Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul

For our second 'feel' album we could probably have chosen any Stax album. As Otis himself put it in a Rolling Stone interview: "At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

In the end we chose what Keith Richards called, "The album that soothes a broken heart".



It wasn't uncommon for the back cover to act as advertising, imploring the idle browser to buy and take an album home. Back covers weren't shy (because they had the space) to advertise more explicitly, promoting other albums by the artist too. Here they did both, showing covers of his three previous albums; The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (1965), Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1965) and The Soul Album (1966).

As was typical, they tried to talk directly to the potential listener..."This dictionary, created especially for you, is the undeviating vocabulary of its author OTIS REDDING. Searching for something interesting to enjoy? Here...put this album on your turntable and listen to OTIS. If you should hear a word you don't understand, get your OTIS REDDING DICTIONARY OF SOUL and look it up!"

This was no doubt aimed the white audience Otis Redding had started to tap into. Released in October 1966, Dictionary of Soul was his fifth album and the last to be released before his death in December the following year. After the success of Otis Blue, Redding was increasingly attracting a crossover audience and in early 1966 he performed at the famous Whiskey A Go Go club on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip in front of a predominantly white audience, becoming one of the first soul artists to play in the western United States.

It certainly did its job on at least one member of the Stones.