“Words fail me in describing his impact. He was on the session when history was made. He came up with the parts we all studied. He produced the records we all worshipped”: Why Steve Cropper was one of guitar’s most humble heroes

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.”

Favouring an Esquire or Telecaster, Cropper wove his choppy, economical parts so seamlessly into the fabric of each song that a casual listener could miss him (despite Sam Moore’s holler of “Play it, Steve!”, prompting the puppyishly excited bends in Sam & Dave’s Soul Man). Yet the players always knew his value.

“Words fail me in describing his impact,” wrote Joe Bonamassa. “He was on the session when history was made. He came up with the parts we all studied. He produced the records we all worshipped.”

Steven Lee Cropper was born in Dora on 21 October 1941 but was forged in Memphis, where he moved aged nine, channelling the city’s blues, R&B and gospel into his high school band, The Royal Spades. In a lucky twist, the sax player’s mother and uncle – Estelle Axton and Jim Stewart – owned an indie label, Satellite Records, which released the group’s instrumental Last Night (before rebranding as Stax to avoid legal action).

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.

Green Onions - Booker T. & Steve Cropper, Keb Mo... Live Guitar Festival New York 2013. - YouTube

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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.

Otis Redding - (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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“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.”

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.