October 28, 2025 • 24 mins
He was a voice that could move mountains — raw, sacred, and unstoppable.
A preacher’s son with a sound that carried the weight of every hymn and heartbreak in America.
Just as the world began to listen, fate silenced him in a storm over the Midwest.
But one unfinished song would rise from the wreckage to define him forever.
This is the story of a man who gave everything to his music…and left behind a melody the world still hums without knowing why. Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast presents: The King of Soul.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast — The King of Soul — was written and narrated by Jonny Hartwell.
While inspired by real events, certain dialogue and scenes have been dramatized for storytelling purposes.
Special thanks to Stax Records, Concord Music Group, and the Otis Redding Foundation for preserving the legacy of one of music’s greatest voices. Historical sources include interviews with Steve Cropper, Ben Cauley, and archival reporting from Billboard, Rolling Stone, and local Macon newspapers. This episode is dedicated to the fans who keep the whistle alive — every time they sing along.”
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
A preacher’s son with a sound that carried the weight of every hymn and heartbreak in America.
Just as the world began to listen, fate silenced him in a storm over the Midwest.
But one unfinished song would rise from the wreckage to define him forever.
This is the story of a man who gave everything to his music…and left behind a melody the world still hums without knowing why. Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast presents: The King of Soul.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast — The King of Soul — was written and narrated by Jonny Hartwell.
While inspired by real events, certain dialogue and scenes have been dramatized for storytelling purposes.
Special thanks to Stax Records, Concord Music Group, and the Otis Redding Foundation for preserving the legacy of one of music’s greatest voices. Historical sources include interviews with Steve Cropper, Ben Cauley, and archival reporting from Billboard, Rolling Stone, and local Macon newspapers. This episode is dedicated to the fans who keep the whistle alive — every time they sing along.”
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Heartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Here we go again,
diving into another story from music's dark side. When you
work in radio long enough, you start to recognize voices
the way a sailor no stars. They guide you, they
(00:21):
warn you, some keep you safe. Some burnout before you
can name them. Every once in a while, a voice
cuts through the static and makes you sit up straight.
A sound so rat you can feel the room change.
It's more than talent, it's truth with a backbeat. But
what happens when a voice like that just disappears? No
(00:41):
farewell tour, no slow fade into nostalgia, just gone gone,
just like that. I wanted to understand what happens when
the brightest note stops mid song. So I went south,
back to the place where this particular voice first shook
the rafters. I didn't bring a cab, just a recorder,
a notebook, and the question that's haunted every fan of
(01:05):
American music since nineteen sixty seven, how can something that
alive end so suddenly? This isn't a tribute. It's an
investigation into faith, sound and the thin line between destiny
and disaster. This is Script sixteen, searching for the Madman
a Macon and the Crown Prince of Soul, Act one
(01:29):
Pain in my Heart. As you approach Macon, you'll pass
through stretches of rural Georgia, farmland and forests and rivers,
and older small town landscapes. For example, the Oak Mulgi
Pimont Scenic Byway travels near Macon, passing through pine forests
and across the Old Mulghi River. Billboards fade into timber.
The humidity holds you like a damp hug. Even the
(01:52):
air hums a low, patient rhythm that sounds like it's
been waiting for a singer. Everyone I spoke to told
the same story. Before there was a legend there was
a boy who sang so loud you could hear him
across the county line. Just imagine a wooden church on
Sunday morning. The paints peeling, the pews are sticky with varnish,
fans printed with towing service ads wave and slow unison.
(02:15):
Then the kid stands up barely twelve skinny as a
broom handle. His first note hits, and the walls tremble.
The preacher stops, looks at the kid. His eyes startled
open with amazement. For a second, the congregation forgets the
sermon and listens to something closer to revelation. His father preached,
his mother prayed, and between them he learned that survival
(02:38):
is a duet. Outside the soundtrack was the South itself,
train whistles, hammers, screen doors, thunder, rolling over fields. If
life had a rhythm, he could make it rhyme. He
played everywhere that had plug and a crowd, fish fries
and juke joints and high school dances, bars with bullet
holes in the drywall. He didn't have a style yet,
(03:00):
he just had a need. Every song sounded like a
confession shouted through a keyhole. I want to take you back.
It's nineteen fifty eight, a shack of a club called
the Hilltop. Hotter inside than out. You can smell whiskey
and catfish and sawdust. The band tunes up, horns a
little sharp, drums a little late, but when the mic squeals,
(03:20):
he just grins, adjust it with both hands, and belts
out a love song no one's heard before. Half the
room laughs, the other half starts swaying. By the third chorus,
even the bartender's wiping his eyes. After the show, he's
paid in crumpled bills and beer. A man in a
suit leans in and says, son, you got a little
bit too much churching you for the blues, and don't
(03:41):
you lose it. That line follows him the rest of
his life. He spends the next few years chasing that
spark from town to town. Sometimes the band quits mid tour,
Sometimes the tires do too. He once told a friend
he didn't mind sleeping in cars because the highway hums
sounded like harmony, every mile, every failed show, every long night,
(04:01):
yelling over broken amplifiers. That's where the grit comes from,
not from the pain exactly, but from the refusal to
be quiet. He knows that talent gets you noticed, Persistent
gets you nowhere until the right door opens, And that
door for him was in Memphis Act too, These Arms
(04:22):
of Mine. I drove up to Memphis on a gray
afternoon and parked outside the Old Stacks Building, the one
that used to be a movie theater before it became
holy ground for music lovers like me. Now the Marquee's gone,
but you can still feel the ghosts pressing up against
the walls inside. Engineers swear the floorboards, remember every footstep.
