A 1932 ballad learns to shout
It begins as advice, almost courtly, a man telling other men to be gentle, the horns holding still like ushers. Then Al Jackson’s stick starts a double click that does not double the time so much as warn it, and the advice becomes a plea, and the plea becomes a shout that has forgotten the drawing room where the song was born. Try a Little Tenderness is a standard from 1932 dragged into a Memphis room that does not do standards unless they bleed. Otis Redding does not interpret the lyric. He outruns it.
The song, by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly and Harry Woods, had been a crooner’s piece, Sam Cooke among the many, before Stax. Redding did not want it. Friends and the label wore him down. In 1966, at Stax Studios on McLemore Avenue, Booker T. and the M.G.’s played, Isaac Hayes worked the arrangement, Steve Cropper on guitar, Duck Dunn, Booker, Jackson. Producers are credited across Jim Stewart, Hayes and the M.G.’s, which is how Memphis often signed a room rather than a boss. Cropper has described Jackson’s cross-stick as doubling the time without really doubling it, and his own guitar figure as a Latin pickup that vanished once Redding started, because everything else became insignificant. The track closed Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul. The single made the pop chart. The song became his.
At Monterey, in June 1967, the build turned into a public combustion, months before the plane. That live take is the one film students know. The studio take is sterner, the shout earned bar by bar rather than thrown. Both are true. Redding died in December. The tenderness in the title is not what the ending sounds like. The ending sounds like a man who tried the gentle version and found it was not enough for the size of the feeling.
Nobody will ever sing Try a Little Tenderness like Otis sang it. When we actually got into the recording, everything else was sort of insignificant.
(Steve Cropper, Dreams to Remember)
The arrangement is a lesson in patience that pop rarely sits still for. No drums, really, until the song has asked nicely. Then the band stops asking. Hayes’s chart, with its nod toward the string feeling of Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come in the horns, gives Redding a staircase. He takes the stairs three at a time and still hits the landings. Cropper’s claim that you do not need to listen to anyone else after this is a sideman’s boast and a critical fact. The crooners keep their elegance. They do not keep the song.
What remains is the build, copied ever since by singers who think volume is the same as arrival. It is not. Redding’s volume is the last step of an argument that started in a whisper about how to treat a woman who is worn out. The advice survives the shout, which is the miracle. Try a Little Tenderness is still a manual and a meltdown in one track. You can use either. He used both, and then there was no time for a third way.
