MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Steve Cropper, the lean, soulful guitarist, songwriter and producer who anchored Booker T. and the M.G.’s at Stax Records and co-wrote classics including “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 he died Wednesday in Nashville. The foundation runs the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, on 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 had been with Cropper on Tuesday at a rehabilitation facility in Nashville, where Cropper had been following a recent fall. Gore said Cropper had been working on new music when he visited. “He’s such a good human,” Gore said. “We were blessed to have him, for sure.”
Cropper was not a flashy player, but his spare, catchy licks and tight rhythm work helped define Memphis soul. At a time when white musicians often profited from Black music while keeping a high profile, Cropper was notable for keeping a lower profile and collaborating across racial lines.
Midway through the 1967 Sam & Dave hit “Soul Man,” singer Sam Moore shouts “Play it, Steve!” as Cropper delivers a ringing riff created with a Zippo lighter — an exchange that Cropper later reprised while playing with The Blues Brothers. In a 2020 interview with The Associated Press, Cropper described his approach: “I listen to the other musicians and the singer. I’m not listening to just me… 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.”
Fellow musicians praised him: Keith Richards called him “Perfect, man,” and guitarist Joe Bonamassa has noted that Cropper’s moves are often copied. “If you haven’t heard the name Steve Cropper, you’ve heard him in song,” Bonamassa said.
Cropper was born near Dora, Missouri, and moved with his family to Memphis at age 9. He got his first mail-order guitar at 14 and cited Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and Chet Atkins among his early influences. He was a Stax artist before the label was even called Stax: Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton founded Satellite Records in 1957, signing Cropper and his instrumental group the Royals Spades, later renamed the Mar-Keys, who scored with “Last Night.”
When Satellite became Stax, some members of the Mar-Keys became the label’s horn section while Cropper and others formed Booker T. and the M.G.’s. The group — Cropper, keyboardist Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson — had hits with instrumentals like “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High” and “Time Is Tight,” and served as the house band backing Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and many others.
The racially integrated band was a rarity in its era and widely admired; even artists outside Stax recorded with them, notably Wilson Pickett. Jones and Jackson were Black; Dunn and Cropper were white. “When you walked in the door at Stax, there was absolutely no color,” Cropper told the AP. “We were all there for the same reason — to get a hit record.”
Cropper helped craft “In the Midnight Hour” after hearing a gospel line in Wilson Pickett recordings — “I’ll see my Jesus in the midnight hour” — and adapting it to a secular song. He joked later that “the man up there has been forgiving me for this ever since!”
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 with Booker T. and the M.G.’s. That year Cropper, Dunn and Jones performed in an all-star tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. Al Jackson died in 1975; Dunn died in 2012. Rolling Stone ranked Cropper 39th on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists, calling him “the secret ingredient in some of the greatest rock and soul songs.”
Cropper was especially close to Otis Redding and recalled collaborating on “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” which they completed shortly before Redding’s death in a December 1967 plane crash; the song became a No. 1 hit in 1968. Cropper remembered adding final touches to the recording while grieving Redding. “We had been looking for the crossover song,” he said. “This song, we knew we had it.”
He appeared in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers and its sequel Blues Brothers 2000 as “The Colonel” in the Blues Brothers band, and he toured with the act. Cropper was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 and received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2007.
He continued recording into his later years, including 2024’s Friendlytown, which earned a Grammy nomination. Earlier this year he received the Tennessee Governor’s Arts Award, the state’s highest arts honor.
