"One of the hardest things I ever had to do was mix that song": A music professor breaks down Steve Cropper and Otis Redding's (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay

With the recent passing of the revered R&B guitarist Steve Cropper, we're taking a look back at an iconic song that Cropper co-wrote and produced with Otis Redding: (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.

The song’s status as a piece of music is almost overshadowed by the tragic circumstances of its making. Three days after recording the final take, Otis Redding died in a plane crash, aged only 26. The crash also killed several members of Redding’s backing band, the Bar-Kays. Steve Cropper says that having to finish and mix the song afterwards was the hardest thing he ever did, and I believe him. It was the first posthumous No 1 hit on the Billboard charts.

I had always assumed that Redding wrote the lyrics and that Cropper wrote the music, but it turns out to be the opposite. Redding wrote the music and the lyrics to the first verse, and Cropper wrote the rest. The bay in question is San Francisco Bay. Redding got the idea for the song while staying on Bill Graham’s houseboat in Sausalito, a little ways north of San Francisco.

Dock Of The Bay gets much of its beauty from its strange chord progression. These chords were written in an unusual way. Otis Redding was having problems with his voice due to his impassioned screaming. He had to undergo surgery to remove nodes from his vocal cords, and was warned to take it easy. He decided to change his singing style, and wanted some more introspective material. He was listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and he wanted to start writing songs on guitar, but he didn’t play.

Steve Cropper's idea was to give Redding a guitar tuned to open E. In standard tuning, the guitar’s strings play E, A, D, G, B, E. When you strum the open strings, it doesn't sound like much of anything. Technically, you could describe these notes as Em11 or A9sus4/E, but really it just sounds like a random collection of notes.

However, you don’t have to tune in the standard way. Steve Cropper tuned Otis’ guitar to play an E major chord when strummed open: E, B, E, G-sharp, B, E. In this tuning, you can play any major chord just by pressing your index finger down across all the frets. If you put your finger across the first fret, you get F. If you put your finger across the second fret, you get F#. If you put it across the third fret, you get G, and on the fourth fret, you get G#. The limitation is that you can’t easily play minor chords this way.

Otis was playing around on the open-tuned guitar, moving major chords up and down in parallel. For Dock Of The Bay, he used chord roots that are conventional in R&B and related styles. However, usually you put a mixture of major and minor chords on those roots. If you only use major chords, you get a sound that’s similar to what you’re used to, but not quite “right.” Here are the verse chords:

| G | B | C | A |

| G | B | C | A |

We're in the key of G major, but the very second chord, B, takes us out of the key. It's not that uncommon to use a B chord in the key of G, but you use it for a specific purpose, which is to set up Em. The idea is that you’re moving from the key of G major to the key of E minor. The D-sharp in the B chord sounds out of place in a G major context, but it’s the leading tone in E minor, and when it resolves up to E, it makes retroactive sense.

However, the B chord in Dock Of The Bay doesn’t resolve to Em. It goes to C instead. This is called a deceptive resolution. It’s unusual in pop, though not unheard of. Elizabeth Cotten’s classic Freight Train uses the same chord movement, albeit in a different key.

In Dock Of The Bay, the C chord is followed by an A chord. This is another chord from outside of G major. It’s reasonably common to use A chords in the key of G, but again, in a specific context. Normally what you would do is follow the A chord with a D chord. You’d be temporarily moving into the key of D major, with the C-sharp in the A chord as the leading tone, making retroactive sense when it resolves up to D. Mozart would approve.

But Otis Redding doesn’t go from A to D, he goes from A back to G. There is no justification for this in Western tonal theory. That said, some rock songwriters have used this chord movement anyway: the Beatles in Eight Days a Week, the Rolling Stones in You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and Neil Young in Harvest.

To give you an idea of how striking Otis Redding’s chords are, try playing the Dock Of The Bay verse with conventional G major harmony:

| G | Bm | C | Am |

| G | Bm | C | Am |

That sounds… fine. But it’s unmemorable, because there’s no friction, no drama.

