul singers, he never quite fit it with the Mo Town Sound or highly produced music from Philadelphia and Mussel Shoals.  He got a boost in crossover appeal with hip young White audiences when he headlined at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and the film of his electric performance boosted it further.

Ottis Redding was a dynamic live performer.

Redding began scribbling notes for Dock of the Bay while on tour in the months after that show.  Later he collaborated with Cooper while they were staying with their friend, Earl “Speedo” Simms, on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.  Redding was searching for a new sound quite different than his usual hard charging blues.  Stax executives feared that the departure would damage the label’s reputation.  Finally in the studio Coopers also produced the recording sessions with Booker T. and the MGs as the backup band.  The main track was laid down in November of ’67 with additional dubbing in December.

Otis returned to touring with plans to make additional changes to the recording—the sounds of the water in San Francisco Bay and seagulls—later.  On December 10 he was flying into Madison, Wisconsin in a fog when the small twin engine Beechcraft H18 he was in crashed into Lake Monona.  He died with four members of the band Bar Keys, their valet, and the pilot.

The posthumous The Dock of the Bay album matched the wild success of the single peaking at #4 on the Album Charts.  It has never gone out of circulation.

Back in Memphis Cooper dubbed the sounds that Redding wanted.  The single was released on January 8, 1968 less than three weeks after his funeral in his home town of Macon, Georgia.  The song shot to number one on the R&B charts in early 1968 and in March, topped the pop charts for four weeks.  It went on to win two Grammy Awards—Best R&B Song and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.  The Dock of the Bay was ranked twenty-eighth on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  Redding was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and in 1999 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included three Redding recordings, Shake, Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay, and Try a Little Tenderness, on its list 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll,

When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob. Bob, Bobbin’ Along—Murfin Corona Confinement Music Festival

When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along by Al Jolson, 1926

Here in McHenry County in the northwest boonies of the Chicago area it snowed for almost 12 hours yesterday evening and overnight.  Luckily for us, temperatures were just above freezing and the white stuff was self-shoveling on the sidewalks and drive way.  We got over two inches and the snow clings to the tree branches for that Winter wonderland look.  But when I ventured out of the house to retrieve the newspaper, I spotted robins hopping along the walk and into the snow on the grass in search of a morning snack.  Aside from some early scouts and the emergence of a few who overwintered deep in wood thickets,  the birds just arrived in numbers in these parts last week—as always a welcome sign of Spring.  And Spring is both the most hopeful and muscular of season reminding us of the indomitable vigor of life itself overcoming any setbacks or obstacles.  Welcome news for all of us these days.

Journeyman tunesmith Harry Woods wrote When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along.

When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along was a 1926 popular song written, by Harry Woods, a journeyman Tin Pan Alley tunesmith who also wrote such standards as Side by Side, When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, and Try a Little Tenderness.  The song is an infectiously cheerful earworm, little wonder that it became an instant hit.  

Singer Lillian Roth, a very hot number in her day, made the Red, Red Robin her signature song.

It became the signature song for saloon chanteuse and Broadway star Lillian Roth, who performed it often during the height of her musical career from the late 1920s to the late 1930s.   Susan Hayward sang it in the 1955 Roth bio-weeper I’ll Cry Tomorrow.  Two years earlier Doris Day hit the charts with the song.

In ’26 “Whispering” Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards a/k/a Ukulele Ike, Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, and the now forgotten band the Ipana Troubadours.

Al Jolson sang the song in the 1926 Vitaphone short A Plantation Act.

 But the song is most closely associated with the manic superstar Al Jolson who had the biggest hit of all that year.  He also sang it in blackface in A Plantation Act, an early Vitaphone sound-on-disc short film released the year before his feature film debut in Warner Bros.’s The Jazz Singer in 1927.  He recorded it again 1947 for Decca Records.   Larry Parks Lip-synced that version in Columbia Pictures’ 1949 bio pick sequel Jolson Sings Again.

You’ll Never Walk Alone—Murfin Corona Confinement Music Festival

You'll Never Walk Alone from Carousel by Renée Fleming.

Note—A couple of days ago I posted Hank Williams classic I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry as a response to the social distancing and isolation many of us are experiencing during the Coronavirus emergency.  Folks seemed to like that so much that yesterday I featured British World War II favorite Vera Lynn singing the romantic separation ballad I’ll Be Seeing You and announced that I would make one of my Murfin Music Festival a regular feature for the foreseeable.  Today I am migrating it to Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout from where it can easily be shared widely.

Since this is Sunday and some of us are really missing our church connection and in need of a dose of spirituality and encouragement here is something inspirational.  But today’s song does not come from any hymnal, it comes from Broadway.

The graduation scene from the original Broadway production of Rodger and Hammerstein's Carousel.

Carousel was the second musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.  It was Ference Molnár’s 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline in 1873.  It was an unusual and grim choice in an era when most stage musicals were still revues, frothy romantic comedies, or light operettas.  In the show innocent textile mill girl Julie Jordon meets rough and tumble carousel barker Billy Bigelow at carnival set up for the town’s annual clam bake.  He woos, seduces, and abuses the girl before committing suicide after a botched robbery.  Then in an apparently universalist heaven, he is summoned from his duties as a star polisher by the Starkeeper to return invisibly to earth to save his daughter Louise who is in trouble and considering suicide herself due to the shame of being a bastard and living as a social pariah with her disgrace mother.  In his frustration at being unable to get through to Louise, Billy slaps her.  Unlike the original play in which the daughter is doomed, Carousel ends in a moment of uplifting triumph as Louise marches in for her high school graduation.

In the musical Julie is comforted after Billy’s death by Netti Fowler, Julie’s wise cousin and owner of a small seaside resort who sings You’ll Never Walk Alone.  The song is reprised in the final graduation scene by the whole cast.

In the original production Julie was played by Jan Clayton, later noted as the mom on TV’s Lassie, Billy by macho baritone John Raite, Christine Johnson as Nettie, and ingénue Bambi Lynn as Louise.  Many performers have taken the stage in numerous Broadway Revivals, London productions, touring companies and innumerable regional, community, and school theater productions.

The movie poster for the 1956 film adaptation.

The 1956 20th Century Fox film adaptation Featured Shirley Jones, Gordon MacRea, Claramae Turner, and Susan Luckey in the roles.

Renée Fleming as Nettie comforts Julie in the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel

Today we are featuring a version of You’ll Never Walk Alone from the 2018 Broadway revival by opera lyric soprano diva Renée Fleming.