“I learned”: The three guitarists Steve Cropper wanted to avoid sounding like
There is something electrifying about standing in the reconstructed Studio A in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, Tennessee.
It may not be the exact room where the Stax house band Booker T and the MGs, that it, Booker T Jones on organ, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn on bass and the human metronome Al Jackson Jr on drums, recorded so many hits with so many of the best soul singers of the 1960s, but it has been meticulously and lovingly rebuilt to be as close to the original building, even using some of the original bricks, as possible.
The room is huge, expansive and intimidating. With high soundproofed grey and white walls on some sides and wooden walls set behind the control booth and mixing desk, and with ceilings that are high above you that you barely register that they’re even there, and with so much space surrounding the organ, bass, drums and guitar that are huddled around in a circle in the centre of the studio, you can feel yourself getting lost in this historic setting. The walls might not be original, but the instruments in front of you are, and so were the people who played them, way back when.
It’s easy to forget it now, but there once was a time before songs like ‘Soul Man’ and ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, ‘In the Midnight Hour’ or ‘Knock on Wood’, ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ and ‘B-A-B-Y’ ever existed, until Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, Albert King, Carla Thomas and, of course, Booker T and the MGs came along to create them. Because we grew up with all of these songs so ingrained in our hearts and souls and brains and bodies, you can forget just how seismic and revolutionary they were. These singers and the session men who played behind them were just as revolutionary in their time and in their way as Elvis, Bob Dylan or The Beatles were.
It doesn’t really bear thinking about, but if not for the musicians at Stax, or for those down the road in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at the Fame Studios, and, let’s not forget, their northern counterparts at the Motown label and studios, then we’d be hugely musically poorer today. And it wasn’t just in the music that they were making that made them all so revolutionary and essential, but in the way that the groups working at each of these studios and labels integrated Black and white musicians, backgrounds and musical styles, in a time where Black people couldn’t even drink at every water fountain in the country or sit in any seat on a bus.
Their integration softened people’s hearts, and their music changed all of our lives, but they wouldn’t have been able to have that same effect if they’d just been playing like anybody else. It took something original, real and raw to transcend everything that divided the world, musically, racially, and culturally. Steve Cropper’s guitar playing could cut through any hokum, and it always sounded like he was playing more than he actually was because you filled in the spaces left behind by his playing with the way that it made you feel.
Booker T’s organ riffs were like the sound of your spirit being set free to music, ‘Duck’ Dunn played like he was born walking on air, and so you feel the same way when you hear him and Al Jackson Jr. You could set your watch by him, be guided by his steadfast rhythm in your every move and never miss a step. Soul music is a music of love, it’s a music of joy; human spirit and unity, empowerment and betterment, and to be able to give off all of those qualities, its best practitioners needed to stand united, and always be ready to empower and better themselves. Most of these musicians would not have had formal training, and yet they had each and every one of them mastered their craft.
A year before his 2025 death, Steve Cropper responded to a fan who had asked “the crunch of your guitar on ‘Green Onions’ was like nothing else that had gone before. How did you get that sound?” by saying that “I learned how to do something that nobody did, I learned how to bend two strings equal at the same time with one finger. I figured the world didn’t need another Chet Atkins, didn’t need another Les Paul, didn’t need another BB King, so I became Steve Cropper”.
And thank god that he did.
