Steve Cropper: Booker T guitarist’s sinewy licks gave soul to Stax hits
Steve Cropper was the brilliant yet self-effacing guitarist for Stax Records who discovered Otis Redding and co-wrote (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.
Every time Steve Cropper left his house, he was confronted by the sound of his own guitar playing. Whether he was eating in a restaurant, shopping for groceries or simply driving into town with the radio on, you could guarantee it wouldn’t be long before Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay or, say, Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour would come on.
Or it might be Green Onions by Booker T & the MGs, or Sam and Dave’s Soul Man on which Sam Moore shouted, “Play it, Steve!” to cue Cropper’s solo. Or it could be one of the hundreds of other classic soul tracks that Cropper recorded as the in-house guitarist and producer for Stax Records.
Hearing the hits he had made happened “pretty much every day of my life” and so, being a modest man, he learnt to tune it out. Except that there was always somebody ready to remind him. “I’ll be standing there not listening and my daughter will say, ‘Dad, that’s you playing!’ And I go, ‘Oh, OK’.”
Cropper played on just about every record made at Stax in the 1960s, his guitar licks adding sinew and grit to a body of songs that created the template for southern soul music and continue to influence generations of musicians to this day. In many ways he was an unlikely figure to play such a pivotal role in the development of black music. He was a white country boy from the midwest, and when his family moved to the segregated south he was 10 and had never heard the blues, gospel, R&B or any other genre of black music.
“We didn’t really have music when I was growing up because there was no electricity,” he said. “All you’d hear on the radio was stuff like (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? But when we moved to Memphis I found a gospel station on the radio and never looked back. I ended up playing soul and R&B. But it’s that same rhythm. It just makes you move.”
He got his first guitar by mail order at 14 and had just turned 20 when he arrived at Stax in 1961 as a member of the instrumental group the Mar-Keys. The label had been founded by Jim Stewart, a white former bank clerk who initially recorded country musicians. When he began recording black singers such as Rufus and Carla Thomas, the Stax studio, located in a former cinema in an African-American neighbourhood of Memphis, became a racially integrated oasis.
Needing a house band, Stewart recruited Cropper from the Mar-Keys and bassist Lewie Steinberg (replaced by Cropper’s schoolfriend Donald “Duck” Dunn) and added black musicians Booker T. Jones on organ and drummer Al Jackson. With such a multiracial line-up the group was unable to play in public, but in the studio their groove was immaculately colour-blind. After their first session together, they were messing about, vamping on an organ-driven, 12-bar blues riff with stinging guitar from Cropper. “What the hell is that?” Stewart shouted from the control room and insisted on recording it.
Released as the instrumental Green Onions in 1962 under the name Booker T & the MGs, the single made No.3 in the US charts and launched Stax as an epoch-making, earthier and funkier alternative to the sweeter soul-pop being crafted in Detroit by Motown.
Further hits with Booker T & the MGs followed, including Hip Hug-Her, Soul Limbo (famous in Britain as the theme of Test Match Special) and Time is Tight, and Cropper swiftly became Stewart’s right-hand man.
More than a brilliant guitarist, Cropper acted as engineer, producer, songwriter and talent scout. Among his discoveries was Otis Redding, who turned up at Stax one day in 1962 working as a chauffeur for blues artist Johnny Jenkins. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing, the band was called in and Redding became a superstar.
Cropper went on not only to produce or play on all of Redding’s greatest recordings but co-write several of his best-known songs, including Mr Pitiful and (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, a posthumous hit after the singer’s death in a plane crash in 1967. Other memorable hits Cropper co-wrote included Eddie Floyd’s Knock On Wood and Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour.
Known among his fellow musicians as “the Colonel” — he claimed he never knew why, although he had served as a captain in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — he was named by the music magazine Mojo in 1996 as the world’s second greatest guitarist after Jimi Hendrix.
Cropper was more self-effacing, a musician’s musician reluctant to push himself into the limelight. “I have worked with guys who have changed the world, but I didn’t change anything. I was just trying to do my parts,” he said. “You could wear a silly hat or do something crazy if you want to stand out from the crowd. Or you could just learn to play the guitar better.”
Among his biggest fans were the Beatles, who wanted to record the album that came to be Revolver at Stax with Cropper producing. In the event the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, cancelled the sessions due to security concerns, although John Lennon and Ringo Starr both recruited Cropper to play on later solo albums.
After leaving Stax in 1970, he was in constant demand as a session player, and others who called on his services over the years included Bob Dylan, Elton John, Neil Young and Rod Stewart, whom he ranked alongside Redding as the finest singer with whom he ever worked. He was also seen on screen alongside Duck Dunn in John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s band for the 1980 film The Blues Brothers and its sequel Blues Brothers 2000.
He is survived by his second wife, Angel (nee Hightower), and their children Cameron and Andrea, and by his children Stephen and Ashley from his first marriage to Betty (nee Grooms), which ended in divorce.
Steven Lee Cropper was born in 1941 in Dora, Missouri, and grew up on a family smallholding in West Plains. His mother Grace (nee Atkins) was a schoolteacher and his father, Hollis Cropper, an agent for the St Louis-San Francisco Railway. After his family had moved south to Memphis, he formed a band called the Royal Spades at Messick High School, which morphed first into the Mar-Keys and then the MGs.
Playing rhythm and lead simultaneously, as a guitarist he was largely self-taught and claimed to be at a loss when asked what made his style so distinctive. “My whole idea was to listen and just go for it,” he said. “Let God take over, and you just channel the notes. That’s all I can tell you.”
Steve Cropper, guitarist, was born on October 21, 1941. He died of undisclosed causes on December 3, 2025, aged 84.
The Times
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