The King of Soul cover illustration for Black Theatre #3

From Google Arts & Culture:

 

Black Theatre was a periodical of the Black Theatre Movement. This magazine contains articles about black playwrights. The cover of the third issue depicts The King of Soul or The Devil and Otis Redding, which represents Redding encountering the devil and the toll it took in his life. From the Thelma McDaniel Collection (3063(

From Oxford Reference regarding the writer Ben Caldwell, author of the play, “The King of Soul or The Devil and Otis Redding,” which Raysor is illustrating: 

 

Caldwell's plays uniquely satirize not only the racism and the naïveté of whites, but also those African Americans who seek either to emulate whites, be unduly materialistic, or anchor themselves to stereotypes. Some of these works also employ revolutionary rhetoric common to the period, but as Stanley Crouch suggests, Caldwell's movement to agitprop from a deftly crafted concatenation of satirical moments renders the whole formulaic, clinical, and trite.

Many of his works are very short one-act plays; four of these, appearing in a special issue of Drama Review (vol. 12, 1967–1968), occupy only eleven pages. Caldwell's great power, however, is his ability to communicate racial issues with both mordancy and a superb economy of dramaturgy. The revolutionary spirit compromised through materialism is the theme of Riot Sale, or Dollar Psyche Fake Out, as a weapon that shoots currency makes rioting African Americans stop to gather the money and run to nearby stores; Top Secret, or A Few Million after B.C. focuses on a secret meeting between the President and select members of his cabinet to discover a method of imposing birth control on African Americans. The method: convincing African Americans, many of whom wish to emulate whites anyway, that having more than xsxsxtwo children is uncivilized.

One of his more mature efforts in this vein is The King of Soul, or The Devil and Otis Redding (1969), in which the theme of materialism is further complicated by both the history of the exploitation of talented entertainers such as Redding and by the inclusion of Redding and the Faustian bargain he makes—though never understands. This kind of pithy acidity helped earn Caldwell a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970.

From the book Smethurst, James Edward, The Black Arts Movement : literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  Caption for the image included in the book: 

 

Cover of Black Theatre with an illustration by Maxine Raysor of R & B singer Otis Redding as a Christ martyred by the white recording industry. The illustration refers to a play by Ben Caldwell that both attacks the mass culture industries and extols rhythm and blues as a source of black communal feeling. (Reproduced by permission of Ed Bullins.