The record in context

Sam Cooke died in December 1964, shot under murky circumstances at a Los Angeles motel. He was 33, the smoothest voice in soul music and the man who had shown a generation of singers — Redding included — what was possible. Cooke’s “Shake,” written and recorded by him in his final year, was a sleek, uptown dance number: polished, controlled, effortlessly cool.

Redding’s version, cut for Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul in 1965, is the opposite of all those things. Where Cooke glides, Redding detonates. He takes a sophisticated dance record and turns it into something raw, sweaty and almost violent in its energy — less a cover than a confrontation. It is impossible not to hear it as a tribute: the younger singer taking the older master’s song and proving, in the most loving way possible, that he has learned the lesson and is now teaching one of his own.

Redding opened his Monterey Pop set with “Shake” in June 1967, and the choice was perfect. For an audience that had come to see rock bands, he led with the most physical thing he had — a song that announced, before a single ballad could soften the impression, that this man could out-shout, out-move and out-feel anybody on the bill. Cooke’s song became Redding’s battering ram.

Listen closely

Play Cooke’s original first, then Redding’s, and the contrast will hit you like a change in weather. Cooke’s “Shake” is all poise — a crisp arrangement, a vocal that never breaks a sweat, the sound of a man entirely in command of the room. Redding’s version sounds like the room is on fire. Listen for the tempo: his band pushes the song harder and faster, the horns blare where Cooke’s merely punctuate, and the whole record has a ragged edge that the original deliberately avoided. This is not interpretation; it is transformation.

Listen for what Redding does to the vocal line. Cooke sings the melody; Redding attacks it. He stretches syllables until they nearly tear, shouts phrases that Cooke crooned, and fills every gap in the lyric with grunts, hollers and exhortations — the full vocabulary of the Southern church and the chitlin-circuit stage. Where Cooke’s performance says “watch me,” Redding’s says “feel this.” The difference is the difference between elegance and ecstasy, and Redding was never interested in elegance when ecstasy was available.

Notice, though, that the tribute runs deeper than volume. Listen for the moments when Redding pulls back — a softened phrase here, a crooned line there — and you will hear Cooke’s influence surfacing through the sweat. Redding had studied the master; the control underneath the abandon is Cooke’s teaching. The younger singer is not rejecting the older one’s style but building on it, proving that smoothness and rawness are not opposites but points on the same continuum. The shout means more because you can hear the croon it grew out of.

That is what makes the record a tribute rather than a theft. Redding did not try to out-Cooke Cooke — nobody could. He took Cooke’s song into his own world, the world of Memphis horns and sanctified shouting, and brought it back changed. Every cover version is a conversation between two artists; this one is a conversation between the living and the dead, conducted at full volume. Listen to the ending, where Redding just keeps shouting the title long past the point of sense — it stops being a dance instruction and becomes something like a prayer. Shake, shake, shake: wake up, stand up, feel alive. For three minutes, it works.