Disc one, track six—“Shake”—second verse: “Ya shake it like a bowl a’ soup yeah / Ya let it go loopity-loop yeah.” Between the instructional of line one and the crisp but ecstatic release of the second, you get everything you absolutely need to know about Otis Redding. He gathers us together, gives unto us the gospel, and sends the enlightenment up into the sky and out into the world. Such was the mastery of the man, who could surely wrap himself in darker, deeper cloaks—“Ole Man Trouble,” a short song made much longer by the thickness of the misery, evinces more constant, sharp, pure pain than you’ll find outside an Oncology Ward—but who understandably liked to surface into pleasure, to lead us into the Promised Land, because he knew his voice was all that.

I’ll let you in on a few more secrets. One, you’ll find even more heavenly versions of “Shake” elsewhere in this set. Two, the live take on “Satisfaction” from the Whiskey A Go Go gives us Otis descending from slightly hoarse to rather hoarse, pushing through his diminished instrument with the “only” weapon left: intensity. His instinctive gift was the gift to start at the foreseeable edge of almost unbearable intensity, play with that edge, show nuances along every measurable tiny retreat from that edge—and then, sometimes, emboldened by this gift and enraged, perhaps, by a ragged throat, to step over that edge. To chant an imperative phrase of frustration (“you gotta getcha some”) as long as he frustratedly well pleased to, and to walk pridefully through the fires of the danger zone, unengulfed.