Don’t Make Me Stop Now: The Battles Behind Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’

Most love songs are promises. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” is a negotiation conducted at the edge of collapse. The woman is leaving — not in anger, not in scandal, but in the slow, ordinary way that is hardest to argue with: she is tired, and her love has faded, and she wants to be free. The man has no defence except the truth, which is that his love has done the opposite. It has grown stronger the longer it has lasted, until it has become less a feeling than a condition of his existence, something he calls, with a candour that still startles, a habit. He does not ask her to love him again. He asks only for time. “I’ve been loving you too long to stop now” — the title is the whole of his case, and Otis Redding sings it the way a man sings when he already knows the verdict and is pleading anyway, because pleading is the last thing left that resembles hope.

The record he made of that plea in the spring of 1965 became, almost immediately, the foundation stone of everything Otis Redding means. It was his first Top 40 pop single and the biggest hit of his lifetime, a slow 6/8 ballad built from little more than piano chords, sighing horns, Steve Cropper’s picked guitar figures and a voice that moves from a murmur to a raw-throated cry without ever seeming to change gear. It has been ranked among the greatest songs ever recorded, preserved by the Library of Congress, and covered by everyone from the Rolling Stones to Ike and Tina Turner — and yet it began as somebody else’s unfinished song, carried in a suitcase from city to city on the soul revue circuit, waiting for the one singer alive who could make its desperation sound like dignity. This is the story of how that song was finished in a Buffalo hotel room, cut twice in Memphis, fought onto the charts, and turned, night after night, into the most devastating six minutes in soul music.

The Iceman’s Unfinished Song

To understand where “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” came from, you have to start with Jerry Butler — and with the fact that, by the winter of 1964–65, Butler knew more about the architecture of a soul ballad than almost anyone in America. As the lead singer of the Impressions he had sung “For Your Precious Love” in 1958, a record that essentially invented the Chicago soul ballad: slow, church-fed, courteous on the surface and desolate underneath. As a solo artist on Vee-Jay Records he had stacked up hits — “He Will Break Your Heart,” “Moon River,” “Make It Easy on Yourself” — with a delivery so cool and controlled that a Chicago disc jockey, E. Rodney Jones, had nicknamed him the Iceman. Butler was a craftsman in an idiom that ran on feeling, and among the half-finished songs he carried with him on the road that season was a slow plea he could not quite complete: a song about a man whose love had outlasted the love of the woman it was aimed at.

Redding, at that point, was still a rising man rather than a star. The former church singer from Macon, Georgia, had clawed his way onto the Stax Records roster in 1962 and had been building, single by single, through “Pain in My Heart” and “Mr. Pitiful,” the second of which had just given him his first real national traction. He and Butler were moving through the same world of theatres, package tours and one-night stands that made up the Black entertainment circuit of the mid-1960s, a world in which artists crossed paths constantly, shared bills, shared buses, shared the small hours after the show. It was a world that ran on exhaustion and talk, and songs moved through it the way stories do — hand to hand, room to room.

Butler told the story of what happened next himself, and his account, preserved in the liner notes to Redding’s catalogue, remains the definitive one. “I was going to Buffalo, New York, to play a date,” he recalled. “I changed planes in Atlanta, and Otis got on the plane. And we found that we were both working in the same place on the same night. When we checked in the hotel, we found we had adjoining rooms. After the show that night, we were sitting around, messin’ around with the guitar and talking about things. He was showing me some songs that he had been working on that he hadn’t completed, and I showed him ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,’ which I had been working on and hadn’t completed. And he fell in love with it. And he said, ‘Let’s try and finish it!’ So we started messing with it and finished it. And he took it back to Memphis and recorded it.”

