lucky cola Stanley Booth, Music Journalist Who Loved the Blues, Dies at 82
In late 1967, the music journalist Stanley Booth was on assignment to write about the Memphis soul sound for The Saturday Evening Post when he watched Otis Redding and the guitarist and producer Steve Cropper sit on folding chairs at Stax Records in Memphis as they composed “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”
In one of the many vivid behind-the-scenes moments Mr. Booth captured over the years, he described Mr. Redding strumming a bright red dime-store guitar and singing the opening lyric:
Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun —
“‘But I don’t know why he’s sittin’,’ Otis says, rocking back and forth as if he were still singing. ‘He’s just sittin’. Got to be more to it than that.’ He pauses for a moment, shaking his head. Then he says, ‘Wait. Wait a minute,’ to Steve, who has been waiting patiently.”
I left my home in Georgia,
spaceman slotHeaded for the Frisco Bay —
“He pauses again, runs through the changes on his fractured guitar, then sings,”
I had nothing to live for,
Looks like nothing’s gonna come my way.”
Mr. Booth also wrote about the subsequent recording session, at which a seemingly satisfied Mr. Redding listened to the playback of the song and said, “That’s it.” He died soon after, in a plane crash on Dec. 10, 1967, before the release of the song, which would rise to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. (It was his only No. 1 hit.)
“I spent the last week of Otis’s life with him, told him goodbye on Friday and Sunday night he was dead,” Mr. Booth said in an interview in 2015 with The Vinyl Press, a website for vinyl record enthusiasts. “He made other people feel good. I’ve never really recovered from his death.”
The article offered an early glimpse at Mr. Booth’s often-dazzling writing and ability to evoke a scene with well-chosen details and dialogue. That gift made him a respected journalist, if somewhat under the radar; his work appeared in Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as lesser-known publications like Eye magazine. And he famously embedded himself with the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour, which resulted in an acclaimed book.
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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.
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