(04:43):
It's where our mystery man walked in one day, not
as a star, but as a chauffeur of all things.
He'd driven another singer up for an audition. When the
session ended, he asked for a chance, just a chance,
just one. Let me open the studio door for you.
Dimlt wires everywhere, A red recording ball blinks like a heartbeat.
(05:06):
He steps to the mic, nervous, smile, hat in hand.
Someone in the booth jokes, all right, driver, show us
what you got. He exhales once, moves closer to the mic,
and starts to sing. These arms of mine, they're lonely,
and the first line might waiver, but the second, the
(05:27):
second catches fire. By the end, nobody's laughing. The producer
hits the innercomm and quietly says, well, I guess that's
a take. That record barely made it onto local radio,
but when it did, phones just lit up. Listeners didn't
ask who that was. They asked what was that? Because nobody,
(05:48):
I'm telling you, nobody ever sounded like that. Half prayer,
half plea, all human. He quit driving that week, started
touring instead. Tiny clubs, long miles, paper suits that wilted
under stage lights. But the crowds grew. He wasn't singing
to people anymore. He was pulling them through something. You
(06:09):
were there a two lane highway at midnight. The bus
rambles like an unsteady heartbeat. Half the bands asleep, heads
against windows. He sits in the back with a notebook
and a borrowed guitar, humming through fragments in the dark.
Every time a train passes, he tries to match its whistle.
Someone grumbles, man gets some rest. He just smiles. I
(06:31):
can't can't lose this tune. The next few singles climb
a little higher each time. Nothing spectacular yet, just steady,
a steady pulse of someone who won't stop. When he
hits the stage, he doesn't just perform. He occupies. He kneels,
he shouts, he whispers, drops to the floor like the
spirit knocked him there. The audience doesn't watch him, They
(06:55):
join him. By the time he's twenty four, he's headlining
the Southern Circuit. Reporters call him the preacher of pain
in a good way. Other singers start copying his phrasing,
the way he bends a word until it feels like
it might break. But success has a cost, and you
can already hear it in his voice. There's a rasp now,
(07:17):
a shadow, the kind that shows up when you've been
singing every night of your life without nothing left in
the tank. I asked one of the old sessions then,
what it was like the first time he realized this
guy wasn't just another hopeful, he says, you ever hear
thunder roll across the valley before the storm hits, That's
(07:37):
what he sounded like, like a warning. He doesn't know
it yet, but the storm's coming faster than anyone expects.
At three, Try a little Tenderness. Next act three, Try
(07:59):
a little Tenderness. I found a stack of old tour
posters in a making pawn shop, curled sun bleached edges,
torn dates from nineteen sixty five and sixty six and
sixty seven, City after city, where the ink on his
name got boulder each time. First it was the third
line of the bill, then the second, and suddenly it
was the only name that mattered. One was from a
(08:21):
theater from London nineteen sixty six. I could just imagine
the rain on cobblestones, breath fogging, in the air. Inside,
the crowd hums like a generator, not sure what they're
about to see. And suddenly the curtains pull back, a horn, stab,
a scream, and then him. Jacket dark was sweat before
(08:42):
the second verse. He doesn't glide, He charges. He sings
like the floors on fire, and the ceiling's too low.
When the song ends, the crowd doesn't clap, it explodes.
They don't know what to call it. They just know
it's theirs now. And when the press finally learns the
name ode reading and they spell it wrong in half
the articles, but that doesn't matter. The sound is right.
(09:06):
Otis tears through Europe and through America, through every stage
that will hold him. He moves like a boxer, preaches
like a reverend, sweats through silk like a sinner looking
for redemption. I talked to one of the horn players,
older now boys, raps thin as paper. He said, hell,
every night he give us that look before the encore.
(09:27):
I didn't need a word. We knew, we knew this
one might kill him, but we're gonna do it anyway.
Then he told me a story of the legendary Monterey
Pop Festival. It was nineteen sixty seven, the West Coast,
still high on peace and flowers. The stage smelled like
smoke and Petrulli. Then comes that Georgia accent, cutting through
the haze. You all ready for a little soul. The crowd, hippies,
(09:50):
rock kids, everyone, they just erupt. He opens with Respect,
not the version you know, but the song he wrote.
You knew that right. This one's dirtier and faster, a demand,
not a plea. Then he does a cover of Satisfaction
from the Rolling Stones, rolling pounding feral. By the time
he closes with tried a little Tenderness, he's on his knees,
(10:13):
voice cracking, body shaking, the audience screaming like a revival.
