Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay- Otis Redding

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is a song co-written by soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper. It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just days before his death in a plane crash.

Sitting-On-The-Dock-Of-The-Bay

Verses

Barre chords are used in the original recording.

With Barre Chords…

Using Open Chords

You could play a more basic version that only uses open chords. You can still provide some of the “walk”.

Take the chord/lyric sheet and instead of using barre chords, just use the open chord form of the chords listed:

G                      B7
Sittin' in the mornin' sun
        C                        A
I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes
G                       B7
Watching the ships roll in
           C                    A
And then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah

Here we go, just using open chords:

But, what about that cool walk from the C chord down to the A chord as found in the original transcription?

We can even add an additional walk from the G chord up to the B chord:

Life By The Drop- Part 3

Verse

The verses of the song are 16 measures long. Each verse has 4 lines of lyrics, so if you do the math you’ll come to find that each line of the lyric will last 4 measures.

[Verse 1]
Hello there my old friend
Not so long ago it was ’til the end
We played outside in the pouring rain
On our way up the road we started over again

The chord progression for the verse is A, E, F#m, D and each chord gets a measure.