Macon, Georgia would not seem to be much of a breeding ground for artistic eminence. Life doesn’t rock and roll here as much as it simply unwinds in its own good time and speed. Stretching out fifty-six square miles, with a population of around ninety thousand, it squats approximately ninety miles southeast of Atlanta, roughly equidistant between the latter and the port city of Savannah in “the heart of Georgia,” as the city brochures say. There really are two Macons, the rural-urban core downtown attached by a nexus of bridges—including the one on Fifth Street called the Otis Redding Bridge, which one can get to by taking the Otis Redding trolley down Cotton Avenue, past a building housing the Otis Redding Foundation. Beyond the Ocmulgee River, reaching to the north, can be seen the Old Red Hills of the Piedmont Plateau, while the washboard-flat, pine-treed forests proliferate to the east and south as far as the eye can see. Under those hills are copious deposits of kaolin, the clay-like mineral used in the manufacture of porcelain, cosmetics, toothpaste, paper, and Pepto-Bismol.
Caught between progress and tradition, with superhighways crisscrossing serene neighborhoods where clean white colonial homes rub up against drab brown housing projects and abandoned warehouses, Macon suggests at once the courtly, honeysuckle Old South and modern urban decay. The wonder is that a city of not particularly intellectual standing like Macon is home to two superb colleges, the Baptist-affiliated Mercer University and Wesleyan College, a Methodist women’s school. Today, scattered towers of concrete and glass carve a nice, tightly bunched smoky skyline. For longtime Maconites, there is much to be proud of—nothing more so than the town’s standing as perhaps the greatest incubator of American soul music there has ever been.
While Macon had bred an intriguing array of famous and semi-famous—including the stately actor Melvyn Douglas, racism-spouting Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker, and John Birch, the curious missionary whose name was subsumed after World War II by the extreme right-wing “society” that bears his name—all anyone need know about the city is that Little Richard and Otis Redding were raised and perfected their craft here, on the streets of downtown Macon, at the center of what the postcards once called “the prettiest and busiest city in Georgia.” On the streets of the historic district, running along the wide expanse of College Street, there is still the pulse and a scent that sixty years ago drew Little Richard, James Brown, and Otis Redding into a grid of nightclubs within this corridor.
The music that made Macon a cultural cornerstone can be traced as far back as to when African-Americans began to settle here. Most of those were sharecroppers who came from the rural farmlands after years of breaking their backs for too little in return. Indeed, the plight of the sharecroppers was a regional disgrace that went too long unnoticed, another end-run around racial equality developed in the aftermath of Reconstruction. In theory, sharecropping seemed an ideal way to cut blacks in on the economic pie, by giving them a part of the same plantations that whipped their forebears into obedience. The old plantations were divvied up for freed slaves to be given “forty acres and a mule” and live and work for the same bosses, but at barely livable wages, and the crops owned by the bosses. With nowhere else to go, the freedmen, and their succeeding generations, were no more than virtual slaves.
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ONE OF those Georgia sharecroppers was Otis Ray Redding Sr., a crisply articulate, proper, fanatically religious man. The grandson of a slave, he lived and worked on a 1,500-acre farm in Dawson, down in rural Terrell County, tilling peanuts, picking cotton, slopping hogs, whatever put some cash in his pocket. He also preached at the local Baptist church and, after marrying a sharecropper’s daughter named Fannie, had four daughters of his own, Debra, Darlene, Christine, and Louise. Then they had their first son, Otis Ray Redding Jr., on September 9, 1941. He did not come out crying “fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” instead of “ma-ma-ma-ma-ma,” but even in the crib there seemed something melodic about this baby’s whining, though all it meant to Otis Sr. was another mouth he had to feed, and his pay at a farm owned by a man named Lang wouldn’t cut it.
So shortly after the birth of their son, the Redding family followed the same path as thousands of black families just like them, moving to where there was a future. That usually meant the road to Atlanta. Years before, for example, another family man that made it out of Dawson, Ben Davis Sr., worked his way up to become editor of a black newspaper and a prominent Republican in Atlanta, something he would never have been able to accomplish in his hometown.1
Otis Redding Sr. set out for Atlanta, but, like many others in that caravan, he first found Macon to his liking and stopped right there. The Redding brood settled into a four-bedroom apartment in a newly erected public housing project in Tindall Heights on Plant Street just east of the Mercer University campus, a mile south of the same Gateway Park where Otis Redding can be found as a seven-foot bronze statue strumming a guitar not on the dock of a bay but on the bank of the Ocmulgee.
