Personal Life and Wealth
Redding, who was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg), was an athletic family man who loved football and hunting. He was described as vigorous, trustworthy, naturally full of fun and vitality, and a true businessman. Biographer Peter Guralnick has said Redding would even have been respected by the Ku-Klux-Klan. According to several people, Redding's personality was not fully matured neither on stage nor in public life. His brother Rodgers thought he was "confused", while Alan Walden described him as "naive". He was not only a musician, company founder, talent scout and record producer, but was also active in philanthropic projects. Through his keen interest for the black youth he intended to build a summer camp for disadvantaged people from urban slums and ghettos.
Redding was a very wealthy entertainer. According to several advertisements, he had around 200 suits and 400 pairs of shoes, and he earned about $35,000 per week for his concerts. For the "Big O Ranch" he spent about $125,000. As the owner of the Otis Redding Enterprises of Macon, he earned through performances, music publishing ventures and royalties from record sales more than a million dollars in 1967 alone. About his success in 1967, one columnist said, "he sold more records than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin combined."
Read more about this topic: Otis Redding
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or wealth:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”
—Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
“People die for wealth and birds die for food.”
—Chinese proverb.