SMIP #5: Soul Man by Sam & Dave
“Play It Steve!”
(1:15)
Of all the underappreciated legends of Sixties soul music Stephen Lee Cropper, a pasty-faced white boy born in October 1941 on a Missouri farm, perhaps leads the field. In 1950 the Cropper family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. A late musical starter, Cropper was ten when he played a guitar for the first time, getting his own instrument only when he was 14.
He soon became a founding member of the band The Royal Spades. The Royal Spades became The Mar-Keys. The Mar-Keys became one of the first Stax Records acts to make the charts, with 1961’s Last Night. Cropper left the Mar-Keys to become the A&R man for Stax, the Memphis-based Atlantic Records affiliate that ran neck-and-neck with, and often bested, Tamla Motown throughout the soul decade. Simultaneously he was a founding member of the Stax house band, Booker T. & The MGs, and became one of Stax’s lead producers.
While Motown’s The Funk Brothers were content to stand in the shadows of their label, the MGs – with Booker T. Jones on organ/piano, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, Jr. – were more than just any old house band. Best known in the UK for 1967’s Soul Limbo (the BBC’s long-time cricket coverage title music) and in the US for the 1962 hit Green Onions, the MGs were innovative hit makers in their own right, defined the Memphis Soul sound (alongside The Memphis Horns) and influenced the very best: The Beatles famously kissed Cropper’s hands when they met for the first time, claimed that they had based Day Tripper’s guitar riff on Duck Dunn’s bass line on Otis Redding’s original recording of Respect and initially intended to record the Revolver album in Stax’s Memphis studio. (In 1970 the MGs released the sublime album McLemore Avenue – named for the street on which Stax was located – reinterpreting The Beatles’ Abbey Road album as three instrumental suites.)
When not engaged in one of the above roles, Cropper also found the time to co-write singles such as Knock On Wood (with Eddie Floyd) and In The Midnight Hour (with Wilson Pickett) and strike up a formidable partnership with Otis Redding, with whom he composed (among many others) the hits Pain In My Heart, Mr. Pitiful and the sixth most-played record of all time on American radio, (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay. It is probably Cropper’s long-standing collaboration with Redding for which he is most lauded: “I don’t know what it is about Otis’s voice,” Cropper once said. “He just makes my guitar sound better.”
Redding’s cruelly early death in a 1967 plane crash marked the beginning of the end for Stax – the label had Cropper in the studio finishing Dock Of The Bay before Redding’s body had even been recovered. By 1971 the label had also lost Cropper, Booker T. and its star writers Issac Hayes and David Porter, as well as its distribution deal with Atlantic. But for that magnificent soul decade, the Stax star shone brighter than any other in the firmament – while Tamla had more hits (a scarcely credible 110 US top ten singles in the decade from 1961 to 1971), Stax made up in quality for what it lacked in quantity.
Cropper was at the heart of it all, but recently claimed he “really didn’t learn to play fluent lead guitar until after” he left Stax.
Shoot, guitarists are all different. For years I’d see guitarist come into the studio and change their guitar strings before each session. Man, I never changed my guitar strings! I’d let ’em stretch into place and play ’em forever. I’d even apply Chap Stick to my guitar strings to break ’em in and enable my fingers to slide across the neck. It just made the guitar sound so much better that way.
While undoubtedly underappreciated, it would be wrong to say that Cropper’s work has been entirely overlooked: he was voted the best living guitarist by fellow musicians in Mojo magazine in 1996. It is therefore ironic that some of his simplest guitar work should be the catalyst for the fifth SMIP.
Samuel Moore and David Prater – southern boys tutored in the ways of gospel – met in Florida in 1961, unsuccessfully recording for several years before being signed to Atlantic Records and handed off to Stax in 1965. Initially paired with Cropper as the act’s writer and producer (he co-wrote and produced four of their earliest Stax singles), it was chiefly with the later help of the MGs and songwriters/producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter that Sam & Dave created a sublime body of sweaty urban soul throughout the late Sixties that epitomizes Southern soul, at one stage making the Billboard R&B Top 20 with ten successive single releases, though familiarity and drug misuse quickly bred contempt to the extent that the duo barely spoke off-stage and the act was put out of its misery in 1970.
