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The legendary guitarist Steve Cropper, the renowned guitarist with Booker T and the MGs, has died at the age of 84.

The musician, who performed on and helped pen Otis Redding's Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay and the hit track In the Midnight Hour, succumbed this past Wednesday in Music City, Nashville.

Often cited among the finest backing bands in soul and R&B, the quartet the MGs was the resident studio band of the historic Memphis label Stax Records and is best remembered for their 1962 instrumental track Green Onions.

Cropper also joined the blues revival band The Blues Brothers in the 1970s and featured on their hit cover of Soul Man.

"Steve was a cherished artist, writer, and producer whose immense talent inspired generations around the world," his family expressed in a release.

"While we feel sorrow for the loss of a loved one and companion, we take solace knowing that Steve will live forever through his music," they noted.

A cause of death was not immediately known.

A friend, Eddie Gore, mentioned he was with Cropper recently in Nashville, where the guitarist had been working on fresh material.

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

An Illustrious Journey

Voted the number two guitarist of all time by a British music magazine in 1996, Cropper first found employment at the Stax label in 1961 at the age of 20.

A year later, the MGs came together, consisting of keyboardist Booker T Jones, drummer Al Jackson and bassist Lewie Steinberg - who was succeeded by Donald "Duck" Dunn in 1964.

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

"I've always seen myself as a rhythm guitarist," Cropper said in a past interview. "I enjoy the fact that I can play something over and over, while other guitar players wouldn't consider it. They won't even play the same lick twice."

Not only was he a guitarist, Cropper was a prolific 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 "a part of virtually every record released by Stax from 1961 through year end 1970".

"We would literally spend long days in the studio," Cropper noted in an interview. "I think we had 17 or 18 artists we worked with, so we had a extremely demanding schedule."