He told me you could feel it, You could feel
it in your chest, the sense that the world just
tilted a bit, that somehow, for these few minutes, soul
and rock and gospel and rebellion all found the same frequency.
When I talked to one of the festival photographers, she said,
(10:34):
I saw him walk off stage. He looked emptied out,
like a candle after the flame's gone, but the wicks
still glowing. That glow follows him home radio stations, double
his Spins magazine covers call him the King of Soul.
He buys a farm in Georgia, white fences, a small lake,
and peace. But he doesn't slow down. He can't act
(10:58):
four hard to handle. Success has a hum. It's the
sound of the phone that never stops ringing, the suitcase
that never fully gets unpacked, the stage monitors that hiss
even after the band's gone home. I sat in that
old Stax control room listening to engineers described the grind,
twelve hour sessions, half written songs, no sleep, and a
(11:22):
man who wouldn't stop until everyone felt what he felt.
Otis didn't sing songs. One of them told me he
argued with them until they surrendered. He was restless. Motown
had its machine, the Beatles had their revolution. Otis wanted
something bigger than either, not a hit, a horizon. They
(11:44):
told me at the time that after he was recovering
from throat surgery, doctors warned him to rest. Apparently, he
just laughed and coughed and said, man, I am resting.
I just happened to be singing while I do it.
Let me take it back to the summer of sixty seven.
A houseboat in saw Lito fog rolling in like a curtain.
He sits with a guitar, staring at the bay beside him.
(12:07):
Guitar Steve Proper scribbles chords on a napkin. They're not
chasing a groove this time, They're chasing serenity. Otis hums
the line under his breath. Sitting in the morning sun,
he nods to the water. Hear that rhythm. That's all
I want now, Cropper later told me it wasn't like
(12:31):
anything we'd done. It was lighter like he finally exhaled.
But the rest of the band was uneasy. They wanted
the fire, not the quiet. One of them said, Man,
folks don't buy sitting, They buy shouting. ODIs just smiled.
They'll buy feeling. So how did the session at Stacks unfold? Well,
(12:52):
let me set the stage. Cigarette smoke filled half the room.
The lights are low, tape reels silently spinning. The band
tunes quietly, horns, signing, drums, whispering. ODIs steps to the mic,
eyes closed, head bowed like a prayer. For a moment,
the world just holds its breath, and then he sings.
(13:16):
The first note curls through the air, raw, pleading holy.
The room changes, the horn players forget to breathe. The
drummer softens his grip, even the salty engineer grins his approval.
They're chasing that sound no meter can measure, because when
ODIs sings, everyone feels like something is breaking and something
(13:38):
is healing. He whistles through the outro, laughing, saying we'll
put birds in it, make it sound like the sea.
Cropper nods writes it down. No one realizes they're recording prophecy.
When the take ends, Otis leans back and says, after Christmas,
will finish it, new year, new sound. Then he packs
(14:01):
up his tape, hugs the crew and promises to see
them in a week. A week can be forever. He
goes back on tour, tight schedule, no margins for air weathers,
turning Midwest dates stacked one after another, sleep debt growing
heavier than the luggage. I asked one of the roadies
(14:22):
what it was like on the last run. He said,
you could tell. You could tell he was tired, but
the shows were good, really good man too good. It's
like he was racing something we couldn't see. There's footage
from his last TV appearance a local station in Cleveland.
He's smiling and joking with the host, talking about new music,
(14:42):
a new band, big plans for sixty eight. At one point,
the interviewer says, you look calm these days, and Otis
just laughed. Yeah, I'm just sitting for a while. The
tape cuts there. The camera operator swears he heard him
humming the same unfinish melody as he walked off the set.
(15:03):
Nobody knew those would be the last notes anyone ever
heard him sing. Act five, I love you more than
words can say. Next Act five, I love you more
than words can say. The winter sky over Wisconsin looks
(15:27):
harmless at first, flat, pale, almost lazy, but everyone who
lives there knows that kind of sky is a liar.
December tenth, nineteen sixty seven, Sunday morning, Madison. The Beachcraft
eight eighteen weights on the tarmac, a small twin engine,
white paint, red stripe, the kind of plane that's done
(15:47):
this a thousand times and will do it one thousand more,
except not today. They'd load light, a few horns, a
suitcase of stage clothes, one overnight bag, stuff with sheet music.
The band the Barqueys, still buzzing from the show the
night before, jokes teasing one kid humming the opening of
her spect under his breath. They're nineteen twenty, invincible. Otis
(16:11):
climbs aboard, last coat, collar up, hat pulled low. He
looks back once towards the hangar, nods to the manager
on the ground, and ducks inside. The cabin smells of
oil and leather, seats, cramped windows, rimmed with frost. Someone
cracks a joke about the weather. Hope this bird can
fly through soup. The pilot grins but doesn't answer. Engines roar,
(16:34):
props blur, and the world outside turns white. At first,
it's smooth, steady. They level off. The snow thickens. The
laughter quiets. Man, this storm's bad. One of them says.
Otis leans forward, smiles that tired half smile will be fine.
