NEW YORK, N.Y. – Donald “Duck” Dunn, the bassist who helped create the grainy Memphis soul hum at Stax Records in the 1960s as part of the legendary group Booker T. and the MGs and contributed to such typicals as “In the Midnight Hour,” ”Hold On I’m Coming” and “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” died Sunday at 70.
Dunn, whose inheritance as one of the most appreciated session musicians in the business also incorporated work with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers as well as with Levon Helm, Eric Clapton, Neil youthful and Bob Dylan, died while on tour in Tokyo.
News of his bereavement was posted on the Facebook site of his friend and fellow performer Steve Cropper, who was on the similar tour. Cropper said Dunn died in his sleep.
“Today I lost my best friend, the World has misplaced the best guy and bass player to ever live,” Cropper wrote on Twitter.
Dunn was born in Memphis, Tenn., in 1941, and according to the memoirs on his official website, was nicknamed for the drawing character by his father. His father, a candy maker, did not want him to be a musician.
“He thought I would become a drug follower and die. Most parents in those days thought music was a activity, something you did as a hobby, not a profession,” Dunn said.
But by the time Dunn was in high school, he was in a group with Cropper.
Cropper left to become a sitting player at Stax, the Memphis record corporation that would become known for its soul recordings and artists such as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and the Staples singing group.
Dunn soon followed Cropper and connected the Stax home band, also known as Booker T. and the MGs.
It was one of the first ethnically integrated soul groups, with two whites (Dunn on bass and Cropper on guitar) and two blacks (Booker T. Jones on organ and Al Jackson on drums), and was later inducted into the amaze and Roll Hall of Fame.
The group had its heyday in the 1960s as backup for a variety of Stax artists. Dunn played on Redding’s “Respect” and “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” Sam and Dave’s “Hold On I’m coming” and Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”
Booker T. and the MGs had its own hits as well, counting “Hang ‘Em High,” ”Soul-Limbo” and, before Dunn joined the band, the cool 1962 active “Green Onions.”
“I would have liked to have been on the road more, but the evidence company required us in the studio. Man, we were footage almost a hit a day for a while there,” Dunn said.
In the 1970s, the group’s members drifted separately. Jackson was killed in Memphis in 1975 by an interloper in his home.
Cropper and Dunn come together when they joined Aykroyd and Belushi’s Blues Brothers band and appeared in the 1980 “Blues Brothers” movie.
“How could anyone not want to work with John and Dan? I was really kind of uncertain to do that show, but my wife talked me into it,” Dunn said in a 2007 meeting with Vintage Guitar periodical, “and other than Booker’s band, that’s the most fun band I’ve ever been in.”
Dunn also did sitting work on recordings by Clapton, Young, Dylan, Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, according to his discography.
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