Gould’s book doesn’t challenge the consensus that Otis Redding was a remarkable and remarkably decent person. In fact it succeeds in making him seem a good deal more remarkable by taking the measure of the historical circumstances he emerged from. The known day-to-day facts of Otis’s short life are only part of the narrative Gould has framed. Those facts take us deep into the minutiae of radio talent shows, fraternity dances, regional disc jockeys, marginal record companies (one of Otis’s early singles came out on the incredibly named Confederate label, complete with battle flag), the whole music industry wilderness of booking agents, song pluggers, personal managers, and miscellaneous hangers-on, a wilderness Otis was apparently able to take increasingly in his stride. But Gould situates these microworlds within a much wider field of action. To do so he often leaves Otis aside for pages at a time, a maneuver he executes with great confidence. None of these excursions are digressions or footnotes; every detail feeds back into the story he is telling.
Gould’s prelude is Otis’s apotheosis at Monterey. He was, along with Jimi Hendrix, one of the only African-American headliners, unknown to most of the audience, and came on stage after midnight to perform a truncated five-song set, backed by Booker T. and the MGs and the Mar-Keys. His show-stopping transmutation of the sentimental pop standard “Try a Little Tenderness” into an accelerating emotional blowout made him, finally, an incontestable sensation. It is everybody’s favorite kind of show business story, the long-deserved sudden incandescent triumph. This one has been told many times, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, and generally enshrined as a moment to cling to amid the flak and cultural debris of the late Sixties. As so often in pop culture history we find ourselves confronting the same details again, wondering if these shards can still yield any life once they have been installed in a permanent nostalgia exhibit.
Gould sets the tone for what will follow by dollying back into a panoramic establishing shot: “The United States is a vast country, and geography has always played a part in the saga of its popular music.” Within a few paragraphs he evokes large sweeps of territory and time. Ray Charles, Thomas A. Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, and Stephen Foster come into the frame. Gould now makes his premise explicit: to understand the significance of what Otis Redding accomplished, “it is necessary to start with an understanding of the cruel and seemingly unyielding constraints of the culture, musical and otherwise, that was being broken through.” That eloquent phrase—“cruel and seemingly unyielding constraints”—sets up the counterforce to illuminate the apparently effortless freedom of Otis Redding’s aesthetic. The book becomes the story of how he resisted constraint and pushed back against cruelty, in his own fashion and in the terms of his own art.