Otis Redding: Otis Blue - Otis Redding Sings Soul (clear vinyl) [RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This limited edition puts Otis Blue on crystal clear vinyl in mono, on the Volt label. The album topped the Billboard R&B albums chart, reached No. 6 in the UK, and Time named it one of the 100 greatest albums ever.

This edition

• Clear vinyl
• Mono
• Limited edition

About the album

Most albums take months. Otis Blue took roughly a day. Over July 9 and 10, 1965, Otis Redding and the Stax house band squeezed about 22 hours of studio time around their own club gigs in Memphis, and walked out with one of the defining soul records of the decade.

Booker T. & the M.G.'s are the engine, with Steve Cropper on guitar, Duck Dunn on bass, Al Jackson Jr. on drums and a young Isaac Hayes on piano, while the Memphis horns punch every chorus home. Redding's own "Respect" and the aching "I've Been Loving You Too Long" anchor it, and with Sam Cooke gone just months earlier, he pays tribute with three Cooke songs, including "Change Gonna Come" and "Wonderful World." Then he grabs the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" and turns it into a horn-blasting Memphis stomp. Tom Dowd engineered, with Jim Stewart and Steve Cropper producing.

It sold over 250,000 copies in its day and went gold in the UK in 2022, some 57 years after the fact. Otis was never one to rush, apart from the recording.

Also at Kops: more Otis Redding on vinyl · browse Classic Soul

Tracklist

Listen

On Volt / Atlantic / Rhino (cat# RCV1 80138), a reissue of the 1965 album.