It was enough to get you running to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, when news spread (with few details) of Steve Cropper’s death last Wednesday. Now the crack rhythm section that backed so many Stax stars, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, has only Booker T. Jones, its namesake composer and organist, to represent the band.
As Jones expressed in a statement after Cropper’s death, “I am saddened by the passing of Steve Cropper. God rest his soul in peace. I remember riding my bicycle as a kid to Satellite Records and meeting Steve who was working as a clerk there. Day after day he allowed me to play records, free of charge, knowing I had no money to pay for them. He was such a nice guy. He was an innovator and I was fortunate to work with him. I will miss him.”
While there was a good deal more to Cropper’s musicianship than his output at Satellite, later Stax, that label’s rise defined him. His sound, stinging blues outbursts from his Fender Esquire/Telecaster, emerged fully formed right out of the gate when the M.G.’s “Green Onions” took the world by storm in 1962. From there, he would continue to spice up M.G.’s tracks with such electrifying licks, but also with some vicious rhythm parts, as on “Boot-Leg.” Regarding Cropper’s crucial role as a songwriter and producer, perhaps the folks at the Stax Museum put it best when they wrote, “His work with Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, and so many others carried a spirit of authenticity and innovation that still resonates through our halls every day.”
A sense of space was fundamental to that innovation. As he put it in a 2021 interview with the Flyer, “Call it the KISS formula. ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ K-I-S-S!” This in turn dovetailed with his tendency to play both rhythm and lead guitar at once, comping along when others took the spotlight, stepping out boldly when a fill or solo was called for. That grew naturally from his emulation of Lowman Pauling of The “5” Royales.
“He was a hero of mine,” Cropper told Memphis Magazine of Pauling in 2023. “I didn’t really copy him, but I did a lot of stuff like him. I thought he was a good rhythm and lead player.” Decades after the fact, Cropper could still vividly recall seeing The “5” Royales with his friend since the sixth grade, Donald “Duck” Dunn, when they were both students at Messick High School. “We just sat and watched the band, that’s all we cared about. But Lowman wore this long strap, and when he got ready to take a solo, he’d pick it up and cradle it under his arm and play a solo. And then drop it back down and start playing the rhythm on the neck again.”
This approach would come to define the Stax sound. Cropper would later tell Robert Gordon (in a 2022 interview at the Memphis Public Library), “They said, ‘How come there’s only one guitar on a Stax record?’ I said, ‘’Cause they couldn’t afford two guitars!’”
Yet Cropper brought a considerable musical vocabulary to the Stax table. Speaking of “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” a song he wrote with Eddie Floyd and Wilson Pickett, Cropper told the Flyer, “Most guitar players didn’t know or play diminished chords. And I did, and that was like a new style for everybody. Everybody was like, ‘That’s different!’ No shit! They were used to playing augmented [chords], but they didn’t know what a diminished was.”
Though he often described himself as a purely groove-oriented player, his musical learning was deep. And he credited that to the Black gospel of Memphis, which he discovered after moving here from rural Missouri as a youth. “So the band used to say, ‘Not another one of those demolished chords!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I added that pregnant 13th to it!’ If you’re gonna add that 13th, play that sucker as loud as you can! We did that with minor ninths and minor sixths. Play ’em loud! I learned a lot of that listening to church bands. When I moved to Memphis when I was 10, I was glad to hear the radio because the only radio we listened to [before that] was in the car. Because we didn’t even have electricity on the farm until 1948 or something. So we’d go out and listen to the car radio and try not to run the batteries down. And you’d just hear songs like ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?’”
After leaving Stax, Cropper parlayed his deep grasp of music and record-making into an independent career as a sideman and producer that still resonates today, whether through artists he produced at his Trans Maximus Inc. (TMI) studio in Memphis (like Jeff Beck) or via his role backing The Blues Brothers, often recreating his old Stax hits. Having released his first solo album on Stax subsidiary Volt in 1969, he carried on that tradition sporadically, well into the 21st century. In 2021, Cropper’s Fire It Up earned a Grammy nomination, and only last year, as Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour, he released the album Friendlytown, with cameos from Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and Brian May of Queen.
Ultimately, though determined to “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Cropper was a hero to many virtuosos like Beck, Gibbons, and May, and was regularly included on lists of the greatest guitarists ever. And yet, appropriately for a musician whose trademark was listening to the band and the song’s arrangement, he didn’t give the credit for such accolades to his hands. As he once told the Flyer, “I like to think that God gave me some good ears.”