🔗 Share this article Legendary guitarist Steve Cropper, guitarist of the soul group Booker T & the MGs, dies aged 84 Steve Cropper served as a key member of the house band of the pioneering Memphis label Stax Records. Steve Cropper, the acclaimed guitarist with Booker T and the MGs, has left us at the age of 84. The artist, who played on and helped pen Otis Redding's Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay and Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, succumbed on Wednesday in the city of Nashville. Considered among the finest studio bands in soul and R&B, the quartet the MGs was the resident studio band of the influential Memphis label Stax Records and is most famous for their classic 1962 track Green Onions. Cropper went on to join the comedy music group The Blues Brothers in the 1970s and played on their successful version of Soul Man. "Steve was a deeply admired musician, songwriter, and producer whose immense talent inspired millions of lives around the world," his family expressed in a release. "While we grieve the loss of a family man and friend, we are consoled knowing that Steve will endure through his music," they added. A specific cause was not immediately known. An associate, Eddie Gore, recalled he was with Cropper just the day before in Nashville, where the guitarist had been working on new songs. "He's such a good human," Gore commented. "We were lucky to have him, for sure." Steve Cropper, right, with fellow musicians Eddie Floyd and Sheryl Crow. A Storied Musical Path Named the runner-up for guitarist of all time by a UK publication in 1996, Cropper started his career at Stax Records in 1961 at the age of 20. A year later, the MGs came together, comprising keyboardist Booker T Jones, drummer Al Jackson and bassist Lewie Steinberg - who was replaced by Donald "Duck" Dunn in 1964. The band was entered into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. "I've always seen myself as a player who focuses on rhythm," Cropper remarked in a previous conversation. "I enjoy the fact that I can play something over and over, while other guitar players don't want to even know about that. They are reluctant to repeat the same phrase twice." As well as a guitarist, Cropper was a productive songwriter, and in addition to Dock of the Bay and In the Midnight Hour, he helped write Eddie Floyd's hit Knock on Wood. According to his official biography, he was "integral to virtually every record put out by Stax from late 1961 through the end of 1970". "We would truly spend marathon sessions in the studio," Cropper noted in an interview. "I think we had 17 or 18 artists signed to the label, so we had a pretty busy schedule."