Phil Walden and
Jim Stewart were among those who had doubts about the song, the sound, and the production. Redding accepted some of the criticisms and fine-tuned the song. He reversed the opening, which was Redding's whistling part, and put it at the end as suggested. "The Dock of the Bay" was released early in 1968 and topped the charts in the US and UK.
Billboard ranked the record as the
number 4 song for 1968.
Universal success "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released in January 1968, shortly after Redding's death.
R&B stations quickly added the song to their playlists, which had been saturated with Redding's previous hits. The song shot to number 1 on the R&B charts in early 1968 and, starting in March, topped the pop charts for four weeks. The album, which shared the song's title, became his largest-selling to date, peaking at number 4 on the pop album chart. "Dock of the Bay" was popular in countries across the world and became Redding's most successful song, selling more than four million copies worldwide. In 1969, it won two
Grammy Awards:
Best R&B Song and
Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. In 1998 the song was inducted into the
Grammy Hall of Fame.
Legacy Redding's body of work at the time of his death was immense, including a backlog of archived recordings as well as those created in November and December 1967, just before his death. In mid-1968, Stax Records severed its distribution contract with
Atlantic Records, which retained the label's back catalog and the rights to the unreleased Otis Redding masters. Through its
Atco subsidiary (Atco had distributed Otis Redding's releases from Stax's Volt label), Atlantic issued three more albums of new Redding material, one live album, and eight singles between 1968 and 1970.
Reprise Records issued a
live album featuring Redding and
Jimi Hendrix at the
Monterey Pop Festival. Both studio albums and anthologies sold well in
America and abroad. Redding was especially successful in the
United Kingdom, where
The Dock of the Bay went to number one, becoming the
first posthumous album to reach the top spot there. In 1999,
BMI named the song as the sixth-most performed song of the twentieth century, with about six million performances.
Rolling Stone ranked
The Dock of the Bay number 161 on its
500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the third of five Redding albums on the list. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was ranked twenty-sixth on
Rolling Stones
500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the second-highest of four Redding songs on the list, after "
Respect" (in this case the version recorded by
Aretha Franklin).
Jim Morrison made reference to "Dock of the Bay" in the
Doors' song "
Runnin' Blue", written by Robby Krieger, from their 1969 album
The Soft Parade. Morrison sings an a capella intro for the song, singing directly about Otis Redding. "Poor Otis dead and gone, left me here to sing his song, pretty little girl with a red dress on, poor Otis dead and gone." During the verse, the lyrics "Got to find a dock and a bay" are heard more than once, as well as several other references to Redding's song. In 2013, Redding's son
Otis Redding III performed the song at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Brannan Street Wharf on the
Embarcadero in San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood. The song's lyrics are emblazoned there on a plaque, leading some to believe Redding wrote the song there (especially as the lyrics reference the "Frisco Bay"). It was actually written ten miles farther north, in Sausalito, as Redding watched "the ships come in" on
Richardson Bay. ==Michael Bolton version==