Celebrated soul guitarist Steve Cropper dies aged 84

Steve Cropper (Mark Humphrey/AP)

Steve Cropper, the guitarist and songwriter who helped anchor celebrated Memphis backing band Booker T and the MGs at Stax Records, has died at the age of 84.

Pat Mitchell Worley, president and chief executive of the Soulsville Foundation, said Cropper’s family had told her that he died on Wednesday in Nashville.

The foundation operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, 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.

Steve Cropper’s Fender Telecaster at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (Alamy/PA)

Cropper, who co-wrote the classics Green Onions, (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay and In The Midnight Hour, 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.

His name was immortalised in the 1967 smash Soul Man, by Sam & Dave, in which singer Sam Moore calls out “Play it, Steve!” as Cropper pulls off a characteristically tight, ringing riff, a slide sound that Cropper used a Zippo lighter to create.

The exchange was re-enacted 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.

When you walked in the door at Stax, there was absolutely no colour

Cropper was born in Missouri, but moved with his family to Memphis when he was nine and got his first mail-order guitar at the age of 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 the funky Last Night. Satellite was soon renamed Stax; a California label with the same name had threatened legal action.

At Stax, some of the Mar-Keys became the label’s horn section while Cropper and other Mar-Keys eventually formed Booker T and the MGs, known for their hit instrumentals Green Onions, Hang ‘Em High and Time Is Tight, and backed Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and other artists.

The racially integrated band, a rarity in its day, was so admired that even non-Stax artists recorded with them, notably Wilson Pickett.

“When you walked in the door at Stax, there was absolutely no colour,” Cropper said in the AP interview. “We were all there for the same reason — to get a hit record.”

In the mid-1960s, Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler brought Pickett to Memphis 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 MGs. The same year, he was part of the house band for an all-star tribute at Madison Square Garden to Bob Dylan, with other performers including Neil Young, George Harrison and Stevie Wonder.

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”.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in New York City, and two years later received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

Cropper continued recording into his later years, including 2024’s Friendlytown. Earlier this year, he received the Tennessee Governor’s Arts Award, the state’s highest honour in the arts.