Crowds awaiting, Then the hum falters, a cough, then another,
(16:55):
then another. Someone mutters that didn't sound right. The pilot's
voice tightened over. The engines hold on. We're pushing through
the cloud bank. But the cloud doesn't end, It just
becomes everything. The plane lurches hard left, Coffee spills, horn
cases slide, a shout. Frost creeps across the window, blinding white.
The smell of fuel thickens. The ultiminar spins too fast,
(17:17):
too low. Otis closes his eyes. He's praying, remembering his
wife's laugh, children's faces, the Georgia farm, the water in Salsolito.
That melody, then impact, a metallic scream, a rush of
icy blackness, the silence so total it swallows itself. Some
time later, a reporter pronounces nine souls on board, eight
(17:42):
are lost. The lake was forty degrees, the air barely twenty.
Search boats fought sleet and win through the night. At dawn,
a rescue diver spotted movement, a hand clutching a seat cushion.
Ben Cauley trumpet player, aged twenty, still alive. Imagine surfacing
into that cold, your lungs fire like coal. You see
(18:03):
nothing but gray sky in wreckage. You kick towards a sound,
sirens somewhere far away. Hands pull you out, wrap you
in a blanket that feels like sandpaper. Later, in the hospital,
reporter's crowd around his bed. He tells them, I unbuckled
my seat belt. I don't know why. When the plane
hit the water I was under I saw him. He
(18:24):
was not moving, he didn't look scared. He just still,
the quote runs in every paper the next morning. It's
the only eyewitness testimony to one of music's cruelest moments.
Back in Georgia, the phone on his wife's night stand
rings just after dawn. No one remembers who answered first.
(18:46):
The wire surface gets the story before she does. Within hours,
radio stations starts spinning his records in tribute. By nightfall,
candlelit vigils glow outside of stacked studios in Memphis. People
don't talk, They just play the songs inside. Steve Cropper
sits alone in the studio reel stack like tombstones. He
(19:10):
pulls one out, marked DOC one. He threads the tape
through the reel to reel presses play. The room is
dim and quiet, too quiet. The first sound you hear
isn't the music. It's breathing. Then his voice. I'll be
(19:30):
sitting when the evening comes. Cropper's throat titans. He adds
the gulls, and the waves, and the faint whistle. Otis
joked about. Each sound cuts deeper. He keeps working because
the alternative is to stop hearing him altogether. He whispers
(19:52):
to no one, I'll finish it, man, I'll finish it.
Just like you want it. Then he lets the tape
run to the end, the real slow, clicking softly, a
heartbeat fading into silence. When the news broke, they called
him the King of Soul, but titles don't mean much
(20:12):
at thirty thousand feet. Fans wrote thousands of letters, some
addressed to Heaven, some to the record label. One read,
thank you for teaching me how to feel and for
making it hurt less. In the months that followed, Steve
Proper mixed the record, wept through the playback, and delivered
it to the label. They released it on January eighth,
(20:33):
nineteen sixty eight, posthumously. Even the word sticks in your throat,
but no one expected what happened next Act six, The
Dock of the Bay Next Act six, Doc of the Bay.
(20:59):
The single comes out quietly at first, just another January
release in a cold, divided America. No one at the
label expects it to chart too slow, too mournful, too still.
But then the calls start. Stations that never played soul
are playing this truck stop, diner's, college dorms, army bases.
(21:20):
Everywhere there's a jukebox that whistle drifts out of it
like a ghost. With perfect pitch. You're there a highway
outside of Saint Louis. It's snowing sideways. You pull into
a rest stop to warm up inside. A waitress's crying
and doesn't know why. On the counter, a tabletop radio
hums sitting in the morning sun. No drums, no shout,
(21:44):
just calm peace that somehow sounds like heartbreak. By spring,
it's number one, A song he never saw finished becomes
his crown I drove to make In a few months
after starting this story, locals still call him quote our boy.
There's a statue now, bronze eyes tilted towards the sky.
Kids climbed the base to take pictures. Old men sit
(22:07):
on benches and talk about the day the phone rang.
One told me when that record came on, it didn't
sound like death. It sounded like a man who finally
made it home. You're there. December eighteenth, nineteen sixty seven,
funeral day. A line of mourners stretch four blocks. White
flowers blanket the church steps. When the casket passes, the
(22:30):
crowd starts. The hum low, uncertain until one voice begins
to whistle, then another, then hundreds. The melody floats above
the sobs, fragile but steady, even the wind holds its breath.
Steve Cropper couldn't bring himself to attend. He stayed in
(22:52):
the studio instead, listening to the master just one more time,
he told me later. It was it was like he
was sitting in the next room, just waiting for me
to hit play, he said. Finishing that record nearly broke him,
but also saved him, because it meant Otis wasn't entirely gone.
