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DJ Mystical Michael Rhode Island DJ & Boston DJ
Tag Archives: Fun Professional Wedding DJ
Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness
Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness was one of the great Soul songs and artists of the Twentieth Century. I grew up listening to his music and had a pleasant reminder of his brilliance at an Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance back in the mid-nineties in Bloomington, IN. They did an entire set of Redding Classics and it was inspiring and moving. Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness was one of the bright moments. Any professional DJ or music lovers would have been inspired.
Since there is new attention being shined on Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness due to the new song “Otis” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, it seemed like a good time to revisit him and his legacy.
Although he wasn’t very successful among white audiences in the United States, his concerts in Europe established the opposite. His performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was one of his last big concerts until his death in a plane crash at the age of 26, one month before his biggest hit, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay,” sold about 4 million copies worldwide, was released. Reddings’ contribution to soul music led him to his nickname “King of Soul.”
Redding was born in the small town of Dawson, Georgia. When he was three, his family moved to Macon, Georgia, where Redding sang in a church choir and as a teenager won the talent show at the Douglass Theatre for fifteen weeks in a row, which led to his discovery by Syd Nathan of King Records. His earliest influence was Little Richard (Richard Penniman), also a Macon resident. Redding said, “If it hadn’t been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard – he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock ‘n’ Roll stuff, you know. Richard has soul, too. My present music has a lot of him in it.”
Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness Music Video
According to the website of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 1989, Redding’s name is “synonymous with the term soul, music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of Gospel and Rhythm and Blues (R&B) into a form of funky, secular testifying.” In 1993, the U.S. Post Office issued an Otis Redding 29 cents commemorative postage stamp. Redding’s music was featured in the 1991 film The Commitments, including “Mr Pitiful”, “Try a Little Tenderness”, “Hard to Handle”, and “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”.
Otis Redding Try A Little Tenderness Wedding DJ Music
Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk
It is hard not to feel the energy and Soul that the great Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk put into every guitar lick in this song. Smooth as silk without being overproduced. I recently had a Groom ask for this song to be the song that he and his mother would dance to for their Mother-Son Dance. I fought hard to contain the tears that well-up every time I hear this song. I do not remember the scene in the film La Bamba but I remember it was one of the more emotional ones. There are few artists from that era that had a full-length feature film made about their life like Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk. As a professional Wedding DJ, I get requested plenty of his music these days and continue to feel moved by his music.
Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk Music Video
He was born Ricardo Esteban Valenzuela Reyes. He was asked by his producer and agent to change his family name to make it sound ‘more american’. Its strange in 2011 to contextually imagine that happening today, where nearly twenty percent of American population is Latino. His death along with other pop stars Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper is still considered an American tragic story. After the February 2, 1959, performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly, Richardson, and Valens flew out of the Mason City airport in a small plane that Holly had chartered. He was on the plane because he won a coin toss. The plane, a four-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza, departed for Fargo, North Dakota, and crashed shortly after takeoff in a snow storm. The crash killed all three passengers and the pilot; at 17, Valens was the youngest to die on the flight. The event inspired singer Don McLean’s popular 1971 ballad “American Pie“, and immortalized February 3 as “The Day the Music Died”.