Just after the Reddings’ move to Macon, Pearl Harbor was attacked and many of the men of the city enlisted, the blacks of course shunted into segregated units. While Otis Sr., deferred because he had a large family—another son, Luther Rodgers Redding, was born in 1943—he could nonetheless be proud that he served, as a janitor at Robbins Field, the Air Force installation south of Macon. To supplement his income, he also helped out on a farm just outside of town. Fannie also worked, as many black women did, as a maid, at the Woolworth’s a few blocks from the apartment. War and work did not keep Otis Sr. from his higher calling. He became the deacon at Vineville Baptist Church, a mile to the north up Pio Nono Avenue.
The living was easier and the pay better in Macon. The complex sat on one of many of the Jefferson Hills overlooking the bustling highway now called Eisenhower Parkway and the flatlands to the east. The complex was a big step up. There were electric refrigerators, hot-water heaters, gas stoves, and, as the ads for apartments boasted, “a complete bathroom indoors.”2 There were, too, plenty of fresh air and the faint scent of pine when the wind was blowing right. All in all, residents had the feeling that they lived in luxury. But those clean walls were paper-thin and the units cheaply constructed. Soon Fannie Redding was stuffing rags into cracks in the walls to keep the cold out, and gangs were running around the streets making trouble.
Reflecting his parents’ sensibilities, Otis Redding Jr. kept his distance from gang activity. Adhering to the deacon’s stern requisites, he was a fixture in the church pews when Otis Sr. delivered his sermons and a very noticeable presence in the choir. Indeed, if not for his father’s avocations and expectations, it is unlikely that Otis Redding Jr. ever would have found the magic elixir of singing. Not incidentally, it was the only real bond he had with the deacon, and thus was a solidifying force between them even as the son began to drift from the family. As such, despite the dissension between the two when Otis Sr. realized his boy was adopting the wrong kind of music, Otis Jr. would still deposit himself in church—that much he always believed he owed to the father whose love was unconditional, even if his words seemed to betray it. The trips they would take together, to the fishing hole, to hunt, to ride horses in the country, to the deacon’s friends’ homes, to other church socials where Otis Sr. would be invited to do some fire and brimstone, each was an occasion for father and son to learn about the other, for the son to obey and conform, if with the unspoken understanding that a clash was sure to arise soon enough.
The complicated dynamics between them were implicit, yet both maintained the ligature. Otis, for all the seductions of modern pop music, earnestly kept a flag raised for gospel and its tangible roots in the new music of the 1950s. Without actively seeking a music education, he was imbued with an ability to feel out music that he would sing, understand it, feel it. This was the essence of the blues, of evolving soul, and the debt he had to that enlightenment was directly traced to Otis Sr., a man who ironically couldn’t sing a note but heard in his son’s voice nothing less than the sound of the Lord. This continuing tuition stretched for over a decade as the boy grew into a man earlier than most of those his age would. He had the swagger and sensibility of an adult, maybe too much so for his own good, and certainly in the eyes of the deacon, who may have wished his son would have tarried just a little longer in adolescence, to be able to decipher good from bad.
There was, to be sure, a certain dichotomy to the Redding who careened from child to manchild under the watchful gaze of a father who never quite knew if his boy was a man or a boy on any given day. Sometimes, having the characteristics of both could serve the young man well. As he grew up, he could defend himself with his fists, though his game was to get along and he seemed to know the punks by name. His younger brother Luther, who called himself by his middle name, Rodgers, said Otis could charm a snake and that there was no one on the block who disliked him.
When the complex finally deteriorated into a tenement, Otis Sr., who had become a dad again with the birth of another daughter, Christine, began checking out the better neighborhoods where a black family could live. He found one several miles to the northeast that seemed an aerie, high on Sugar Hill in the Bellevue section near Azalea Park, on Pike Street. With only four homes to the block, a dead end street at one side, and a dirt road called Log Cabin Drive on the other, the complex sat across from miles of green glades and undeveloped valleys known as “the Bottom.”
The deacon wanted this peaceful, if still segregated, habitat to be an idyll for his good Christian family and so they moved there in 1954, when Otis was fourteen. To his father’s relief, Otis Jr. finally found something besides singing to occupy his time. Here were fishing holes and hiking trails. Just down Log Cabin Road was a white section, with stately colonial houses and an ice skating rink, the closest that most blacks in Macon could come to a transitional neighborhood one step away from integration. Otis and his new buddies, testing the limits, would cross over the boundary and go ice skating or get into football and baseball games with the white boys. Sometimes it got dicey for them; seeing them intermingling, rednecks in pickup trucks would roll in, the cue for Otis and his friends to have their feet start walkin’, though when the trucks rolled out they’d go back again and resume the game.