Sporadic reunions throughout the Seventies and the emergence of The Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live (an act that heavily borrowed from Sam & Dave’s stage performances – Dan Aykroyd later said, “If there wasn’t a Sam Moore, there never would have been a Jake and Elwood.”) kept the act’s name in the public eye, despite the pair’s respective drug addictions (Prater would be arrested in 1987 for selling crack to an undercover policeman).
Written and produced by Hayes and Porter, 1967’s the swaggering calling card Soul Man featured all the members of Booker T. & the MGs (excepting Booker himself; Hayes filled in on piano) and The Memphis Horns. Cropper jangles an uncomplicated guitar riff in the key of G as an introduction (0:00-0:08) and the Memphis Horns add light and shade (from 0:08) while Sam and Dave’s shouted call and response sets out their stall to the object of their affection:
Good lovin’ – I got a truck load;
And when you get it – huh! – you got somethin’.
So don’t worry – ’cause I’m comin’…
(0:22-0:33)
So, honey, [I] said, “Don’t you fret,
’Cause you ain’t seen nothing yet”…
(1:00-1:07)
I was brought up on a side street – listen now!
I learned how to love before I could eat.
(1:25-1:33)
A simple slide guitar lick from Cropper (0:41) complements the chanted chorus (0:34-0:49) emphatically proclaiming Sam and Dave’s status as men well and truly of soul. During the second chorus (1:08-1:23) Sam yells out, “Play it, Steve!” (1:15) while Cropper reprises that simplest of four-note solos (1:14-1:16).
In the rich history of ad libs, yells and asides, the exuberance of Moore’s imploring of Cropper, recognising and immortalising the latter’s influence over Sixties soul, stands out. Recorded in the dying days of the age when most records were still recorded live in the studio, it represents a time when bands and vocalists alike could still lose themselves in their performance during a recording session.
While John Lennon’s manic mariner’s cackle heralding the final chorus in Yellow Submarine rarely fails to raise a smile and Michael Jackson’s yelps and vocal tics on the Off The Wall and Thriller albums can still excite, they were added to the track long after the musicians put down their instruments.
There remains something special about live pop music, something indefinable that can only be experienced properly at a gig but can sometimes be represented on the very best live albums. Ropy as the sound sometimes is, you can hear ‘it’ on live recordings such as Sam Cooke’s album Live At The Harlem Square Club, Otis Redding’s set at the Monterey Pop Festival, Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night, or Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late To Stop Now.
The days when acts sought to reproduce their live sound on vinyl have long since gone, but a trawl through those recordings made ‘as live’, before four-track recording studios became the norm, can – as with Soul Man – yield vast rewards.
The Soul Man single topped the Billboard R&B chart for seven weeks and made number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, but only scraped to number 24 in the UK – hardly surprising in a year when this country’s top three selling singles were all recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck.
The single won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Rhythm & Blues Group. Rolling Stone magazine listed Soul Man as one of its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2005, and the Recording Industry Association of America placed it in its list of Songs of the Century. Sam & Dave’s recording of Soul Man was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Steve Cropper became (and remains) a member of the Blues Brothers’ Band. He named his own label Play It, Steve Records and his website is at playitsteve.com.
Dave Prater died in a 1988 car accident; Sam Moore continues to live, love, thrive and survive as a very special soul singer.
Sam & Dave lip synch Soul Man on American television in 1967 here, including Sam’s “Play it, Steve!” exhortation:
To hear Soul Man’s incredible bass line played properly and accorded due prominence, watch David Dunn, “Duck” Dunn’s nephew, reprise his uncle’s efforts, accompanied by the Blues Brothers Band’s live recording: