By Andrea Bossi ·Updated April 20, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… “I have magic in this building,” Karla Redding-Andrews, the daughter of Otis Redding, says on a cozy April afternoon in Macon, Ga.
Speaking to a full hall of friends and partners, Redding-Andrews is kicking off celebrations, marking one year since erecting the Otis Redding Center for the Arts (ORCA) in downtown Macon. Her mom, Redding’s widow, Zelma Redding, sits nearby with a bright smile, no microphone in hand yet all the power in the room.
Redding’s legacy lives on strong in music and culture. He’s a Roll Hall of Fame inductee with a catalogue of hits, like “Try a Little Tenderness” (yes, as sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye), “Respect,” “These Arms of Mine,” and the posthumously released “(Sittin’ On a) Dock of a Bay.” Though the Georgia-born singer died at only 26 years old in a plane crash, in 1967, his legacy has been so pristinely protected for nearly six decades since. It’s all because of his family, starting with his wife.
“To protect my husband’s legacy, my family, and I been one of my biggest dreams because he was doing this, [though] not on this level, before he passed. Otis was giving scholarships to underprivileged kids and bringing them to the ranch so they could just have a whole day out, just having fun. And it just kind of dawned on me that I got to keep this going,” Mrs. Redding, who never remarried, tells ESSENCE.
Rather than letting Redding’s story become another cautionary tale about an artist whose catalog was diluted, misused, or lost to industry control, Mrs. Redding moved to ensure that neither his music nor his legacy could be separated from his family. The journey was far from easy. After all, Mrs. Redding says, it was “pretty rough.” And that idea that he left the family rich? A common misconception. “They record royalties was trash. He didn’t live on record royalties. He lived on performances,” she clarifies.
Mrs. Redding, like Otis, had dropped out of high school. After he died, she was just 25 years old with three kids to raise. “I had to go back to school and learn,” she says. Mrs. Redding got her GED then went to study business. “I worked really hard, putting my thoughts together on how I’m going to do this. Some days, I would roll, I tell you. It was rough, but I made it,” she tells ESSENCE.
A big part of this was managing his estate and, thus, becoming entrenched in the music business. There, “she didn’t just learn how to swim with the sharks, she bit at them,” Redding-Andrews says of her mom. “You never stop fighting in the entertainment business, especially for your IP rights, the copyrights. People just think that they can kind of take your stuff and do whatever they want to do with it. Luckily, mom has always been that one to say, ‘you didn’t get my permission.’”
Over the years, while continuing to serve as a steward of Redding’s catalogue and name, Mrs. Redding also multiplied her entrepreneurial prowess. “I will take a chance, and I’ve been blessed to take the chances that I’ve taken in life, and it works for me,” she says. She opened a nightclub in the ‘70s and owned a booking agency and record store starting in 1980.
“After Karla got out of college [in 1985], came back home, everything just started coming together,” Mrs. Redding adds. They opened a shoe and bag boutique downtown. Mrs. Redding later co-founded a bank, and in 2007, she created the Otis Redding Foundation, which is the vehicle for much of the family’s work today. Through it, she opened the Otis Redding museum and hosted music programming at various locations, including Mercer University. This paved the way for ORCA, just their latest move to protect and project Otis Redding’s legacy.
The arts center is a 15,000-square-foot space with an indoor-outfoor amphitheater. Inside, a myriad of high-end tech and instruments outfit the rooms, be they practice rooms, studios, or tech labs. Korg pianos, Gretsch drums, Fender basses, Solid State Logic production tools, and the latest Smartboards are abundant within — most are donated, a testament to the family’s strong relationships in music. There’s a zen room, too, with sensory delights and sound-isolated Stereo Alpha Egg Chairs. It’s open for summer programming and for after-school opportunities throughout the school year for kids between the ages of five and 18.
“The first thing we teach our kids when they come here is, you got to know the history. You got to know that [Otis] powered through, he believed in himself and never let anyone kill his dream. That’s what’s important and what is reflective of this space, and in terms of keeping the legacy going,” Redding-Andrews says. Plus, “dad’s original fan base is dying out everyday. So you got to try to go and get these 18 to 40 year olds to understand who Otis Redding is.”
To build ORCA, Redding-Andrews says she and her mom made a deal. “When she walked out of the door at the museum and looked at the location, she said, ‘that’s our spot right there,’” she tells ESSENCE. Her mom bought the land, which had been a restaurant before it was razed to the ground years prior by a fire, and Redding-Andrews brought the building to life. Once they got it, “I went to work to write grants, calling people, showing them the plans, and showing them our concepts. For a while, people were like, ‘hmm let me wait until you get the building.’ They didn’t want to donate to the dirt,” she adds.
Building it wasn’t easy. Redding-Andrews didn’t just struggle finding the right architect to build something that didn’t look like a school — “Kids sit in the classroom all day. So why would they leave a classroom to another classroom?” she says — but the county commissioner was tough to convince, though the design review board was supportive. “The community had gotten rumbles that they weren’t going to let us do it. They had already started forming a petition, writing and signing papers,” she adds.
ORCA also does what Mrs. Redding thinks her husband would have wanted. After all, he had already made a point to support local children when he was alive, with scholarships and bringing them to his family’s ranch. “He just wanted them to ride the horses, go fishing in the pond and everything. He would charter a school bus to bring them out, chaperones to be with them, and everything,” Mrs. Redding remembers. “His dream was to build a studio and museum out on our ranch. But we didn’t have nobody to run that; he left us too early.”
“What a gift to the city,” says Andrea Grinder — who is on the board of the Otis Redding Foundation and is the vice president for economic development at Central Georgia Technical College — says of ORCA.
The namesake arts center, in its glitteringly new glory, may only be a year young, but the family has big plans for what’s ahead. The ORCA team is working on getting their studio Dolby Atmos-certified in order to work with filmmakers. The arts center will not only continue to serve young local talents, but the team also plans to bring in professionals from Macon and Atlanta to speak to the learners.
The Reddings have no plans to move their home base from middle Georgia. “Macon is home base. Dad’s office was at 535 Cotton Avenue. Mom was an integral part of downtown and the Macon community with her businesses,” Redding-Andrews says. In Macon will the legacy continue. “We have a commitment to downtown because downtown has always been committed to whatever we want to do.”
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