If this all seemed like an innocuous game, the grave seriousness of those trucks was underlined when Otis and a friend named Benny Davis, whom he took to after learning that his brother Richard had played drums in Little Richard’s band—a very impressive credit once Little Richard broke out big in the mid-1950s and owned Macon—were hiking through the Bottom and saw a noose dangling from a tree, a sight that gave him his first real understanding of what racism meant, and how perilous it was to be out alone, walking black.3 That hanging tree would give him a cold chill from then on, a reminder of that thin line. Even as he achieved a level of adoration in his life, there seemed a haunted look deep in his eyes and a defensive skepticism about whether the races could truly mix.
As serene as life could be in Bellevue, it was a fleeting respite. The area also deteriorated into a colloquial “Hellview.” The Reddings learned that the four-room cottage they had bought was built on the cheap and after a year required too much work and was too much of an expense to maintain. It also turned out to be a potential death trap. One day when the family was out, something caught on fire and the place burned to the ground. Fortunately the deacon had insurance and with the settlement money he bundled whatever was salvaged and hired movers again, determining that it was best to retrace his steps and head back for Tindall Heights. But then again, wherever they could have gone at that point would be a rough go. They were black and this was the Deep South. And if any reminder was needed, a short walk from the Heights to the closest avenue took you to signs that read: JEFF DAVIS STREET. That would be Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.
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THE BEST any black family could reasonably expect in Macon was an uneasy, tenuous peace. They lived with awareness that the KKK was growing strong in the town. Furthermore, Macon’s racial history was mixed, at best. This could be seen in ambivalence to integration even by some of the city’s most prominent African-American statesmen, most notably Harry McNeal Turner, who during the Civil War was the first black chaplain of the United States Colored Troops, fighting his native region’s Confederate soldiers. During Reconstruction, Turner, having settled in Macon, was elected to the Georgia state legislature and named the first Southern bishop of the American Methodist Church. Yet, outraged by the rise of Jim Crow, Turner, who preached that God was black, became an advocate of the Back to Africa movement, and remained so until his death in 1925. The law, he once remarked, “has made the ballot of the black man a parody, his citizenship a nullity and his freedom a burlesque.”4 Turner also was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as the first black postmaster, his domain being Macon, and it was in the post offices of Georgia where some early signs of racial comity arose, with many white postal officials resisting demands from their towns to fire their black clerks—sometimes appealing to their congressmen and senator.5
As in most cities under the yoke of Jim Crow, blacks in Macon had their own neighborhoods—Pleasant Hill, Unionville, Fort Hill, Tybee, Bellevue—and were expected to stay in them, at great risk otherwise, including the real chance of being lynched. Tindall Heights was another safe harbor, not that Otis Redding Jr. would accept being chained to it. Still, until the mid-1960s, when he was well into his twenties, he never saw a day in Macon when segregation wasn’t common law, a sticking point that was addressed by Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave a speech at the Steward Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Forsyth Street in 1957.6 At Redding’s early shows at the clubs, blacks were herded into separate lines and tables inside; later, whites would be prohibited from entering some of these juke joints, per the “separate but equal” doctrine.
The proverbial stains of Jim Crow—the colored drinking fountain and bathrooms, and lunch counters barred to Negroes—were inured into quotidian life. High society dances at the Armory Ballroom were off limits. Terminal Station had a colored waiting room. A Confederate monument stands beside the county courthouse. Even so, Macon congealed into something like a model of incipient post–Jim Crow urbanism without demonstrations or marches. For example, the town’s newspaper, the Macon Telegraph, was overseen by some remarkably brave and progressive editors. What’s more, there were two black-owned papers, the Voice and the World, where black readers could go for reinforcement. There was also a steady growth in NAACP membership. Macon’s colleges had opened their doors to African-Americans a century before those in Alabama and Mississippi were ordered to do so by the attorney general of the United States.
Not that the cleft between black and white didn’t exist, and adamantly, nor, as Otis could attest with a shiver, the hanging tree unseen. But as one scholar has put it, racial relations in Macon were something like an “unutterable separation.”7 For the times, it was progress enough. And today, the mixed racial flavor of Macon is such that Little Richard Penniman Boulevard runs right into an intersection with Jeff Davis Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard runs parallel to it. The man for whom the former was named, who washed dishes at the Greyhound bus depot in Macon before hitting it big, always had a riposte for racists who heckled him during concerts in the 1950s, saying that when he heard the common heckle of “Go back to Africa where you came from,” he would reply, “Africa? Who told you I was from Africa? I’m from Macon, Georgia. I am a peach.”8
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MUSIC WAS a crucial component in the art of simple survival and simple ambition. In days before rock and roll, or a civil rights movement to speak of, nothing perhaps save the Bible could soothe and promote optimism in the face of pain like the salve of rhythm and blues. Not that everyone was so quick to make that concession. For Otis Redding Sr., however, the Bible had no alternatives. While many other hardworking black laborers waited for Friday night to head to the black and tan speakeasies in downtown Macon to drink in some jazz and blues along with Scotch and gin, Redding’s father actually called it the devil’s music—and there were few exceptions, even Lena Horne singing “Stormy Weather” crossed over into an evil place.
