#otis-redding — Public Fediverse posts

Try A Little Tenderness 🖐
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjO7qdADCyQ

This week's #JukeboxFridayNight theme is #DogsCatsAndOtherPets. This is the flip side of Otis Redding's second Volt single, a somewhat primitive but still quite charming performance: 


Otis Redding: Mary's Little Lamb (1963)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbEg_tl06-Q

#OtisRedding #SoulMusic

On Apr 29, 1967: #ArethaFranklin releases her single "Respect" (written by #OtisRedding), Billboard Song of the Year 1967.

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”*…

… which might be the same thing?

As more and more folks are fearing obsolescence (if not, indeed, subjugation) by emerging technology, Matthew Wills reminds us that this fear– especially as embodied in androids– has a long (and dark) history here in the U.S…

Our word “robot” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. In it, historian of robots Dustin A. Abnet explains, Čapek repurposed the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” to refer to the artificial workers produced by the play’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) company. [See also here.] Created from synthetic organic material, and thus more android than mechanical, these worker-roboti ultimately overthrow their human masters.

The play was a sensation in Europe, and then a year later, in America, though something was lost in translation. Čapek used robots to criticize soulless Fordism—the “standardization and regimentation” of American capitalism—and hence the US’s political and cultural power in Europe and around the world. (Other Europeans would conceive of the robot in the same way, notably director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou in the 1927 German film Metropolis.)

But a funny thing happened to these robotic symbols of American capitalism by the mid-twentieth century. They were Americanized by American capitalism. Americans, as Abnet notes, “turned a figure that initially rebelled against the dehumanizing effects of Fordism into a tamed electro-mechanical slave holding aloft a global empire of consumerism.”

Nowhere was this more literal than in the Westinghouse Electric Company’s “simple remotely controlled mechanical men and women” used to advertise the company’s products from 1927 to 1940. “Technology did not have to run amok, Westinghouse’s robots suggested; it could instead become a tamed slave that empowered each individual consumer to become his or her own master.” In the American context, where the language of master and slave was rooted in racism, Westinghouse “connected robots to romanticized white myths about slavery.”

“Americans had always racialized robot-like creations,” continues Abnet, citing the first American automaton (a caricature of a Native American) and the “grotesque minstrel-like caricatures of Black and Asian bodies” that made up automatons in the late nineteenth century.

Westinghouse’s creations, named Herbert Televox, Karina Van Televox, Telelux, Rastus, Willie Vocalite, and Elektro, were promoted as docile domestic workers. Abnet quotes the New York Times’ science and technology editor extolling the benefits of the first of these “mechanical slaves” in 1927: “it obeys without the usual human arguing, impudence or procrastination.”

Rastus, Westinghouse’s Great Depression-era robot, was the most overtly racialized of these corporate robot slaves. Rastus was modeled on a minstrel show character: “black rubber ‘skin,’ overalls, a white shirt, and a pail hat.” In addition, “the robot had a ‘rich, baritone voice’ that would have been read as unmistakably black.” While “all of Westinghouse’s other robots told jokes…Rastus and its blackness were themselves the joke.”

In 1930, Westinghouse’s President explicitly expressed the prevailing white romanticism of slavery. In the company’s Electric Journal, he argued that without the exploitation of the “muscles of others,” there could be “no art, literature, science, leisure, or comfort for anyone.” Rastus’s “tamed black body,” stresses Abnet, “underscored the larger rhetoric of slavery that shaped the fantasy the company offered white consumers.”

“Ultimately, Westinghouse’s robots were not just about more efficiently accomplishing work or ensuring greater leisure time; they were a symbol that deployed racialized slavery in ways that could reassure white Americans of their own freedom, their own mastery over both technology and the bodies of others.”

Čapek’s robots had successfully rebelled, killing all but one human. In America, that couldn’t happen, at least according to the corporations selling the robot idea. But fear of a robot rebellion, like the fear of slave rebellion before the Civil War, remained. Abnet notes that the “most common robot story in American science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s told a story of white men, using their cunning, strength, and willpower to restore their authority over the robots who should be their slaves.” Movies, especially science fiction serials, often told the same story.

A century after R.U.R. and forty years after The Terminator, the uneasiness engendered by robots (and their droid, cyborg, replicant, and AI cousins) persists, reflecting longstanding concerns about labor, autonomy, and power…

Early automatons in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery: “How America Racialized the Robot,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

###

As we move on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Aretha Franklin’s up-tempo cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” enter the Billboard Hot 100. It rose steadily over the next several weeks, hitting #1 in June, where it stayed for two weeks and won Franklin two Grammy Awards at the 1968 ceremony, including the first of eight consecutive Grammys for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. An R&B classic, it has also become a protest anthem, thanks to its connections to both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s.

https://youtu.be/v4f22xl6Bvg?si=yn-pPhxjVoWgsA8k

I've Been Loving You Too Long 🤗
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0zROagSE7U

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song co-written by the #soul singer #OtisRedding and the guitarist #SteveCropper. Redding recorded it twice in 1967, including just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. It was released on #StaxRecords' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous number 1 single in the US. It reached number 3 on the #UKSinglesChart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTVjnBo96Ug

On the 11th of March 1968: #OtisRedding is the first person in the US to posthumously receive gold record for his single "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay".

