* David A. Graham at The Atlantic…

Steve Cropper, who died Wednesday at 84, is not a household name, but the music he made is some of the most familiar in American pop. The twanging guitar line that opens Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man”—that’s him. Same for the chugging riff on Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” and the chopping rhythm on the soul instrumental “Green Onions.” He’s the man who finished mixing “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” adding the sounds of gulls and waves after his friend Otis Redding, with whom he wrote the song, died in a plane crash.

Cropper’s most enduring contribution, though, isn’t any particular song, but the way he pared the guitar techniques of R&B and blues down to their barest necessities to invent the language of rock-and-roll rhythm guitar in the early 1960s. Since Chuck Berry’s first hits, rock’s most famous instrumentalists have been lead guitarists, who step out in front of the band with flashy solos. But rhythm guitarists are essential for maintaining a song’s harmonic structure and making it groove. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Ramones—all of these artists and more built on the foundation he laid.

The setting where he did that was important as well: as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the house band at Memphis’s Stax Records and a rare multiracial group in the segregated South. The M.G.’s consisted of two white and two Black musicians, and their work was as American as possible, melding blues and gospel with country. It was music created when Cropper jammed in the Stax studio with the 17-year-old organist Booker T. Jones, and when he holed up in the Lorraine Motel with singer Eddie Floyd to write “Knock on Wood.”

He was one handsome fella back in the day…

* Luckily for us, Booker T. & The MG’s recorded a Christmas album many years ago…

* This is an open thread.