michael bolton sittin on the dock of the bay

'Dock Of The Bay' was exactly that: 'I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay' was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform. Pitiful,' 'Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)' they were about Otis' life. He didn't usually write about himself, but I did.

If you listen to the songs I wrote with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. That's about all he had: 'I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.' I took that and finished the lyrics. He had been at San Francisco playing The Fillmore, and he was staying at a boathouse, which is where he got the idea of the ship coming in. Anytime he came in to record he always had 10 or 15 different intros or titles, or whatever. Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas. In a 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper explained the 'origins' of the song:

In November of that year he joined producer and guitarist Steve Cropper at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee.

While touring in support of the LPs King & Queen (collaborations with female vocalist Carla Thomas) and his live set Live in Europe, he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. He had come off his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just months earlier in June 1967. While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title 'Dock of the Bay,' on a houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California.

Michael bolton sittin on the dock of the bay