Every time the whistle came round, he'd close his eyes
(23:14):
and nod along, as if to say, yeah, oh yeah,
that's him. That's him right there. Decades past, the world
keeps moving, new stars, new styles, new heartbreaks, but the
whistle never fades. You still hear it at dusk, when
the day exhales, on radios that shouldn't still work in
(23:35):
bars where the bartender doesn't know the name of the
song but knows every word. In the hum of the bay,
when the water hits the pier just right, Some songs age,
some songs Wait a dock somewhere south of Savannah, the
air smells like salt and rain. You sit on a
(23:56):
wooden post, shoes off water lapping beneath your heels. The
sun slides down the horizon, gold bleeding into gray. A
gull cries overhead, and from a distant porch radio you
hear a familiar voice. You close your eyes, and the
world tilts for a moment. You can almost see him
leaning back, watching the tide, humming along with time itself.
(24:21):
The whistle comes soft and perfect and drifts into the night.
The King of Soul is gone, but listen, listen closely.
You can hear him still sitting, still watching, still singing
when the evening comes. I hope you enjoyed Scrip sixteen,
(24:45):
Searching for the mad Man of Makon and the Crown
Prince of Soul. I'm Johnny Hartwell. This has been Johnny's
Dead Air podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Heartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Here we go again,
diving into another story from music's dark side. When you
work in radio long enough, you start to recognize voices
the way a sailor no stars. They guide you, they
(00:21):
warn you, some keep you safe. Some burnout before you
can name them. Every once in a while, a voice
cuts through the static and makes you sit up straight.
A sound so rat you can feel the room change.
It's more than talent, it's truth with a backbeat. But
what happens when a voice like that just disappears? No
(00:41):
farewell tour, no slow fade into nostalgia, just gone gone,
just like that. I wanted to understand what happens when
the brightest note stops mid song. So I went south,
back to the place where this particular voice first shook
the rafters. I didn't bring a cab, just a recorder,
a notebook, and the question that's haunted every fan of
(01:05):
American music since nineteen sixty seven, how can something that
alive end so suddenly? This isn't a tribute. It's an
investigation into faith, sound and the thin line between destiny
and disaster. This is Script sixteen, searching for the Madman
a Macon and the Crown Prince of Soul, Act one
(01:29):
Pain in my Heart. As you approach Macon, you'll pass
through stretches of rural Georgia, farmland and forests and rivers,
and older small town landscapes. For example, the Oak Mulgi
Pimont Scenic Byway travels near Macon, passing through pine forests
and across the Old Mulghi River. Billboards fade into timber.
The humidity holds you like a damp hug. Even the
(01:52):
air hums a low, patient rhythm that sounds like it's
been waiting for a singer. Everyone I spoke to told
the same story. Before there was a legend there was
a boy who sang so loud you could hear him
across the county line. Just imagine a wooden church on
Sunday morning. The paints peeling, the pews are sticky with varnish,
fans printed with towing service ads wave and slow unison.
(02:15):
Then the kid stands up barely twelve skinny as a
broom handle. His first note hits, and the walls tremble.
The preacher stops, looks at the kid. His eyes startled
open with amazement. For a second, the congregation forgets the
sermon and listens to something closer to revelation. His father preached,
his mother prayed, and between them he learned that survival
(02:38):
is a duet. Outside the soundtrack was the South itself,
train whistles, hammers, screen doors, thunder, rolling over fields. If
life had a rhythm, he could make it rhyme. He
played everywhere that had plug and a crowd, fish fries
and juke joints and high school dances, bars with bullet
holes in the drywall. He didn't have a style yet,
(03:00):
he just had a need. Every song sounded like a
confession shouted through a keyhole. I want to take you back.
It's nineteen fifty eight, a shack of a club called
the Hilltop. Hotter inside than out. You can smell whiskey
and catfish and sawdust. The band tunes up, horns a
little sharp, drums a little late, but when the mic squeals,
(03:20):
he just grins, adjust it with both hands, and belts
out a love song no one's heard before. Half the
room laughs, the other half starts swaying. By the third chorus,
even the bartender's wiping his eyes. After the show, he's
paid in crumpled bills and beer. A man in a
suit leans in and says, son, you got a little
bit too much churching you for the blues, and don't
(03:41):
you lose it. That line follows him the rest of
his life. He spends the next few years chasing that
spark from town to town. Sometimes the band quits mid tour,
Sometimes the tires do too. He once told a friend
he didn't mind sleeping in cars because the highway hums
sounded like harmony, every mile, every failed show, every long night,
(04:01):
yelling over broken amplifiers. That's where the grit comes from,
not from the pain exactly, but from the refusal to
be quiet. He knows that talent gets you noticed, Persistent
gets you nowhere until the right door opens, And that
door for him was in Memphis Act too, These Arms
(04:22):
of Mine. I drove up to Memphis on a gray
afternoon and parked outside the Old Stacks Building, the one
that used to be a movie theater before it became
holy ground for music lovers like me. Now the Marquee's gone,
but you can still feel the ghosts pressing up against
the walls inside. Engineers swear the floorboards, remember every footstep.
(04:43):
It's where our mystery man walked in one day, not
as a star, but as a chauffeur of all things.
He'd driven another singer up for an audition. When the
session ended, he asked for a chance, just a chance,
just one. Let me open the studio door for you.
Dimlt wires everywhere, A red recording ball blinks like a heartbeat.
(05:06):
He steps to the mic, nervous, smile, hat in hand.
