Sitting on the Dock of the Bay Otis Redding (not Reading). Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title "Dock of the Bay," at a houseboat on Waldo Pier in Sausalito, California. He had come off his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just days earlier in June 1967. 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. In December of that year he joined producer and guitarist Steve Cropper at a recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Together, they completed the music and melancholy lyrics of "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay". From those sessions emerged Otis Redding's final recordings, including "Dock of the Bay," which was recorded on 6 and 7 December. The result was a song quite different in style from most of Redding's other recordings, but one with which he was reported to be very pleased. Redding continued to tour after the recording sessions and, on December 10, the charter plane which was carrying him crashed into Lake Monona, outside Madison, Wisconsin. Redding and six others were killed. Only one passenger survived, Ben Cauley of The Bar-Kays. Redding's body was recovered from the lake the day after the crash.