Steve Cropper, the lean, soulful guitarist and songwriter who helped anchor the celebrated Memphis backing band Booker T. and the M.G.’s at Stax Records and co-wrote the classics “Green Onions,” “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and “In the Midnight Hour,” has died. He was 84.
Pat Mitchell Worley, president and CEO of the Soulsville Foundation, said Cropper’s family told her that Cropper died on Wednesday in Nashville. The foundation operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, located at the site of the former Stax Records, where Cropper worked for years.
A cause of death was not immediately known. Longtime associate Eddie Gore said he was with Cropper on Tuesday at a rehabilitation facility in Nashville, where Cropper had been after a recent fall. Cropper had been working on new music when Gore visited, he said.
“He’s such a good human,” Gore said. “We were blessed to have him, for sure.”
The guitarist, songwriter and record producer was not known for flashy playing, but his spare, catchy licks and solid rhythm chops helped define Memphis soul music. At a time when it was common for white musicians to co-opt the work of Black artists and make more money from their songs, Cropper was that rare white artist willing to keep a lower profile and collaborate.
‘Play it, Steve!’
Cropper’s very name was immortalized in the 1967 smash “Soul Man,” recorded by Sam & Dave. Midway, singer Sam Moore calls out “Play it, Steve!” as Cropper pulls off a tight, ringing riff, a slide sound that Cropper used a Zippo lighter to create. The exchange was reenacted in the late 1970s when Cropper joined the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd act “The Blues Brothers” and played on their hit cover of “Soul Man.”
In a 2020 interview with The Associated Press, Cropper discussed his career and how he mastered the art of filling gaps with an essential lick or two.
“I listen to the other musicians and the singer,” Cropper said. “I’m not listening to just me. I make sure I’m sounding OK before we start the session. Once we’ve presented the song, then I listen to the song and the way they interpret it. And I play around all that stuff. That’s what I do. That’s my style.”
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, asked once about Cropper, said simply, “Perfect, man.” On a YouTube instructional video, guitar virtuoso Joe Bonamassa says Cropper’s moves are often copied.
“If you haven’t heard the name Steve Cropper, you’ve heard him in song,” Bonamassa said.
He got his first guitar at 14
Cropper was born near Dora, Missouri, but moved with his family to Memphis when he was 9 and got his first mail-order guitar at age 14, according to his website, playitsteve.com. Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and Chet Atkins were among his early influences.
Cropper was a Stax artist before the label was even called Stax, which Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had founded as Satellite Records in 1957. In the early 1960s, Satellite signed up Cropper and his instrumental band the Royals Spades. The band soon changed its name to the Mar-Keys and had a hit with “Last Night.”
Satellite soon was later renamed Stax, where some of the Mar-Keys became the label’s horn section while Cropper and other Mar-Keys formed Booker T. and the M.G.’s. Featuring Cropper, keyboard player Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, they were known for their hit instrumentals “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High” and “Time Is Tight,” and backed Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and others.
The racially integrated band, a rarity in its day, was so admired that even non-Stax artists recorded with them, notably Wilson Pickett. Jones, who is the only surviving member of the band, and Jackson are Black. Dunn and Cropper are white.
“When you walked in the door at Stax, there was absolutely no color,” Cropper said in the AP interview. “We were all there for the same reason — to get a hit record.”
Inspired by gospel song
In the mid-1960s, Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler brought Pickett to work with the Stax musicians. During a 2015 gathering with the National Music Publishers Association, Cropper acknowledged he had never heard of Pickett before working with him. He found some gospel recordings by Pickett, was taken by the line “I’ll see my Jesus in the midnight hour” and with a slight change helped write a secular standard.
“The man up there has been forgiving me for this ever since!” he said.
Cropper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 as a member of Booker T. and the M.G.’s. That year, Cropper, Dunn and Jones played in an all-star tribute at Madison Square Garden to Bob Dylan. Al Jackson died in 1975, Dunn in 2012.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cropper 39th on its 100 Greatest Guitarists list, calling him “the secret ingredient in some of the greatest rock and soul songs.”
Cropper was especially close to Redding. In an interview on his website, Cropper recalled collaborating on “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” completed shortly before Redding’s death in a December 1967 plane crash and a No. 1 hit in 1968.
The brooding, folkish ballad was a bittersweet reflection on his triumphant appearance a few months earlier at the Monterey Pop Festival. Cropper would remember adding the final touches on the recording while still grieving for Redding.
“We had been looking for the crossover song,” he said. “This song, we knew we had it.”
Cropper was in the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers” and its follow-up, “Blues Brothers 2000,” portraying “The Colonel” in the Blues Brothers band. In real life, he toured with them.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005, and two years later received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.
Cropper continued recording into his later years, including 2024’s “Friendlytown,” which was nominated for a Grammy. Earlier this year, Cropper received the Tennessee Governor’s Arts Award, the state’s highest honor in the arts.
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Associated Press National Writer Hillel Italie contributed reporting from New York.