So that's the verse. Now let's talk about the chorus, which is harmonically even weirder.

| G | E | G | E |

| G | A | G | E |

Once again, we’ve got that A to G movement, but that’s not half as weird as the E chord. That chord has the note G-sharp in it, which is the most dissonant possible note you could use in a G major context. You could make tonal sense out of it by following it with an Am chord. The G-sharp would be the leading tone taking you into the key of A minor. But Redding just goes back to G. That is wild!

Unconventional though it is to move from E to G, the voice leading works well.

• The E in the E chord moves down to the D in the G chord.
• The G-sharp in the E chord moves down to the G in the G chord.
• The B in the E chord stays the same as the B in the G chord.

It's smooth and attractive, but it’s not normal. Steve Cropper plays one of his loveliest riffs on these chords; it sounds like polyphonic crooning.

The chorus is so beautiful that you don’t even notice how uneasily the vocal melody fits on top of the chords. On the line “Sitting on the dock of the bay”, Redding sings the word “bay” on the note A. That is a hard conflict with the G-sharp in the E chord! And yet, Redding and the band deliver the whole thing so sweetly that you start thinking, sure, that note fits that chord fine.

Next, let's talk about the bridge. Here, Redding sticks closer to the conventions of R&B.

| G D | C C7 | G D | C C7 |

| G D | C C7 | F | D |

The bluesy C7 chords are striking, because Redding probably didn’t play those himself. I assume that Steve Cropper added them with Redding’s approval. The ending is tasty, with an uplifting feel due to the F in the F chord moving to F-sharp in the D chord. Gorgeous.

The song ends with a two-chord vamp, alternating G and E under Redding’s whistling. He’s whistling G major pentatonic, landing on D over the E chord. It’s the seventh of the chord, so it fits, but it’s just unexpected enough to be richly gratifying.

The musicologist David Temperley coined the term “melodic-harmonic divorce” to describe rock songs where the melody and the chords don’t fit together in conventional ways. He locates its origins in the blues, where the harmonic conventions are very different from Western European tradition.

Dock Of The Bay has a bluesy melody, but those chords don’t come from any single stylistic source. They’re the result of Steve Cropper’s guitar tuning, and Otis Redding’s playfully intelligent exploration of that tuning’s possibilities.

Dock Of The Bay has had a massive cultural footprint. Secondhand Songs lists hundreds of commercially released covers. I love Mongo Santamaria's recording from 1968, with flute by the great Hubert Laws.

Mongo Santamaria - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (Columbia) 1968 - YouTube

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Peggy Lee’s recording from 1969 is too over the top for my tastes, but it does begin with a superb drum break. (You can hear that break in Ch-Check It Out by the Beastie Boys and Mellow But Chunky by DJ Shadow.)

The last cover that I want to point out is by the World Saxophone Quartet, recorded in 1989. It won’t replace Otis Redding in my heart, but I love their interpretation.

[Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay - YouTube

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De La Soul sampled Redding’s whistling for their 1989 classic Eye Know. Unfortunately, they didn’t clear the sample, and it caused them a lot of problems. Eye Know didn’t appear on streaming services until 2023, after decades of legal negotiations. Otis Redding’s estate in particular took some convincing, which is why the song is now credited to De La Soul featuring Otis Redding.

Because sample clearance is so expensive, it's a lot more common for people to simply quote the song, as Blackalicious does in their 1994 banger Swan Lake.

Blackalicious - Swan Lake - YouTube

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People are right to want to cover, sample and quote (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay. It’s a beautiful song, and it shows what kind of magic can happen when a creative mind like Otis Redding’s approaches the guitar without being too inhibited by the conventions of how you're “supposed” to use it. I’m grateful to Steve Cropper for helping to bring the song into the world – I hope that he and Otis Redding are jamming together somewhere right now.