Donald "Duck" Dunn

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Donald "Duck" Dunn

Donald "Duck" Dunn (born November 24 1941) is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and songwriter. Dunn is regularly cited as one of the most influential music figures since the advent of the electric bass guitar.

Biography

Early life

Dunn was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Nicknamed "Duck" while watching Disney cartoons with his father one day, Dunn grew up playing sports and riding his bike with fellow future music legend Steve Cropper. After Cropper began playing guitar with a friend named Charlie Freeman, Dunn decided to pick up the bass guitar. Eventually, along with drummer Terry Johnson, the four became "The Royal Spades". The Messick High School group picked up keyboardist Jerry "Smoochy" Smith, singer Ronnie Angel (also known as Stoots), and a budding young horn section in baritone saxophone player Don Nix, tenor saxophone player Charles "Packy" Axton, as well as trumpeter (and future co-founder of The Memphis Horns) Wayne Jackson.

Career

Cropper has noted how when the self-taught Dunn was starting out, he would play along with records, playing what he thought should be there. "That's why Duck Dunn's bass lines are very unique [sic]", Cropper said, "They're not locked into somebody's schoolbook somewhere".

Axton's mother Estelle and her brother Jim Stewart owned Satellite Records and signed the group, who would have a national hit with "Last Night" in 1961 under their new name The Mar-Keys. Dunn; however, did not perform on the record, because he was fishing with his father in Mississippi. The bassist on "Last Night" was actually Lewie Steinberg whom Dunn later replaced in Booker T. & the MGs, the band Steve Cropper founded with organ and piano man Booker T. Jones in 1962.

While Cropper, Jones, Steinberg, and drummer Al Jackson, Jr. enjoyed the success of the MGs' smash "Green Onions", the original Mar-Keys basically ceased to exist. In the future, Booker T. & the MGs plus The Memphis Horns were also known as The Mar-Keys. Dunn continued to do session work with the rest of the MGs at Stax Records (formally Satellite). He also worked at his brother Bobby's King Records Distributorship in Memphis. In 1964, he replaced Steinberg and soon after, Steinberg stopped playing sessions at Stax altogether.

Stax became known for Jackson's drum sound, the instantly recognizable sound of The Memphis Horns, and Duck Dunn's unmistakable grooves. The MGs and Dunn's bass lines on songs like Otis Redding's "Respect" and "I Can't Turn You Loose", Sam & Dave's "Hold On! I'm Comin'", and Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign", were hugely influential. After Dunn, Cropper, Jackson, and Jones recorded 1967's Hip Hug-Her album, they became known as more than just the Stax house band that did "Green Onions" and became bona fide stars. Dunn and company enjoyed more than just success, they were shown sheer reverence, on a European tour and via their appearance performing and playing behind Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Donald Dunn

As an instrumental group, they continued to stretch themselves on McLemore Avenue (their reworking of The Beatles' Abbey Road album) and on their final outing, 1971's Melting Pot where Dunn's work continues to be a source of inspiration for Rap artists.

In the 1970s, with Jones and Cropper gone from Stax, Dunn and Jackson remained, playing and producing. Even though they felt more and more alienated by new political forces above, they stayed with the company — whose success was largely due to them — until the very end.

Dunn went on to play for legends like Muddy Waters, Freddie King, and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as younger stars like Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart. He reunited with Cropper as a member of Levon Helm's RCO All Stars and also displayed his quirky Southern humor making two movies with Cropper, former Stax drummer Willie Hall, and Dan Aykroyd, as a member of The Blues Brothers band.

Dunn has recently supported Neil Young live and in the studio and still plays with Cropper and Jones, usually with the late, great Al Jackson's cousin Steve Potts on drums, as Booker T. & the MGs.

External links

• Donald 'DUCK' Dunn's official site