Someone in the booth jokes, all right, driver, show us
what you got. He exhales once, moves closer to the mic,
and starts to sing. These arms of mine, they're lonely,
and the first line might waiver, but the second, the
(05:27):
second catches fire. By the end, nobody's laughing. The producer
hits the innercomm and quietly says, well, I guess that's
a take. That record barely made it onto local radio,
but when it did, phones just lit up. Listeners didn't
ask who that was. They asked what was that? Because nobody,
(05:48):
I'm telling you, nobody ever sounded like that. Half prayer,
half plea, all human. He quit driving that week, started
touring instead. Tiny clubs, long miles, paper suits that wilted
under stage lights. But the crowds grew. He wasn't singing
to people anymore. He was pulling them through something. You
(06:09):
were there a two lane highway at midnight. The bus
rambles like an unsteady heartbeat. Half the bands asleep, heads
against windows. He sits in the back with a notebook
and a borrowed guitar, humming through fragments in the dark.
Every time a train passes, he tries to match its whistle.
Someone grumbles, man gets some rest. He just smiles. I
(06:31):
can't can't lose this tune. The next few singles climb
a little higher each time. Nothing spectacular yet, just steady,
a steady pulse of someone who won't stop. When he
hits the stage, he doesn't just perform. He occupies. He kneels,
he shouts, he whispers, drops to the floor like the
spirit knocked him there. The audience doesn't watch him, They
(06:55):
join him. By the time he's twenty four, he's headlining
the Southern Circuit. Reporters call him the preacher of pain
in a good way. Other singers start copying his phrasing,
the way he bends a word until it feels like
it might break. But success has a cost, and you
can already hear it in his voice. There's a rasp now,
(07:17):
a shadow, the kind that shows up when you've been
singing every night of your life without nothing left in
the tank. I asked one of the old sessions then,
what it was like the first time he realized this
guy wasn't just another hopeful, he says, you ever hear
thunder roll across the valley before the storm hits, That's
(07:37):
what he sounded like, like a warning. He doesn't know
it yet, but the storm's coming faster than anyone expects.
At three, Try a little Tenderness. Next act three, Try
(07:59):
a little Tenderness. I found a stack of old tour
posters in a making pawn shop, curled sun bleached edges,
torn dates from nineteen sixty five and sixty six and
sixty seven, City after city, where the ink on his
name got boulder each time. First it was the third
line of the bill, then the second, and suddenly it
was the only name that mattered. One was from a
(08:21):
theater from London nineteen sixty six. I could just imagine
the rain on cobblestones, breath fogging, in the air. Inside,
the crowd hums like a generator, not sure what they're
about to see. And suddenly the curtains pull back, a horn, stab,
a scream, and then him. Jacket dark was sweat before
(08:42):
the second verse. He doesn't glide, He charges. He sings
like the floors on fire, and the ceiling's too low.
When the song ends, the crowd doesn't clap, it explodes.
They don't know what to call it. They just know
it's theirs now. And when the press finally learns the
name ode reading and they spell it wrong in half
the articles, but that doesn't matter. The sound is right.
(09:06):
Otis tears through Europe and through America, through every stage
that will hold him. He moves like a boxer, preaches
like a reverend, sweats through silk like a sinner looking
for redemption. I talked to one of the horn players,
older now boys, raps thin as paper. He said, hell,
every night he give us that look before the encore.
(09:27):
I didn't need a word. We knew, we knew this
one might kill him, but we're gonna do it anyway.
Then he told me a story of the legendary Monterey
Pop Festival. It was nineteen sixty seven, the West Coast,
still high on peace and flowers. The stage smelled like
smoke and Petrulli. Then comes that Georgia accent, cutting through
the haze. You all ready for a little soul. The crowd, hippies,
(09:50):
rock kids, everyone, they just erupt. He opens with Respect,
not the version you know, but the song he wrote.
You knew that right. This one's dirtier and faster, a demand,
not a plea. Then he does a cover of Satisfaction
from the Rolling Stones, rolling pounding feral. By the time
he closes with tried a little Tenderness, he's on his knees,
(10:13):
voice cracking, body shaking, the audience screaming like a revival.
He told me you could feel it, You could feel
it in your chest, the sense that the world just
tilted a bit, that somehow, for these few minutes, soul
and rock and gospel and rebellion all found the same frequency.
When I talked to one of the festival photographers, she said,
(10:34):
I saw him walk off stage. He looked emptied out,
like a candle after the flame's gone, but the wicks
still glowing. That glow follows him home radio stations, double
his Spins magazine covers call him the King of Soul.
He buys a farm in Georgia, white fences, a small lake,
and peace. But he doesn't slow down. He can't act
(10:58):
four hard to handle. Success has a hum. It's the
sound of the phone that never stops ringing, the suitcase
that never fully gets unpacked, the stage monitors that hiss
even after the band's gone home. I sat in that
old Stax control room listening to engineers described the grind,
twelve hour sessions, half written songs, no sleep, and a
(11:22):
man who wouldn't stop until everyone felt what he felt.
