Donald "Duck" Dunn
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Donald "Duck" Dunn (born November 24, 1941, in Memphis, Tennessee, USA) is a bass guitarist, record producer, and songwriter.
Dunn was nicknamed "Duck" while watching Disney cartoons with his father one day. Donald 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, and trumpeter, and future co-founder of The Memphis Horns, Wayne Jackson.
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 Lewie Steinberg. Dunn later replaced Steinberg in Booker T. & the MGs, the band Cropper founded with organist 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. Dunn then 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 Dunn's unmistakable bassline grooves. The MGs and Dunn's bass playing lines on songs like Otis Redding's "Respect" and "I Can't Turn You Loose", 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. 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", Cropper said, "They're not locked into somebody's schoolbook somewhere".
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 has played 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 made two movies with Cropper, ex-Bar-Kay and Isaac Hayes Movement drummer Willie Hall, and Dan Aykroyd, as a member of The Blues Brothers band. In the first movie, Dunn, in his Southern twang, says something to the effect of, "We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline". He could have been talking about the MGs, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.
Dunn has recently supported Neil Young live and in the studio and still plays with Cropper and Jones, usually with Al Jackson's cousin Steve Potts on drums, as Booker T. & the MGs. He remains a highly respected bass player today.
A Donald "Duck" Dunn signature bass guitar (modeled after Dunn's workhorse P bass used throughout his career) is now offered by Lakland basses. (http://www.lakland.com/basses/dunn.htm)