"Respect" is a song recorded by American singer #ArethaFranklin. It is a cover of a #songOriginallyWrittenAndRecorded by #OtisRedding, and which Franklin rearranged and reshaped to give the perspective of a woman as opposed to Redding's male perspective. The music in the two versions is significantly different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A134hShx_gw

"Rock and Roll Heaven" is a song written by #AlanODay and Johnny Stevenson, popularized by #TheRighteousBrothers. It is a #paean to several deceased singers such as #JimiHendrix, #JanisJoplin, and #OtisRedding, and has been rewritten a number of times to include other singers. The song was first recorded by the band #Climax in 1973 (co-writer Stevenson was the keyboard player for Climax, and the song was specifically written for the band's lead singer, Sonny Geraci).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLbLBGCmBBs

(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay 📊
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTVjnBo96Ug

I've Been Loving You Too Long 🪘
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJHD9SiI5YU

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #MorningShow

Otis Redding:
🎵 Try a Little Tenderness

#OtisRedding

https://djposka.bandcamp.com/track/otis-redding-try-a-little-tenderness

https://open.spotify.com/track/36AlMHDBFwSsD3FQOy1R81

I've Been Loving You Too Long 👐
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kap4Zt_2arI

On the 14th of February 1967: #ArethaFranklin records her single "Respect" at Atlantic Studio in NYC; her rendition of #OtisRedding's tune becomes Billboard Song of the Year (1967).

oof, maybe a bad choice for first dance at my wedding. prophetic, anyway

i never left that state

fifteen years is a long time to knock on a door

Otis Redding - These Arms of Mine (1964)
https://youtu.be/VA3SbP6IlA8

#Music #OtisRedding #Soul

I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time

Sunset in the Don Edwards National wildlife refuge, San Francisco Bay #Donedwards #sunset #SF #OtisRedding

#WMPG honors #BlackHistoryMonth

"WMPG recognizes Black History Month with special programming throughout the month of February, highlighting the voices, music, history, and lived experiences of Black artists, activists, and storytellers.

Tune in to hear programs that celebrate Black creativity and resilience across genres and generations, from music that shaped movements to conversations that deepen our understanding of the past and present."

Segments include:
#MarshaPJohnson, #RobertLewis, #EarthaKitt, #MalcomX, #AlvinAiley, #BobGreen, #ChadwickBoseman, #DukeEllington, #LewisLatimer, #AudreLord, #ATribeCalledQuest, #OtisRedding, #NelsonMandela, #GarzaCullorsTometi, #LeslieOdomJr, #NinaSimone, #AudraMcDonald #BelHooks, #Beyonce, #FlorencePrice, #JamesBaldwin, #MuhammadAli, #ScottJoplin, #GraceVenuzaRogers, #BobTheDragQueen, #GordonParks, #KobeBryant, #WEBDubois, #BarackObama, #AudreLorde, #Lizzo, #KatherineJohnson, #ClaudetteColvin, #RhiannonGiddens, #TaranaBurke, #TeresaKachindamoto, #ShirleyChisholm, #ThurgoodMarshall, #HarrietTubman, #JohnBrownRusswurm, #StevieWonder, #LeadBelly, #MaryMcleodBethune, #ShirleyChisolm, #LeonardCummings, #MaeJemison, #BadBrains, #CornelWest, #MaconBollingAllen, #SpikeLee, #BeverlyGlennCopeland, #AngelaDavis, #SojournerTruth, #HankAaron, #BillieHoliday, #GeraldTalbot, #TrevorNoah, #JosephineBaker, #JackieRobinson, #ArethaFranklin, #ToniMorrison, #RobertLewis, #IndigoArts

Listen:
https://www.wmpg.org/wmpg-honors-black-history-month/

#BlackHistory #BlackArtists #BlackMusicians #BlackActivists #CommunityRadio #CollegeRadio

HAPPY HEAVENLY BIRTHDAY TO SAM COOKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr1Q-G4JKIQ

#samcooke #louadler #herbalpert #school #wonderfulworld #bryanferry #hermanshermits #jimmypage #artgarfunkel #paulsimon #jamestaylor #johnnynash #otisredding #witness #harrisonford #amish #johnnyjblair #sanfrancisco #singersongwriter #singeratlarge #birthday

A powerful edition of #WMPG's #WaxPoetic today (#MartinLutherKingDay)!

Wax Poetic
Jan 19, 2026 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

With Chet

"Mixtape style on wax...

From Funk to Punk! A high energy eclectic mix brought to you on VINYL!"

Includes both music and spoken word tracks including: #MartinLutherKingJr, #CutChemist, #CharlesBradley #TheTemptations , #OtisRedding #StevieWonder , #GilScottHeron, #PublicEnemy, and #NinaSimone.

Playlist:
https://spinitron.com/WMPG/pl/21849701/Wax-Poetic

Archived version (available for 5 weeks):
www.wmpg.org/archive-player/?show_key=mon1700&archive_key=0

More archives:
https://www.wmpg.org/show/mon1730/#

#Funk #Soul #BlackHistory #HipHop #AfricaAmericanHistory #BlackMusicians #CommunityRadio

On January 18, 1989: 4th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees: Dion; #OtisRedding; #TheRollingStones; The Temptations; #StevieWonder; The Ink Spots; Bessie Smith; The #SoulStirrers; and #PhilSpector.

Try A Little Tenderness 🖐
#OtisRedding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqNc4XLBguI