Nashville, TN (December 4, 2025)—Noted songwriter, guitarist and producer Steve Cropper passed on Wednesday, December 3, of undisclosed causes. Over the course of more than six decades, Cropper’s musical talents helped shape Soul and R&B music, from his crisp guitar work on songs like Booker T & the MGs’ “Green Onions” and Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” to co-writing Otis Redding’s classic “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” to producing the likes of Mavis Staples, Albert King, Wilson Pickett, Al Kooper, Jeff Beck and countless others. He was 84.
Cropper’s family announced his passing in a statement, noting he died peacefully in Nashville. Highlighting his legacy, the family remarked, “As the legendary guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the architect of the Stax Records sound, he helped create some of the most enduring songs in music history, including ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,’ ‘Soul Man,’ ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘In the Midnight Hour.’ A Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Grammy Award winner, and Songwriters Hall of Fame honoree, Steve’s influence on American music is immeasurable.”
Born in Dora, Missouri in 1941, Cropper moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee when he was young, where he was exposed to music primarily through church services. As he recalled in a 2002 Mix interview, “We didn’t move to Memphis till I was 10 years old. My dad was a farmer, then a machinist in the Navy and then a policeman. My mom was a schoolteacher. Neither of them were musicians. I grew up in the Church of Christ, which was musically very restrictive—you couldn’t even play a tambourine during services. The only singing was a cappella, but it was the first time I heard gospel music. I had been raised on country and western in Missouri. But gospel was great. And I had a brother-in-law who had a guitar, an old Gibson, and I remember touching the strings and loving the vibration.”
That vibration stayed with him as the young Cropper started The Mar-Kays as a teenager, eventually recording the instrumental “Last Night” for the fledgling local label Stax Records in 1961. That experience led to him becoming a session guitarist at Stax and Sun Studios in the years that followed, but while he played on countless records, he also learned production by watching what was going on around him, as classic guitarists Scotty Moore and Chips Moman hired him to play on records they were producing because they wanted to engineer instead.
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“I mixed a lot of records then,” he told Mix. “I loved being an engineer. I still love to mix. I’m still very much a hands-on board player. I play the faders like a piano, which is how we did it back then. I think I could have gone on to be an engineer full time, except that there was more demand for my playing. But the love of working the board never leaves you. I wasn’t schooled on it, but back then, no one was…. EQ was just how you positioned the microphone. A typical session was like the one we did for ‘Green Onions’ [was] one microphone on the organ, one on the guitar amp, one on the bass and one each on the kick and the snare. We’d put that microphone up in between the snare and the hat. We didn’t use an overhead microphone on the drums. I didn’t see that technique till I moved out to Los Angeles.”
While he rose to fame with the MGs and co-wrote classic tracks in the later 1960s, Cooper also co-owned a Memphis studio, Trans Maximus, for two years before eventually moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. There, he produced the likes of Poco and José Feliciano, and played on solo albums by John Lennon (Rock & Roll) and Ringo Starr (Ringo; Goodnight Vienna).
During his 13-year stint on the west coast, he also became a founding member of the Blues Brothers band which stemmed from a Saturday Night Live music sketch with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. Corralling an all-star soul band for the comedians when they were booked to open for a series of Steve Martin standup shows, the act became a sincere homage to classic Soul, leading to a series of multi-platinum albums and the hit 1980 comedy, The Blues Brothers.
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Moving to Nashville, Cropper continued to record, periodically releasing solo Soul/R&B albums like 2021’s Fire It Up. Simultaneously, he also produced and wrote, often working with legendary musicians. While he became as adept at recording digitally as he had been in the analog environment, he confided to Mix that the key to working with the many noted guitarists he produced was “Establishing trust. Letting them know that I’m one of them, that I’ve been there, that there’s no competition between us.”