Otis didn't sing songs. One of them told me he
argued with them until they surrendered. He was restless. Motown
had its machine, the Beatles had their revolution. Otis wanted
something bigger than either, not a hit, a horizon. They
(11:44):
told me at the time that after he was recovering
from throat surgery, doctors warned him to rest. Apparently, he
just laughed and coughed and said, man, I am resting.
I just happened to be singing while I do it.
Let me take it back to the summer of sixty seven.
A houseboat in saw Lito fog rolling in like a curtain.
He sits with a guitar, staring at the bay beside him.
(12:07):
Guitar Steve Proper scribbles chords on a napkin. They're not
chasing a groove this time, They're chasing serenity. Otis hums
the line under his breath. Sitting in the morning sun,
he nods to the water. Hear that rhythm. That's all
I want now, Cropper later told me it wasn't like
(12:31):
anything we'd done. It was lighter like he finally exhaled.
But the rest of the band was uneasy. They wanted
the fire, not the quiet. One of them said, Man,
folks don't buy sitting, They buy shouting. ODIs just smiled.
They'll buy feeling. So how did the session at Stacks unfold? Well,
(12:52):
let me set the stage. Cigarette smoke filled half the room.
The lights are low, tape reels silently spinning. The band
tunes quietly, horns, signing, drums, whispering. ODIs steps to the mic,
eyes closed, head bowed like a prayer. For a moment,
the world just holds its breath, and then he sings.
(13:16):
The first note curls through the air, raw, pleading holy.
The room changes, the horn players forget to breathe. The
drummer softens his grip, even the salty engineer grins his approval.
They're chasing that sound no meter can measure, because when
ODIs sings, everyone feels like something is breaking and something
(13:38):
is healing. He whistles through the outro, laughing, saying we'll
put birds in it, make it sound like the sea.
Cropper nods writes it down. No one realizes they're recording prophecy.
When the take ends, Otis leans back and says, after Christmas,
will finish it, new year, new sound. Then he packs
(14:01):
up his tape, hugs the crew and promises to see
them in a week. A week can be forever. He
goes back on tour, tight schedule, no margins for air weathers,
turning Midwest dates stacked one after another, sleep debt growing
heavier than the luggage. I asked one of the roadies
(14:22):
what it was like on the last run. He said,
you could tell. You could tell he was tired, but
the shows were good, really good man too good. It's
like he was racing something we couldn't see. There's footage
from his last TV appearance a local station in Cleveland.
He's smiling and joking with the host, talking about new music,
(14:42):
a new band, big plans for sixty eight. At one point,
the interviewer says, you look calm these days, and Otis
just laughed. Yeah, I'm just sitting for a while. The
tape cuts there. The camera operator swears he heard him
humming the same unfinish melody as he walked off the set.
(15:03):
Nobody knew those would be the last notes anyone ever
heard him sing. Act five, I love you more than
words can say. Next Act five, I love you more
than words can say. The winter sky over Wisconsin looks
(15:27):
harmless at first, flat, pale, almost lazy, but everyone who
lives there knows that kind of sky is a liar.
December tenth, nineteen sixty seven, Sunday morning, Madison. The Beachcraft
eight eighteen weights on the tarmac, a small twin engine,
white paint, red stripe, the kind of plane that's done
(15:47):
this a thousand times and will do it one thousand more,
except not today. They'd load light, a few horns, a
suitcase of stage clothes, one overnight bag, stuff with sheet music.
The band the Barqueys, still buzzing from the show the
night before, jokes teasing one kid humming the opening of
her spect under his breath. They're nineteen twenty, invincible. Otis
(16:11):
climbs aboard, last coat, collar up, hat pulled low. He
looks back once towards the hangar, nods to the manager
on the ground, and ducks inside. The cabin smells of
oil and leather, seats, cramped windows, rimmed with frost. Someone
cracks a joke about the weather. Hope this bird can
fly through soup. The pilot grins but doesn't answer. Engines roar,
(16:34):
props blur, and the world outside turns white. At first,
it's smooth, steady. They level off. The snow thickens. The
laughter quiets. Man, this storm's bad. One of them says.
Otis leans forward, smiles that tired half smile will be fine.
Crowds awaiting, Then the hum falters, a cough, then another,
(16:55):
then another. Someone mutters that didn't sound right. The pilot's
voice tightened over. The engines hold on. We're pushing through
the cloud bank. But the cloud doesn't end, It just
becomes everything. The plane lurches hard left, Coffee spills, horn
cases slide, a shout. Frost creeps across the window, blinding white.
The smell of fuel thickens. The ultiminar spins too fast,
(17:17):
too low. Otis closes his eyes. He's praying, remembering his
wife's laugh, children's faces, the Georgia farm, the water in Salsolito.
That melody, then impact, a metallic scream, a rush of
icy blackness, the silence so total it swallows itself. Some
time later, a reporter pronounces nine souls on board, eight
(17:42):
are lost. The lake was forty degrees, the air barely twenty.
Search boats fought sleet and win through the night. At dawn,
a rescue diver spotted movement, a hand clutching a seat cushion.