Consider what is being exchanged in that hotel room. Butler had the song’s premise and its aching shape — the Iceman’s kind of song, all restraint and wounded politeness — but he had been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to push it to its conclusion. Redding, whose entire art consisted of taking polite emotions and stripping the politeness off them, heard in the fragment the thing Butler had been circling: not a song about a love that failed, but about the humiliating asymmetry of a love that ends at two different speeds. Accounts of the night have the two men working over a bottle of J&B until the song stood up. By morning, the unfinished fragment had become “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” — jointly credited to Redding and Butler, and carrying both men’s temperaments in its DNA: Butler’s melodic patience, Redding’s refusal to let any feeling stay buried.

There is a further irony in the pairing. Butler’s genius was for understatement, for the held note and the raised eyebrow; he would probably have sung the finished song beautifully and coolly, the way he sang everything. Redding’s genius was the opposite. He sang like a man testifying, and the song he carried out of that Buffalo hotel room was about to become the supreme test of whether soul music could hold a performance built entirely out of begging. Butler, to his credit, never begrudged the outcome. He recorded the song himself a few years later, and lived to watch his unfinished fragment become the record by which an entire genre learned to plead.

A Plea in 6/8

What exactly did the two men build? On paper, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” is almost austere. It moves at the tempo of a slow dance, in a swaying 6/8 that rocks rather than marches, and its lyric wastes nothing. The opening confession sets the terms at once: his love has been growing stronger even as its object has been withdrawing, until she has become, in the song’s most quoted and most quietly devastating image, a habit to him — something his body now does without consulting him, something he cannot simply decide to stop. Then the turn: she is tired, and wants to be free. The song never disputes her right. There is no villain in it, no betrayal to prosecute, no rival to fight. That is what makes it unbearable. Every argument the singer raises — I have loved you too long, my love is still growing, please don’t make me stop now — is an argument against arithmetic, against the plain fact that a feeling one person has stopped having cannot be restarted by the intensity of the other person’s.

The construction serves the helplessness. The verses do not so much progress as circle, returning again and again to the title line, each return a little more exposed than the last, the way a man in an argument he is losing keeps coming back to the one sentence he knows is true. And then there is the ending — or rather, the refusal of one. The song’s subtitle, when it carries one, is “(To Stop Now),” and the final section of the record is simply that plea repeated and intensified: don’t make me stop now, please, please. In the studio version it lasts seconds. On stage, as we will see, Redding would stretch it into a full second act, worrying the phrase the way a preacher worries a text, until the repetition itself became the meaning: a man saying the same words to a door that has already closed.

Music writers have long noted the record’s unusual harmonic movement — the liner notes to Redding’s catalogue describe the ballad as “built around an unusual chord progression” — and its effect is worth pausing on. The chords do not resolve the way a conventional love song’s chords resolve; they lean, and keep leaning, so that the listener’s ear is held in the same suspension the singer is trapped in. Underneath Redding, the arrangement does almost nothing, and does it perfectly. This was a radical choice for 1965, when soul ballads were still often dressed in strings and backing choruses. Redding’s record offers instead the sound of a man in a room with a band that refuses to rescue him.

McLemore Avenue

Redding took the song home to the only place it could have been made: Studio A of Stax Records, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, a converted movie theatre — the old Capitol — where the raked floor of the auditorium had never been levelled and the control room sat where the projectionist once worked. Stax in 1965 was a family firm run by Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, and its sound was the opposite of Motown’s polish: integrated house band, minimal overdubs, everything cut live in the room with the horns close enough to touch the singer. It was funkier, grittier and more gospel-saturated than anything coming out of Detroit, and it was in the middle of its first great flowering, with Booker T. & the M.G.’s as its house band and a young writing staff learning its trade on the job.

The session, in April 1965, was produced by Steve Cropper — the M.G.’s guitarist, already Redding’s closest musical partner at the label, and credited here not only with steering the record but with one of its defining features: the arpeggiated guitar figures that ripple under the vocal like something being remembered. Cropper understood, as few producers would have, that the correct accompaniment for a plea is space. His guitar does not comment on Redding’s singing; it keeps the lights on while it happens. Around that spine stood the full Stax machine at its early peak: Booker T. Jones at the piano, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, Al Jackson Jr. — the most imitated drummer in soul — keeping the 6/8 sway unhurried and inexorable, and the label’s horn section, trumpeters Wayne Jackson and Gene Miller with tenor saxophonist Andrew Love and baritone saxophonist Floyd Newman, the nucleus of the Mar-Keys, answering the vocal in short, sighing phrases that sound like a congregation that already knows how the sermon ends.

