If you know the sting that opens Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” the organ-and-guitar grind of “Green Onions,” or the quiet guitar that walks Otis Redding down to the water on “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” you already know Steve Cropper. You may not have known his name. That was the point.
Cropper, who died December 3, 2025, in Nashville at 84, was the rare guitar hero who refused to act like one. He played fewer notes than almost anyone in his league, and those notes still define Southern soul. As a member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Stax Records’ house band, he helped turn a converted movie theater on East McLemore Avenue in Memphis into one of the most important studios in American music.
A Farm Kid Meets Memphis
Steven Lee Cropper was born October 21, 1941, on a farm near Dora, Missouri. His family moved to Memphis when he was nine. Country radio had been the soundtrack of the farm. Memphis gave him something else: Black gospel, R&B, and the city’s street-level mix of Sun Records rock and roll and neighborhood church music.
He got his first guitar by mail order at 14 and taught himself by listening to Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Chet Atkins, jazz player Tal Farlow, and Lowman Pauling of the “5” Royales. That last name matters. Pauling’s lean, biting rhythm guitar became Cropper’s north star: play in service of the song, leave space, make every stab count.
In high school he formed the Royal Spades with Charlie Freeman. The band became the Mar-Keys. In 1961 they cut “Last Night” for Satellite Records — soon renamed Stax after founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. The instrumental hit the Top 5. Cropper was still a student at Memphis State. He quit the road, took the keys to the studio, and became Stewart’s right-hand man: guitarist, engineer, A&R, and, soon enough, co-writer and producer. Stax later said he was involved in virtually every record the label issued from late 1961 through 1970.
Accidental Immortality: “Green Onions”
Booker T. & the M.G.’s were not supposed to be a band. In the summer of 1962, Cropper, 17-year-old organist Booker T. Jones, drummer Al Jackson Jr., and bassist Lewie Steinberg were booked to back rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley. The session ended early. They started jamming. Stewart hit record.
The slow blues they cut first was meant to be the A-side. Then Jones started a riff Cropper remembered from weeks earlier. Two takes later they had “Green Onions.” It went to No. 1 R&B and No. 3 pop. The M.G.’s — Memphis Group, or, depending on who you ask, a wink at the British sports car — became Stax’s engine. Donald “Duck” Dunn, Cropper’s old friend, replaced Steinberg in 1965. Two Black musicians, two white musicians, one pocket. In the segregated South, that was not a marketing plan. It was just how the room sounded when it was right.
The M.G.’s hits kept coming: “Hip Hug-Her,” “Soul Limbo,” “Time Is Tight,” “Hang ’Em High.” More important, they were the rhythm section behind Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, and Johnnie Taylor. Motown was polished and orchestrated. Stax was lean, dry, and live. Cropper’s Telecaster — bright, clean, almost no effects — was the glue.
He later said he thought of himself as a rhythm player. “I get off on the fact that I can play something over and over,” he told interviewers, “while other guitar players don’t want to even know about that.” Keith Richards once summed him up in one word: “Perfect.”
Three Songs That Never Left the Radio
Cropper’s songwriting credits are short on flash and long on standards.
“In the Midnight Hour” (1965)
Wilson Pickett was in Memphis to record. Cropper had been listening to Pickett’s old Falcons sides and noticed a line the singer kept throwing away on the fade: something about the midnight hour. They wrote the song at the Lorraine Motel — the same motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would later be killed. Gospel cadence, secular heat. It became Pickett’s signature.
“Knock on Wood” (1966)
Written with Eddie Floyd, also at the Lorraine. Superstition as love song. Floyd took it to No. 1 R&B. In 1979, Amii Stewart’s disco version went to No. 1 on the Hot 100 and carried the riff into a new decade. The bones were still Cropper and Floyd’s.
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” (1968)
Otis Redding started the song on a houseboat in Sausalito after the Monterey Pop Festival. He brought the idea to Cropper in Memphis. Cropper helped finish the verses — including “I left my home in Georgia / headed for the Frisco Bay” — and they cut the basic track in late November and early December 1967. Redding died in a plane crash on December 10. Cropper mixed the record while grieving, kept the whistling that was supposed to be a placeholder, and added the ocean and seagulls. It became the first posthumous No. 1 single in Billboard history and won Cropper and Redding the Grammy for Best R&B Song.
They had been hunting for Otis’s crossover record. Cropper later said that on the day they cut it, they looked at each other and knew.
“Play It, Steve!”
Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” (1967) was written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Hayes needed an intro. Cropper grabbed his Telecaster, heard the changes, and invented those sliding double-stops on the top strings. On the choruses he used a Zippo lighter as a slide, balancing it on his knee so it wouldn’t vibrate off while the band locked in. Mid-song, Sam Moore shouts “Play it, Steve!” The shout stayed on the record. A decade later, John Belushi shouted the same line when the Blues Brothers covered it, with Cropper standing right there.
That is Cropper’s whole method in one scene: a two-note idea, a cigarette lighter, no overdubs, and a singer who cannot help calling his name.
After Stax
Cropper left Stax in 1970 as the label’s business side frayed. He opened TMI Studios in Memphis and spent the 1970s as a hired gun and producer: Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Tower of Power, John Prine, Poco, Jeff Beck, José Feliciano. In 1978, Belushi and Dan Aykroyd pulled him and Dunn into the Blues Brothers. Briefcase Full of Blues went platinum. The 1980 film made “The Colonel” — Cropper’s old nickname — a face as well as a sound. He stayed with the band through Blues Brothers 2000 and decades of touring.
Booker T. & the M.G.’s were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Cropper entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005. The Recording Academy gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. He kept recording into his eighties. Fire It Up (2021) earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album. In 2024 he released Friendlytown as Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour, with Billy Gibbons and a guest spot from Brian May. He died after a fall, at a rehabilitation facility in Nashville. His wife, Angel Cropper, confirmed the death. He was 84.
Why the Guitar Still Sounds Like Him
Cropper’s influence is easy to miss because it is everywhere. Garage bands learned the M.G.’s four-piece model. The Beatles admired Stax enough that Brian Epstein once inquired about Cropper producing them. The Clash covered “Time Is Tight.” Hip-hop and sample culture kept recycling Stax grooves. Every guitarist who plays a clipped, midrange Tele riff and then gets out of the singer’s way is speaking his language.
He was not Motown’s sparkle and not Hendrix’s fire. He was the space between the snare and the vocal — the man who knew that one well-placed chord can do more than a chorus of notes. “I’m not a guitar player,” he liked to say. “I use it as a tool.”
The tool was a Fender Telecaster. The job was the song. The result is still on the radio every day.
Play it, Steve.
