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Steve Cropper, the celebrated guitarist with the seminal soul group Booker T & the MGs, has passed away at the age of 84.

The musician, 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 this past Wednesday in Music City, Nashville.

Considered among the greatest studio bands in soul and R&B, the group Booker T. Jones and the MGs was the house band of the groundbreaking Memphis label Stax and is most famous for their classic 1962 track Green Onions.

Cropper went on to join the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd act The Blues Brothers in the late 1970s and featured on their popular rendition of Soul Man.

"Steve was a cherished artist, writer, and producer whose profound talent impacted countless people around the world," his family expressed in a release.

"While we grieve the loss of a loved one and companion, we are consoled knowing that Steve will be remembered through his music," they added.

A cause of death was not released at this time.

An associate, Eddie Gore, mentioned he was with Cropper recently in Nashville, where the guitarist was in the process of creating fresh material.

"He's such a wonderful human," Gore said. "We were fortunate to have him, for sure."

A Storied Musical Path

Voted the runner-up for guitarist of all time by a British music magazine in 1996, Cropper first found employment at Stax in 1961 at the age of 20.

A year later, the MGs were founded, featuring keyboardist Booker T Jones, drummer Al Jackson and bassist Lewie Steinberg - who was replaced by Donald "Duck" Dunn in 1964.

The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

"I've always considered myself to be a rhythm player," Cropper remarked in a previous conversation. "I take pride in the fact that I can play something over and over, while other guitar players don't want to even know about that. They won't even play the same riff twice."

In addition to being a guitarist, Cropper was a vastly creative songwriter, and besides Dock of the Bay and In the Midnight Hour, he collaborated on Eddie Floyd's hit Knock on Wood.

According to available information, he was "involved in the majority of record issued by Stax from the fall of 1961 through the end of 1970".

"We would often spend 15 hours a day in the studio," Cropper said. "I think we had nearly 20 artists signed to the label, so we had a extremely demanding schedule."