In an era when many rock guitarists appeared to believe that the spoils would inevitably go to the fastest and flashiest, Steve Cropper showed generations of younger players the virtues of economy and concision.
Cropper, who has died aged 84, demonstrated in his early recordings as a member of the instrumental quartet Booker T and the MGs – notably their first hit, Green Onions – and in his backing work with singers such as Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett that a single chord, struck with exquisite timing, could say as much as the longest, loudest solo.
He also enjoyed success as a songwriter, co-writing In the Midnight Hour for Pickett, Knock on Wood for Eddie Floyd, and, most significantly, (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay, a reflective ballad recorded a few days before Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967. Cropper and Redding had worked together on the song, whose gentle introspection seemed to suggest a new artistic direction for the singer. Released within a month of Redding’s death, it went straight to the top of the charts.
At the time Cropper was a key creative force at Stax Records, the independent Memphis label specialising in soul, R&B and gospel music. After business-related disagreements led to his departure in 1971, the many admirers who invited him to contribute to their albums included John Lennon, Rod Stewart, Dolly Parton, Ringo Starr and Etta James.
In 1980 he featured prominently in The Blues Brothers, a comedy film that became a worldwide hit, alongside the actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and his fellow musicians James Brown, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles. He also appeared in a sequel, The Blues Brothers 2000, and toured with the Blues Brothers Band.
Born on a farm in Dora, Missouri, he was the son of Hollis Cropper, who worked for the St Louis-San Francisco Railway, and Grace (nee Atkins), a schoolteacher. First beguiled by country music, he became interested in the blues and R&B once the family had moved to Memphis when he was aged nine. At 14 he acquired his first guitar and set to absorbing influences from the work in country music of Chet Atkins, the jazz playing of Tal Farlow, and the contribution of Lowman Pauling to a popular doo-wop group, the Five Royales.
While at Messick high school he led a band first called the Royal Spades, including his childhood friend Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass guitar. He was also hanging around and doing odd jobs in the old cinema on McLemore Avenue in Memphis, where in 1957 Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had set up their Satellite studio and record shop, soon to be renamed Stax.
When the Royal Spades expanded their lineup in 1961 and became the Mar-Keys, they recorded a driving blues instrumental called Last Night, whose bleary charm made it the label’s first sizeable hit. Soon they were being enlisted as Stax’s house rhythm section, playing on hits such as Rufus Thomas’s Walking the Dog, his daughter Carla Thomas’s Gee Whiz and William Bell’s You Don’t Miss Your Water.
Through using up the time left over from an unsuccessful session with the rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley in August 1962, the four members of the band who would become known as Booker T and the MGs – the organist Booker T Jones, the bass guitarist Lewie Steinberg, the drummer Al Jackson Jr and Cropper – recorded a slow after-hours blues called Behave Yourself, intended as the A-side of their first 45rpm single. To provide the necessary B-side, they cut a medium-tempo blues distinguished by a simple rising riff, created on the spot, to which they gave the title Green Onions.
When radio disc jockeys showed enthusiasm for the B-side, the record company responded and Green Onions became not just one of the biggest instrumental hits of the 1960s but, thanks to its use in many different contexts, the most familiar. All four members made distinctive contributions to the record, but none was more striking than Cropper’s briskly flicked chords on his 1956 Fender Esquire, and the solo in which his compressed phrases answered Jones’s and Steinberg’s unison statement of the cool, minimalist melody.
No one in the studio realised it at the time, but this was a manifesto for a new kind of rhythm section, as potent as those being cooked up in Detroit by Motown’s Funk Brothers and, shortly afterwards, by the Meters in New Orleans.
With Dunn recruited by Cropper to replace the erratic Steinberg, the MGs continued to have hits of increasing sophistication, including Soul Limbo and Time Is Tight, despite strains that began to develop when Jones, a musical prodigy, decided to take up a place at university in Indiana, meaning that he was available only at weekends and during the holidays. Nevertheless their work with Redding on such hits as Respect and Try a Little Tenderness brought them wider recognition.
When Atlantic Records sent Pickett and the duo Sam and Dave down to Memphis to record at Stax, resulting in many hits, it was a sign of wider acknowledgment of their growing eminence. In 1966 the Beatles, at the height of their success, had to be dissuaded from decamping to Memphis to try to get the Stax sound into the songs they were recording for Revolver, their seventh album.
The multiracial harmony at Stax, symbolised by the two black and two white musicians of the MGs, was never better illustrated than by a wildly acclaimed tour of Europe in March 1967. But it was disturbed a year after those concerts by the racially motivated murder of the Rev Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel, an establishment much used by Stax’s artists, and where Cropper had written Knock on Wood with Floyd.
A rupture with Atlantic Records, who handled Stax’s distribution, and other business problems led to the guitarist’s exit to pursue a freelance career and to start his own studio in Memphis.
In 1975 he relocated to Los Angeles, where he produced and appeared on many albums, including those by Levon Helm’s RCO All-Stars, before moving in 1988 to Nashville, which remained his home until his death.
There were several studio reunions of the MGs, with different drummers after Al Jackson Jr’s murder in 1975. In 1992 they appeared at Madison Square Garden in a concert celebrating the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan‘s recording career, backing guest performers including George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, Chrissie Hynde, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Lou Reed and Dylan himself.
Cropper’s string of solo albums, starting with With a Little Help from My Friends in 1969, ended with Friendlytown in 2024. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the MGs in 1992, he won two Grammy awards, for (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay in 1968 and for Cruisin’, a tune from the MGs’ final album, in 1994.
He is survived by his wife, Angel (nee Hightower), whom he married in 1988, and their son, Cameron, and daughter, Andrea, and by Stephen and Ashley, the two children of his first marriage, to Betty Grooms, which ended in divorce.
• Steven Lee Cropper, guitarist, songwriter and record producer, born 21 October 1941; died 3 December 2025
