It wasn’t the country music that made a key ‘Blues Brothers’ scene so difficult

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Steve Cropper had an affinity for the country music played in one of The Blues Brothers film’s most hilarious moments — even if he’ll always be associated with the soul-drenched sound of Memphis. After all, Cropper is a native of the Midwest, where was surrounded by a decidedly different mix of sounds.

“It’s kind of funny,” Cropper told SoHo Radio. “I grew up in Missouri and, basically, country, bluegrass, hillbilly music.” Memphis, in particular its gospel tradition, had a huge impact on the youngster, once he arrived around the age of 10. Still, “I always said, if you took [Stax legend] Otis [Redding] out of a lot of things that I did, I probably would sound more country than I would R&B. But when Otis was singing, it made everything you did sound like rhythm and blues.”

So, when Cropper found himself as a member of the Blue Brothers band in the 1980 movie, playing a pick-up gig at a country bar, he felt right at home taking on “Stand By Your Man” and — in one of the film’s most iconic moments — “Rawhide.”

Instead, Cropper reveals, the scene nearly broke down over a bad prop.

“If you remember, there’s a girl playing a pinball machine with a cigarette,” he says, “and John goes ‘hey-ah!’ and pops it out [with a whip]. They had a lady on set that made this whip, because they didn’t want to use a real whip and possibly hurt someone. So, it was made out of brown felt, and it had cotton in it. And the first time John does this, [begins laughing] it just completely fell apart. They had to shut the whole set down until they could repair it! That had to be very expensive. When he does it, that’s actually the second whip — because the first one just completely exploded, with cotton flying everywhere.”

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