Ben Cauley trumpet player, aged twenty, still alive. Imagine surfacing
into that cold, your lungs fire like coal. You see
(18:03):
nothing but gray sky in wreckage. You kick towards a sound,
sirens somewhere far away. Hands pull you out, wrap you
in a blanket that feels like sandpaper. Later, in the hospital,
reporter's crowd around his bed. He tells them, I unbuckled
my seat belt. I don't know why. When the plane
hit the water I was under I saw him. He
(18:24):
was not moving, he didn't look scared. He just still,
the quote runs in every paper the next morning. It's
the only eyewitness testimony to one of music's cruelest moments.
Back in Georgia, the phone on his wife's night stand
rings just after dawn. No one remembers who answered first.
(18:46):
The wire surface gets the story before she does. Within hours,
radio stations starts spinning his records in tribute. By nightfall,
candlelit vigils glow outside of stacked studios in Memphis. People
don't talk, They just play the songs inside. Steve Cropper
sits alone in the studio reel stack like tombstones. He
(19:10):
pulls one out, marked DOC one. He threads the tape
through the reel to reel presses play. The room is
dim and quiet, too quiet. The first sound you hear
isn't the music. It's breathing. Then his voice. I'll be
(19:30):
sitting when the evening comes. Cropper's throat titans. He adds
the gulls, and the waves, and the faint whistle. Otis
joked about. Each sound cuts deeper. He keeps working because
the alternative is to stop hearing him altogether. He whispers
(19:52):
to no one, I'll finish it, man, I'll finish it.
Just like you want it. Then he lets the tape
run to the end, the real slow, clicking softly, a
heartbeat fading into silence. When the news broke, they called
him the King of Soul, but titles don't mean much
(20:12):
at thirty thousand feet. Fans wrote thousands of letters, some
addressed to Heaven, some to the record label. One read,
thank you for teaching me how to feel and for
making it hurt less. In the months that followed, Steve
Proper mixed the record, wept through the playback, and delivered
it to the label. They released it on January eighth,
(20:33):
nineteen sixty eight, posthumously. Even the word sticks in your throat,
but no one expected what happened next Act six, The
Dock of the Bay Next Act six, Doc of the Bay.
(20:59):
The single comes out quietly at first, just another January
release in a cold, divided America. No one at the
label expects it to chart too slow, too mournful, too still.
But then the calls start. Stations that never played soul
are playing this truck stop, diner's, college dorms, army bases.
(21:20):
Everywhere there's a jukebox that whistle drifts out of it
like a ghost. With perfect pitch. You're there a highway
outside of Saint Louis. It's snowing sideways. You pull into
a rest stop to warm up inside. A waitress's crying
and doesn't know why. On the counter, a tabletop radio
hums sitting in the morning sun. No drums, no shout,
(21:44):
just calm peace that somehow sounds like heartbreak. By spring,
it's number one, A song he never saw finished becomes
his crown I drove to make In a few months
after starting this story, locals still call him quote our boy.
There's a statue now, bronze eyes tilted towards the sky.
Kids climbed the base to take pictures. Old men sit
(22:07):
on benches and talk about the day the phone rang.
One told me when that record came on, it didn't
sound like death. It sounded like a man who finally
made it home. You're there. December eighteenth, nineteen sixty seven,
funeral day. A line of mourners stretch four blocks. White
flowers blanket the church steps. When the casket passes, the
(22:30):
crowd starts. The hum low, uncertain until one voice begins
to whistle, then another, then hundreds. The melody floats above
the sobs, fragile but steady, even the wind holds its breath.
Steve Cropper couldn't bring himself to attend. He stayed in
(22:52):
the studio instead, listening to the master just one more time,
he told me later. It was it was like he
was sitting in the next room, just waiting for me
to hit play, he said. Finishing that record nearly broke him,
but also saved him, because it meant Otis wasn't entirely gone.
Every time the whistle came round, he'd close his eyes
(23:14):
and nod along, as if to say, yeah, oh yeah,
that's him. That's him right there. Decades past, the world
keeps moving, new stars, new styles, new heartbreaks, but the
whistle never fades. You still hear it at dusk, when
the day exhales, on radios that shouldn't still work in
(23:35):
bars where the bartender doesn't know the name of the
song but knows every word. In the hum of the bay,
when the water hits the pier just right, Some songs age,
some songs Wait a dock somewhere south of Savannah, the
air smells like salt and rain. You sit on a
(23:56):
wooden post, shoes off water lapping beneath your heels. The
sun slides down the horizon, gold bleeding into gray. A
gull cries overhead, and from a distant porch radio you
hear a familiar voice. You close your eyes, and the
world tilts for a moment. You can almost see him
leaning back, watching the tide, humming along with time itself.
(24:21):
The whistle comes soft and perfect and drifts into the night.
The King of Soul is gone, but listen, listen closely.
You can hear him still sitting, still watching, still singing
when the evening comes. I hope you enjoyed Scrip sixteen,
(24:45):
Searching for the mad Man of Makon and the Crown
Prince of Soul. I'm Johnny Hartwell. This has been Johnny's
Dead Air podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
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