Interview a few star guitarists and you’ll soon hear the old lie: “I just play for the song (man)”. But Steve Cropper really did. Immune to egomania and content to exist at the edge of the spotlight, the Missouri-born rhythm man – who died at the age of 84 on December 3, 2025 – always weighed and measured his guitar parts to serve that day’s material, his metronomic yet soulful right hand often cited among the best in the game.
As the cornerstone of Stax Records’ house band, Booker T & The MG’s – not to mention a producer, engineer and co-writer of standards such as Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, Wilson Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour and Eddie Floyd’s Knock On Wood – Cropper was the engine room behind soul and R&B’s golden age.
In person, however, he was a good-humoured pragmatist happy to function as a cog in a machine. “My playing has always sucked, but it sells because I keep it simple,” Cropper told Phil Weller for Total Guitar in 2024. “If you play too far outside the box, people aren’t gonna like it. I’m not a guitar player. I use it as a tool.”
Cropper found he preferred the insular life of a studio bod to the swashbuckling antics of a road warrior, and soon became Stewart’s fixer and best-paid lieutenant. With the guitarist finding easy chemistry with the interracial MG’s line-up – keys prodigy Booker T Jones, drummer Al Jackson Jr and original bassist Lewie Steinberg – the band chalked up countless credits alongside their own 1962 hit, Green Onions.
As Cropper told Total Guitar, that loping vamp – with Jones’s woozy organ lines punctured by his strident guitar stabs – was never intended as an instrumental. “A singer was meant to come into the studio, but he’d been singing all night and couldn’t even say his name in the morning. So we were just jamming around waiting.”
Cropper could groove with anyone: who else could have backed Albert King (on 1967’s Born Under A Bad Sign) then covered The Beatles’ Abbey Road (on 1970’s McLemore Avenue)?
Among these projects, it’s perhaps most tantalising to imagine his future partnership with Redding, had the singer not perished after recording 1968’s US No 1 (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.
“That Sunday, he passed away in the airplane,” Cropper told WMOT, “Atlantic Records called and said, ‘You got to get an Otis Redding record out.’ Well, that was the only thing I thought was worthy of being a chart record.”
Even though people fly me in all over to play on their records and overdub, I think they would be better using me on the ground floor, y’know, as a building block, rather than a cherry on the cake
Cropper left Stax in 1970, already sufficiently fabled that sideman work was assured for life. He could have no doubt that his music resonated, noting that he’d hear a vintage soul tune in a gas station or grocery store “pretty much every day of my life”. Yet the man who was once personally sought out by Jimi Hendrix was bemused to be venerated as a guitar great.
“Even though people fly me in all over to play on their records and overdub, I think they would be better using me on the ground floor, y’know, as a building block, rather than a cherry on the cake,” Cropper told Tulsa Public Radio. “I never tried to be a lead player. Really, I’m a rhythm man, and my forte is capturing the feel of a song during its inception in the studio. I think that’s where I’m best.”
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
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