Otis Redding Birthplace — Dawson, Georgia

Otis Ray Redding Jr. was born on September 9, 1941, in Dawson, Georgia — a small Terrell County town in the southwestern corner of the state — and grew up in Macon, Georgia, where his family moved when he was a child. He sang in church, won a local talent contest so many times they asked him to stop entering, and was playing with Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers by his late teens. He drove Jenkins to a Stax Records session in Memphis in 1962 and, with a few minutes of studio time left over, recorded "These Arms of Mine" — a slow, devastating ballad that became his first hit and established everything that would follow.

Redding became the defining voice of Southern soul: raw, gospel-saturated, physically intense in a way that communicated across every cultural barrier. His Stax recordings — "Mr. Pitiful," "I've Been Loving You Too Long," "Respect" (which Aretha Franklin made her own), "Try a Little Tenderness" — were produced with the Memphis Horns and Booker T. and the MGs and are among the most emotionally immediate recordings in American music. His performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 converted a largely white rock audience and was one of the great live performances of the era.

Redding died on December 10, 1967, when his private plane crashed into Lake Monona near Madison, Wisconsin. He was 26 years old and had just recorded "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" — released posthumously, it became his only number-one hit. A memorial stands at the Big O Ranch, his estate near Macon, Georgia. Dawson has a historical marker acknowledging his birth there.