What Chet Atkins was to Nashville country, what Jerry Garcia was to West Coast rock, Steve Cropper was to Memphis and the foundations of Southern soul - a key architect of an American sound that changed the world.
The Missouri-born guitarist leveraged a simple but highly musical style on the electric guitar into one of history’s most influential careers as a studio musician, songwriter and producer. His work in the house band at Stax Records in the 1960s, including that core group’s side project, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, secured Cropper a place in pop music’s pantheon, but he stayed active and inventive over decades, as a sideman and leader, including two fine albums of his own in the past five years. So it was with sadness and some surprise that music fans received the news that Steve Cropper had died on Wednesday in Nashville at the age of 84.
Most people will know Cropper’s work thanks to the songs he wrote while at Stax, with and for some of the greatest voices of all time. He composed “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” with Otis Redding, “Knock On Wood” with Eddie Floyd, and “In The Midnight Hour” with Wilson Pickett. But his impact on the overall sound and soul of Stax’s improbable explosion in the 60s went much deeper, as the “right hand man” of label founder Jim Stewart, a veritable studio manager, key talent scout, and producer of classic sides by Sam & Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Johnny Taylor, and The Staple Singers.
With the M.G.’s, he did the near impossible, bringing a string of instrumentals to the pop and R&B charts, most famously “Green Onions,” which was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012.
For those reasons and more, he became one of a select few people to have been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Musicians Hall of Fame. He was also a two-time Grammy Award winner. Mojo Magazine selected him as the second greatest guitarist in rock and roll history, behind only Jimi Hendrix. The sharp contrast of their approaches says a lot about Cropper’s gifts. Never a showy, dazzling soloist, Cropper made his reputation through mastery of taste, timing, and tone.
“As a guitarist, he made less more by playing supportively and sparsely, always with signature and soul and often with a dirtier or crunchier tone than his contemporaries long before ‘crunch’ and distortion became stylish,” says WMOT host and guitar historian Webb Wilder. “Rooted and ahead of his time at once, he is truly one of the great guitar figures in American music. Then, of course, there is the songwriting, the production, and innumerable collaborations. His great ‘team player’ ensemble playing, arranging, phrasing, and tone on guitar stand out for me.”
“I learned that, in music—kind of like in golf—less is more,” Cropper affirmed to me for a 2018 feature in Premiere Guitar. “I don’t know how it was across the country, but I know how it was in Memphis, Tennessee, on sessions. The more you played, the less they liked it. Most sessions—at least in the rock ’n’ roll or R&B stuff—were all ‘head arranged.’ There were no charts. You could do what you wanted to do as long as you didn’t get in the way of what was going on, like the singer and all that. So I learned very early to play less and get out of the way.”
Cropper was born in 1941 and raised on a farm in Missouri, but his family fatefully moved to Memphis when he was about 10 years old. He told me about saving up to buy his first guitar from the Sears catalog at age 14. When the delivery man arrived, and Steve was coming out of his skin to get hold of that $17 instrument, the driver shocked him with a 25 cent delivery fee.
“Nobody had said that!” Cropper remembered in an oft told tale. “It wasn’t in the catalog. They didn’t tell me that on the order form. I thought delivery was free, and I go, ‘Mom!’ [Laughs.] So Mom always said if she hadn’t lent me the quarter that day, I’d never have been a guitar player. That’s her claim to fame.”
The young musician found himself in a potent time and place, when Memphis was hot, thanks to Sun Records and Elvis, and a wide-open, fast-moving recording and radio business. At 19, Cropper’s first real band, the Mar-Keys, parlayed a casual recording session into a Top 5 nation-wide hit with the instrumental “Last Night.” The label that released it, Satellite Records, soon became Stax, and Cropper’s friends and peers from the neighborhood were pulled into the music-making business at 926 East McLemore Avenue.
Those years, 1961 to 1970, defined a magic decade of hit-making and musical innovation. Cropper managed a pretty smooth transition to a post Stax life as a producer and one of America’s most in-demand collaborators and sidemen. As a partner in the Trans-Maximus (TMI) recording studio and record company, he worked with Poco, Jeff Beck, Jose Feliciano, John Prine, and Tower Of Power. In 1978, a Saturday Night Live gag performance with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd became the recording and touring phenomenon known as the Blues Brothers, where Cropper was again partnered with fellow M.G.’s member Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass.
After about a decade living in Los Angeles, where his credits included time with Leon Russell, John Lennon and Levon Helm, Cropper moved to Nashville in 1988 and found some new challenges playing on country sessions for the likes of Mickey Gilley, Dolly Parton, Janie Fricke, and Jimmy Buffett. He played on more all-star tours and celebrations than one could count.
Cropper also kept recording as a featured artist, a tradition that started with 1969’s excellent instrumental album With A Little Help From My Friends. He teamed up with Felix Cavalieri, former lead singer for The Rascals, and producer/musician Jon Tiven to make two albums together in 2008 and 2010. He called on friends such as Delbert McClinton, Bettye LaVette, Buddy Miller, and Lucinda Williams to forge a tribute to his first great guitar hero, Lowman Pauling, called Dedicated: A Salute To The 5 Royales in 2011. Also working with Tiven, Cropper made and released two very strong late life efforts, 2021’s Fire It Up, and 2024’s Friendlytown with a new band, The Midnight Hour. Another project was in the works.
When he played for WMOT at our Roots On The Rivers festival in 2023, Cropper was backing and mentoring emerging singer Emily McGill. She took to Facebook on Wednesday, where she wrote: I’ll miss Steve Cropper for my lifetime and I hope our paths cross again somewhere beyond this. He believed in me like no other and I am forever grateful for the time and music we were able to share together.”