And Redding? By every account of the Stax years, what happened in that room was what always happened when he sang a ballad he believed in: the performance stopped being a performance. He had a technique that engineers and fellow musicians described with something close to bewilderment — a voice that could drop to a confidential near-whisper on one line and tear open on the next without losing pitch or dignity, the grain of it doing the work that other singers needed vibrato and melisma to do. On “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” he holds himself in check for most of the record, which is precisely why the moments when the check fails — the crack on the plea, the sense that the last chorus is being sung through something — land with such force. The April 1965 recording, cut in mono as Stax then worked, runs just two minutes and fifty seconds. It is difficult to think of another performance of its length that contains so much weather.

The record was released on Volt, Stax’s sister label, on 19 April 1965, as Volt 126, with “I’m Depending on You” on the B-side. What happened next would change what Redding was.

Number Two

The trade papers heard it immediately. Billboard, reviewing the single in May 1965, called it a “winning tender and soulful piece of material and performance by ‘Mr. Pitiful’ himself,” while Cash Box described it as “a tender, slow-moving heartfelt lament about a fella whose love for his gal is growing cold” — getting the geometry of the lyric slightly wrong, since in the song it is his love that refuses to cool, but catching its temperature exactly. Radio did the rest. Through the late spring and into the summer of 1965, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” climbed both of the charts that mattered, and its final positions told the story of where Redding stood at the moment of his breakthrough. On the Billboard Rhythm & Blues chart it reached number two — his biggest R&B hit to date, stalled only below the very summit. On the pop chart, the Hot 100, it reached number twenty-one.

Those two numbers deserve to be read together, because together they describe a crossing. Before this single, Redding had been a fixture of the R&B chart and a rumour on the pop chart; “These Arms of Mine” and “Mr. Pitiful” had grazed the Top 40 without truly entering the mainstream conversation. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” was his first Top 40 pop single, and it did not arrive there by sanding down anything. In June 1965, in the middle of a pop landscape dominated by the British Invasion and Motown’s bright machinery, one of the records American teenagers were buying was a slow, unadorned, grown man’s lament cut live in a converted cinema in Memphis, sung by a twenty-three-year-old Georgian who spent its final seconds begging. It was his best-selling single and his biggest hit for the remainder of his life — a fact worth holding onto, because the song’s posthumous companions have sometimes obscured it. In Redding’s lifetime, this was the summit.

The breakthrough had practical consequences inside Stax. Redding was no longer a promising roster act; he was the label’s biggest solo star, the voice around which its summer would be built. And it posed, almost at once, an artistic problem that the label had to solve within weeks. The April recording existed in mono, cut for the singles market. If the song was going to anchor the album Stax now intended to build around its singer — the album that would become Otis Blue — it would have to be made again, in stereo, for the LP age that was dawning. Redding was going to have to re-enter the song he had already perfected, and somehow sing it as if for the first time.

Cut Twice

The sessions for Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul have passed into legend for their speed: on 9 and 10 July 1965, in a burst of work that producer and historian Rob Bowman has documented in detail, Redding and the Stax band recorded ten of the album’s eleven tracks in roughly twenty-four hours. The eleventh was “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” and it arrived at the sessions with its own complicated status. As Bowman’s liner notes put it, for the Otis Blue sessions “Redding decided to recut ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ in stereo. The song had undergone substantial change since it was originally recorded in April.”

