Obituary: Steve Cropper, musician

“Stay in on the mic now, Steve,” Otis Redding says on an alternative take of (Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay. This version opens without the sounds of the sea or the slow bass – just Otis calling Steve Cropper to start strumming an acoustic guitar.

Cropper, who died last Wednesday in Nashville, aged 84, had spent days holed up with Redding writing the song – the first mainstream crossover track by the artist, who died a few days later in an air crash. A white guitarist and a black singer writing and recording a song of such heartbreaking beauty in Memphis in 1967 was in itself a revolutionary act.

Memphis still had segregated schools; the city’s mayor, Henry Loeb, was a conservative segregationist who ran a successful re-election campaign that year on a platform of refusing concessions to black union workers; and the National Guard was called in to break up demonstrations and riots in the city.

But also in 1967, Sam & Dave released Soul Man on Stax Records, a song inspired by riots in Michigan in which black residents had painted the word “soul” on black-owned businesses, so that rioters would not torch those buildings. Halfway through the second chorus, Sam Moore cries “Play it , Steve!” as Cropper pulls off a tight, ringing guitar riff using a Zippo lighter as a slide.

Cropper’s legacy has been slightly tarnished over the years. Some of the Stax artists have told authors that they perceived racist attitudes in his control over the studio and the sound. But Cropper, as the brittle country-soul guitar backbone of Stax Records’ house band, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, was at the very least an unconsciously vital progressive political force.

At a time when it was common for white musicians to co-opt the work of black artists, Cropper was a rare white performer intent on keeping a lower profile and collaborating with singers such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Etta James and Eddie Floyd to make them sound better. He sat back in the groove, a tight rhythm guitarist content to avoid solos and make the singers the stars.

Booker T. and the M.G.’s gave the label its first big hit back in 1962 with Green Onions. Famously, the song came from an idle jam between the foursome after a recording session fell through and they were just messing around in the studio and the engineer hit “record”. The 17-year-old Booker T Jones ranges across his Hammond organ. Cropper takes a brief solo before slipping back into following the backbeat, working with bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr to give a bouncing lift to a simple 12-bar progression.

Unusually, it topped both the Billboard R&B and the pop charts, appealing to black and white alike. It has featured in more than 50 films, including Get Shorty, American Graffiti, Rush Hour, Happy Gilmore, Quadrophenia, A Single Man, X-Men: First Class and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. In the middle of race-torn Memphis, the racially integrated band – Booker T and Jackson were black, Cropper and Steinberg white – were a sign that segregation had no soul.

Born in Arkansas, the son of a railway worker and a schoolteacher, Cropper spent the first few years of his life surrounded by country and western music. He was nine when the family moved to Memphis and he fell in love with gospel and rhythm and blues. Cropper joined Stax after getting a job at Satellite Records, the shop attached to Stax that played the latest soul and R&B, in part to gauge the teenage shoppers’ reaction and tastes. It was visibly a racially mixed store in Memphis in the early 60s, and so popular that kids would sometimes end up dancing on the street outside, in groups that might be broken up by white police.

The label’s owners, white siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, and later the black DJ Al Bell, shared a phone. Bell recalls fearing that Stewart would pick up the phone to make his call, pull his handkerchief out of his pocket and give the earpiece and the receiver a rubdown to “wipe off the black”.

“We had separate water fountains in Memphis and throughout the south,” Bell recalled in 2015. “And if we wanted to go to a restaurant, we had to go to the back door. But all of us, black and white, came off the streets, where you had segregation and the negative attitude, into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom; you had harmony; you had people working together. It grew into what became really an oasis for all of us.”

White police officers would often stop Stax personnel outside the studio. They would check on the safety of the white employees, and frequently harass or question the black employees. All of which would have faded from memory if Stax had produced no hits. But they had Cropper, who wrote or co-wrote tracks including In the Midnight Hour, Mr Pitiful, Knock on Wood, and Time is Tight, and with fellow songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter helped form the southern soul style.

The Beatles were fans – they asked Cropper to produce Revolver, but it didn’t work out, though he played with John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney after the Beatles split. Jimi Hendrix idolised him and used to talk about the night in 1964 when, as a young session musician, he met Cropper in a Memphis soul-food restaurant and said: “Hey, man, dig, I heard you’re all right; that anyone can come down here if they’ve got a song.” Cropper took Hendrix into the Stax studio and the two jammed and recorded all night. “He turned me on to a lot of things,” Hendrix said. Cropper waved this away in later years, telling Uncut magazine: “I don’t hear one note where I influenced him. He’s his own man.”

dWhen Stax bands on tour were turned away by white hotel owners, Cropper and Steinberg’s replacement, Donald Dunn, walked too. It got so that Cropper and Dunn would check in, then sneak their black band members through the back door. But he wasn’t that keen on talking about race in later years. He mainly insisted that Stax was colourblind, and he treated everybody the same.

Stax Records was a flawed but vital source of soulful social change, and Cropper was one of its hardest-working foot soldiers. He once told an interviewer: “I have worked with guys who have changed the world, but I didn’t change anything. I was just trying to play my parts, just playing rhythm guitar.”

Steve Cropper, guitarist and songwriter, was born on 21 October 1941  and died on 3 December 2025, aged 84

Photograph by Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images