For the stern, proper deacon, acceptable music was played on the church organ and an occasional piano recital. Indeed, reversing the normal pattern, the father was introduced by the son to the blues that had been born on plantations like those he had tilled in Dawson. Otis Jr. spent almost all his allowance and money from odd jobs on blues and R&B records. As a result, when Otis Sr. walked past his boy’s bedroom, he heard the emotive sounds of the earliest lineup of the Drifters, stamped by the honey-glazed voice of Clyde McPhatter, spilling off Otis Jr.’s secondhand phonograph. That would be cause for another lecture about the devil and his ways. To get his ten-year-old boy’s mind off singing, the deacon would haul him and his younger brother to the farm, where the boys would ride around on horses and breathe in clean country air.
But the old man never went as far as to forbid such music in his home. He was not a martinet of a father, allowing his children some slack to find their own way, hopefully to God. It was also a matter of pride to him that his namesake son had singing talent, which came in handy at the church on Sunday mornings when Otis Jr., as young as three, was draped in robes wailing gospel songs as Otis Sr. played the pipe organ. The deacon didn’t have any problem boasting about his boy’s voice. Indeed, when an eight-year-old Otis had to have his tonsils out, he fretted. “I remember him saying, ‘Will I be able to sing again?’ ” his brother Rodgers recalled. “And my father said, ‘Sure. Probably you’ll be able to sing better.’ ” Indeed, not long after the surgery, his brother said, “He started getting into piano and trying to write.” That was, he added, “around the eighth grade.”9
The deacon and his wife, who were friends with seemingly everyone in the congregation and neighborhood, had a crucial, if passive, effect. The couple often went to sedate parties. During these functions, which normally took place in their neighbors’ homes, Otis Sr. played the piano himself, though he played safely anodyne music. He would occasionally take his boy with him, hoping to show him what sort of songs he should be singing. What he didn’t realize was how much any given song could teach a kid whose antennae could find the beat to any tune.
“We used to go out to a place called Sawyer’s Lake,” Otis once recalled. “There was a calypso song out then called ‘Run Joe.’ My mother and daddy used to play that for me all the time. I just dug the groove.”10
When young Otis sang for the parishioners, adding a bit of that good old gospel emotion for effect, the deacon sat beaming, quietly tapping a foot to the beat. He could be proud, for sure, that even as a teen, his son was not only handsome and tall, but always mannerly and solicitous, keeping a tenacious sense of family as the fulcrum of his life. That and singing, which Otis began doing outside of church, at talent shows he often won at the segregated Ballard-Hudson High School—the only high school for black children in Macon. He sometimes played drums to keep occupied between his songs, and in time he had stepped up from school talent shows to actual nightclubs with the devil’s brew and real blues singers, joints where laws against children being allowed onto the premises were almost never enforced.
One such club was owned by a guy from the neighborhood, Claude Sims, whose son Earl called himself “Speedo,” after the 1955 doo-wop song of the same name by the Cadillacs. Speedo knew more than a teenager should have about the nightclub lifestyle and had his own group, the Peppermint Twisters. After Otis began singing at the club, Speedo was leading him on tours of other clubs, introducing him to owners and much older, wicked women who passed their time away on bar stools. The changing times and the atmosphere of Macon were Otis Jr.’s biggest lures, and Otis Sr.’s biggest enemies. There was something enticing about singing in Macon, especially in the early 1950s. Like most Deep South cities, it had a music tradition dating back to men in varying degrees like Reverend Pearly Brown, known to some as “the last great street singer.” Born blind in 1915, Pearly Brown would tread downtown Macon, a cup attached to his guitar, a sign around his neck reading I AM A BLIND PREACHER. PLEASE HELP ME. Brown sang what he called “slave songs” with a bottleneck-style slide guitar that would be a staple of country and country rock by the time he was finally heard on records in the early 1960s.
It is said that several generations of Macon-bred musicians and singers were given an education by Pearly Brown, and that included Otis Redding. But one need not have been African-American to drink that elixir. Also born here was Emmitt Miller, a white man who ingested the same blues sources but skewed them to the nascent genre of country music—no stretch given that Pearly Brown was also the first black performer to play the Grand Ole Opry theater in Nashville. Miller, a minstrel act early in his career, in mandatory blackface, fronted a group called the Georgia Crackers, and their jazzy, western-swing records on the Okeh label had an immediate impact on rising big band acts such as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Texas swing leader Bob Wills, and yodeling cowboy troubadours like Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers.
Like New Yorkers and their bagels, they like to say in Macon that its rich musical history is explained by there being something in the water. But it’s more like something in the blood. Once it got into Otis Redding’s blood, it would never seep out.