A substantial change is right. The album version runs three minutes and ten seconds against the single’s two-fifty, and the extra time is not decoration: the recut restores an additional verse that the single edit had left behind, opening the song out and letting its circle of pleas complete one more revolution before the end. There is a personnel change hiding in the two versions as well. The April mono recording has Booker T. Jones at the piano; the July stereo version, according to Fred Bronson’s session research, puts Isaac Hayes — then Stax’s other keyboard pillar, years away from his own solo fame — in that chair instead. Two takes of the same plea, made three months apart, by a singer whose relationship to the song had been transformed in the interval by hearing it come back at him from radios all over America.

Which one is definitive? Purists divide, and the division is itself a tribute. The mono single is the rawer object, tenser, closer to the room. The stereo album version breathes more, lets the horns spread across the picture, and contains the fuller text of the song. What is not in dispute is the album the song came to sit inside. Otis Blue, released on 15 September 1965, placed “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at its centre, as its fifth track and its emotional ballast, and went on to become the defining album of Redding’s career — his first to top the R&B albums chart, a Top 10 record in Britain, and a permanent fixture of greatest-albums lists, ranked by Rolling Stone among the finest ever made. The other Redding originals on it would go on to their own strange afterlives — one of them, “Respect,” would be taken to immortality two years later by Aretha Franklin — but in the autumn of 1965 there was no doubt about which song was the album’s headline. The hit was the ballad. The ballad was the man.

The Show-Stopper

Records, though, were only ever half of Otis Redding. The other half was the live show, and it was live that “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” completed its transformation from hit into ritual. Redding’s stage act in the mid-sixties was a study in pacing: the fast numbers — the shouts, the dances, the Sam Cooke covers — built the temperature, and then, at the point of maximum sweat, he would bring the whole room down into the ballads, where the real testimony happened. In that architecture, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” occupied a unique position. It was the song in which the entertainer disappeared entirely and left the congregation alone with the man.

The evidence survives on the live albums. In April 1966 he played three nights at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles — a deliberate incursion into the white pop audience’s territory, recorded across multiple sets — and the ballad appears again and again in those tapes like a fixed star the sets revolve around. (The complete Whisky recordings, finally issued in full in 2016, let you hear him sing it to a room full of Hollywood hipsters with exactly the same naked commitment he gave it in theatres on the chitlin’ circuit.) A year later, in the spring of 1967, he took it to Europe as the emotional centre of the Stax/Volt Revue, the package tour that carried the Memphis sound across the Atlantic; the resulting Live in Europe, recorded in London and Paris, preserves the song in front of audiences who had mostly never seen anything like him, and who respond to the ballad the way audiences everywhere did — with the particular silence of people who have stopped watching a show and started witnessing something.

What he did to the song on stage was expansion. The studio performance ends with the plea repeated a handful of times, a controlled fade of desperation. Live, Redding unfolded that closing section into an open-ended coda that could run and run: the band settling into the 6/8 sway like a tide, the horns breathing, and Redding out front working the phrase — don’t make me stop now, please don’t make me stop now — down from a cry to a murmur and back up again, testifying, improvising small variations of address, sometimes seeming to argue with the woman, sometimes with himself, sometimes with God. Singers who shared bills with him described the effect in the language of the church, which was where the technique came from: this was the vamp, the moment in a gospel service where the song stops being a text and becomes a state. Redding, the son of a Baptist minister’s Georgia, knew exactly what he was doing. The ballad was his altar call.

It is worth saying plainly what this cost him nightly. The codas were not simulated feeling; by all contemporary testimony they were the genuine article, wrung out of him in real time, and the band learned to follow wherever his voice decided to go. Al Jackson’s drums, Cropper’s guitar, the horns — all of it existed, in those minutes, to hold a frame steady while a man emptied himself inside it. Audiences understood. By 1967, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” was no longer merely a song in Otis Redding’s set. It was the moment the set had been built to reach.

The Love Crowd

And so to the afternoon and evening of 17 June 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in California — the Monterey International Pop Festival, the founding ritual of the Summer of Love, three days in which American rock music announced itself as a culture. Redding’s presence there was not inevitable. The festival’s bill leaned towards the new psychedelic aristocracy — Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix — and the soul world was barely represented. It was Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic Records partner whose company distributed Stax’s product, who championed the invitation, understanding before almost anyone what would happen when the hippie audience met the King of Soul. Redding closed the Saturday night, introduced by Tom Smothers, backed by Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the Mar-Keys horns, wearing a sharp green suit that stood out like a flag among the festival’s beads and denim.

