Thank You, Otis Redding
The Wider Quiet
In the late 1960s, just as I was entering my teenage years, I purchased my very first record — a 45 rpm single of (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding.
I bought it at a department store called Zayre in East Providence, Rhode Island. The record probably cost less than a dollar. I do not remember exactly why I chose that record. I did not know a lot of the popular bands. Perhaps I had heard the song on the radio. More likely, I was drawn to the title itself.
I have always loved the sea.
Even as a child, I was drawn to shoreline places and changing water. During my early teenage years, our extended family spent summers at a small cottage overlooking Narragansett Bay. The cottage sat high on a cliff above the water alongside a string of other modest summer cottages. The mood of the bay changed constantly. Some mornings the water looked soft and silver beneath the fog. Other days it turned restless and dark under incoming storms. The tides came and went with their own rhythm, indifferent to whatever dramas were unfolding in our teenage lives above them.
Those summers became some of the most formative years of my life.
Friends and cousins gathered there on weekends. We played records constantly. We talked endlessly about boys. We wore bikinis and went water skiing.
There was a long picnic table beneath a colorful awning facing Narragansett Bay at the edge of the yard. That was where our family clambakes were held each summer. Coolers filled with soda, adult beverages, and watermelon appeared beside containers of hot dogs, Portuguese linguiça, potatoes, and freshly dug clams collected earlier that morning. Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and children all gathered together there while music drifted through open cottage windows and the bay shifted quietly below us.
And yet, like many young teenagers, I also carried a very private inner life.
I was shy and serious for my age. Moody sometimes. I loved books, meaningful lyrics, and songs that seemed to carry emotion beneath the surface. Even then, The Dock of the Bay spoke to me in ways I could not explain.
Back home in suburbia, I hurried to my bedroom after buying the record and placed it carefully on my small turntable. The moment the music began, I loved it. The cadence of the song felt almost tidal to me — slow, steady, reflective. Even now, decades later, the rhythm still feels like water moving in and out along a shoreline.
I played that record often.
Then one day, while listening to the radio, I heard the song again. When it ended, the DJ casually announced: “That was The Dock of the Bay performed by the late Otis Redding.”
I remember feeling stunned. I was listening to a dead person’s song.
At that point in my young life, I had little experience with life, let alone death. I did not yet understand funerals, grief, or the strange permanence of losing someone forever. But suddenly the song felt different to me. Sadder somehow. More fragile. I remember sitting quietly with the realization that someone who could create something so beautiful no longer existed in the world.
It may have been one of the first times I understood that art survives people.
Now, all these years later, I live beside another ocean here in Portugal. The record turntable is long gone, but The Dock of the Bay still sits on one of my Spotify playlists, and whenever it begins to play, I am briefly transported backward in time.
Back to Rhode Island. Back to summer cottages above Narragansett Bay. Back to cousins and friends laughing, records spinning, and salt air drifting in through open windows. Back to a shy teenage girl sitting alone in her bedroom beside a small turntable, listening carefully to a voice that had already left the world.
Some songs never really leave us.
Maybe because they become attached to places. Maybe because they preserve moments we no longer fully know how to reach. Or maybe because, without realizing it at the time, they quietly become part of who we are.
Thank you, Otis Redding.
Listen to The Dock of the Bay.
This piece is part of The Wider Quiet.