A low-key Memphis guitar legend builds on musical legacy

It’s 1966 and a thunderstorm illuminates the night sky in Memphis, Tenn. Two Stax Records musicians, guitarist Steve Cropper and singer Eddie Floyd, sit in a room inside the Lorraine Motel, struggling to fashion a song about love and superstition.

The pair try many references to good and bad luck — rubbing rabbit’s feet, walking under ladders, breaking mirrors — but nothing fits. Then, as the lightning flashes and the thunder roars, Cropper asks Floyd: “What do people usually do for good luck?’”

“And Eddie goes, knock, knock, knock,” Cropper told The Associated Press in November. “I said, ‘There’s our song, ‘Knock on Wood.’”

At a time when it was common for white musicians to co-opt the work of Black artists and make more money from their songs, Cropper was that rare white artist willing to keep a lower profile and collaborate. That may explain why now, more than half a century later and still making music at 79 years old, he can walk through an airport or a grocery store without being recognized, while the original songs he co-wrote — played on sound systems in those same public spaces — remain instantly familiar.

From “In the Midnight Hour” to “(Sittin On) The Dock of the Bay” to “Soul Man,” Cropper worked alongside the likes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd and many others to leave an indelible imprint on the American songbook.

Missouri-born and Memphis-raised, Cropper joined the Stax Records team as a 20-year-old. Working as a songwriter, producer, and guitarist in the bi-racial house band Booker T. and the MGs, Cropper laid the foundation for songs that have outlasted the studio that created them.

Mark Humphrey / Associated Press Guitarist, songwriter and record producer Steve Cropper in in Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 2.