What followed has become one of the most retold twenty minutes in live music. He opened with Sam Cooke’s “Shake” at full sprint, then — in footage that D. A. Pennebaker’s cameras preserved for the Monterey Pop film — paused to take the measure of the crowd, asking them if they were the love crowd he had been hearing about. He sang “Respect.” And then he brought the tempo down and introduced, as one account put it, one of his soulful numbers: “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”

Everything about the moment was a gamble. The festival audience was young, white, stoned and festival-drunk on novelty; the chitlin’-circuit ballad tradition was as foreign to most of them as opera. Redding sang the song anyway, the whole way, with its long slow build and its pleading coda, standing nearly still in the green suit while twenty-something thousand people who had come to hear the future discovered the past tense of American music standing in front of them, begging a woman not to leave. The response, audible on the tapes and visible in the film, is not applause so much as surrender. He followed it with “Satisfaction” — the Rolling Stones’ song, which he had already made his own — and closed with the other great test of his live act, and by the end of the set the unknown quantity on the bill had become, by near-universal consent, one of the festival’s defining performers. The Monterey performance of the ballad, preserved in Pennebaker’s film and on the album that later paired Redding’s set with Hendrix’s, became the song’s second birth certificate: the moment “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” passed from being a soul hit into being a piece of the general American inheritance.

Six months later, on 10 December 1967, Otis Redding was dead, killed at twenty-six when his plane went down in Lake Monona, Wisconsin, on the way to a show. The Monterey tapes, and the studio recordings, were suddenly all that would ever exist. The ballad he had finished in a Buffalo hotel room was twenty months into the world and already, unmistakably, permanent.

Everybody Wants the Song

The truest measure of a ballad is what other singers do with it, and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” began attracting interpreters almost before its own chart run had finished. The first cover came within months, and from an instructive direction: the Rolling Stones, the British band then busy conquering America with a sound substantially borrowed from men like Redding, recorded the song in 1965 and placed it on their first American live album, Got Live If You Want It!, the following year — although the track was, in truth, a studio performance with audience noise dubbed over it, the Stones being not quite ready to be caught attempting it in public. Mick Jagger’s vocal is an act of frank homage, an Englishman studying at the feet of the phrase-by-phrase master. Redding returned the compliment on Otis Blue itself, where his cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” famously re-engineered their hit as a Memphis horn workout. The exchange stands as one of the neat summings-up of 1965: the borrower and the lender, trading songs, each certain the other had something he needed.

The interpretation that took the song furthest from Memphis came in 1969, when Ike and Tina Turner recorded it for their album Outta Season and released it as a single on the Blue Thumb label. Tina Turner, who produced the record with Bob Krasnow, sang the plea as a duet of marital warfare with Ike, and their version reached number twenty-three on the R&B chart and number sixty-eight on the Hot 100 — a genuine second life for the song on the very charts where Redding’s original had run. Live, the Turners turned it into something else again: a slow-burning set piece, preserved in the Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter from their Madison Square Garden appearance, in which Tina’s performance at the microphone became so theatrically suggestive that she later wrote, with dry ambivalence, in her autobiography I, Tina: “It became really pornographic. Embarrassing. But the people loved it.” That a song built as a husband’s whispered plea could survive translation into the Turners’ charged burlesque says much about its bones. The melody and the plea are strong enough to carry almost any meaning a singer loads onto them.

The roll of interpreters kept lengthening. Aretha Franklin — whose own history with Redding’s catalogue needs no retelling here — recorded the song for her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black, bringing to it the one voice of the era that could match the original for gospel authority. Etta James, the matriarch of the blues ballad, took it into her repertoire too, as did singers as far from McLemore Avenue as country star Barbara Mandrell, for whom a country version of the song was her very first single, and, decades later and half a world away, the Australian rocker Diesel, whose 1993 cover carried it back onto the charts in his home country. Chris Farlowe, Sandy Posey and Dionne Warwick were among the others who recorded it. Jerry Butler, the song’s co-author, made his own recording as well — the Iceman finally singing his fragment whole, in the cool style he had first imagined for it, and thereby demonstrating by contrast exactly what Redding had added: the sound of the feeling escaping the singer’s control.

And yet the covers function, in the end, as a series of footnotes to a text nobody has superseded. Singers approach “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” the way pianists approach a Chopin nocturne — as a standard against which their own emotional technique will be measured and, usually, found human. The song asks for the hardest thing in singing: sustained vulnerability without self-pity, desperation with dignity intact. Almost everyone who attempts it reveals something true about themselves. Only Redding makes it sound inevitable.

The Honors

Official culture, slower than singers but more durable, arrived at its verdicts in due course. In 2003 the Library of Congress added the 1965 Volt recording to the National Recording Registry, the United States’ formal roll of recordings deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant — the closest thing American music has to a state honour, and a remarkable destination for a mono single cut in an afternoon in a converted cinema. In 2011 the same recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the recording academy’s shrine for works of lasting qualitative significance. Rolling Stone, in its original 500 Greatest Songs of All Time listing, placed the song at number 110; when the magazine rebuilt the list from scratch in 2021, polling a new generation of musicians and critics, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” climbed to number 78 — one of the very few records of its era to rise rather than fall in the re-counting, its reputation still compounding nearly six decades after its release.

There is a pattern in those numbers worth noticing. The honours have not attached themselves to the song as a composition in the abstract, the way they might to a standard by a professional songwriter. They attach to this recording, this performance, this voice — to two minutes and fifty seconds of mono tape, and to its three-minute stereo sibling. The institutions are not really honouring a song. They are honouring an event: the afternoon a twenty-three-year-old finished somebody else’s song in the only way it could be finished, by living in it completely.

Why It Endures

Why does this particular plea, of all the pleas soul music left behind, refuse to date? Part of the answer is craft. The song is perfectly built: a premise stated in its first line, a conflict with no villain, a hook that is also an argument, and a closing section engineered — by Butler’s design and Redding’s instinct — to open outward indefinitely, so that the song never truly ends so much as it is abandoned by the tape. Part of the answer is the record’s sound: the unhurried 6/8, Cropper’s guitar figures, the horns sighing like witnesses, Al Jackson’s drums keeping time the way a heartbeat keeps time, indifferent to drama. And part of it is historical position. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” is the hinge record of Redding’s career — the hit that made him, the centrepiece of his greatest album, the showpiece of his greatest concert — so that to follow the song is to follow the whole short arc of the man, from Buffalo hotel room to Monterey stage, inside thirty months.

But the deepest answer is the one the song itself gives. Most of the great soul ballads are about the beginning of love or the wreckage after it. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” is about the exact, unglamorous middle of an ending: the moment when one heart has finished and the other has not, and both people know it, and there is nothing to be done except to say so honestly. Everybody who has ever been left has lived in that moment. Redding’s performance dignifies it. He does not rage, does not threaten, does not bargain with dignity intact one line and abandon it the next. He simply refuses to pretend the feeling has stopped, and asks — knowing the answer — not to be made to stop. It is the sound of a grown man telling the truth at the worst moment of his private life, in public, beautifully.

That is why the covers keep coming and why none of them close the book; why the Library of Congress keeps the tape; why, in the Monterey film, you can watch a crowd of flower children go quiet in the presence of a man in a green suit singing about a habit he cannot break. Otis Redding sang many greater-selling songs, and one more famous one still. But the definitive statement of who he was — the singer as witness, the voice that could make desperation sound like honour — is here, in a song another man started and could not finish, that he completed in a hotel room after a show, and then spent the rest of his short life refusing, night after night, to stop singing. He had been loving it too long. So, now, have we.