Birthday of Donald Duck Disney Cartoon Inspire Tribute To Donald Duck Dunn Guitarist

The world was introduced to Disney’s beloved character Donald Duck on June 9, 1934. More or less starting off as a comic-book character, he remains the most published non-superhero ever. It is the diverse nature of his character that has allowed him to be featured in a plethora of roles, from an army officer and a teacher, to an uncle to three ducklings.  Walt Disney conjured up the idea for Donald Duck to introduce an edgier character to balance out the goody-goody jolly Mickey Mouse. During the experimental phase of Donald’s character creation, Disney read about Australian cricketer Donald Bradman, who had made headlines after getting dismissed for a duck. 

In the 1940s, Donald Duck overtook Mickey Mouse with over 128 independent short animations. This was truly the decade of the Donald, as he soared to popularity faster than any other Disney figure. During World War II, despite having to halt most of its production, Disney represented its stance by using Donald Duck in several American propaganda films. One of these animations earned Disney an Academy Award for ‘Best Short Film.’

Donald luck” Dunn was born in Memphis in 1941, and acquired his nickname as a child as he was a big fan of Donald Duck cartoons. It is this connection with the cartoon duck which inspires our Duck Dunn Playlist. After Mr. Cropper, a childhood friend, began playing guitar, Mr. Dunn took up the electric bass — because, he liked to say, it had two fewer strings than a guitar — and the two were working around town while still in high school with the band that would become the Mar-Keys. He followed Mr. Cropper into the Stax studios and was a member of Booker T. and the MG’s by the mid-1960s.

Duck Dunn, whose simple but inventive bass playing anchored numerous hit records and helped define the sound of Memphis soul music. As the resident bassist at Stax’s studio in Memphis for much of the 1960s, Mr. Dunn provided the solid, bluesy foundation for classic soul records like Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming,” Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and a long string of hits by Otis Redding, with whom he performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.

Stax recordings were known for their raw, down-home soulfulness, a striking contrast to the urbane slickness of Stax’s friendly rival, Motown. Mr. Dunn’s playing was an essential element of the Stax sound.

Booker T. and the MG’s (the initials stood for Memphis Group), whose members — Mr. Dunn, Mr. Cropper, the drummer Al Jackson and the organist Booker T. Jones — were also the core of the Stax studio band, had a few memorable hit singles on its own, among them “Hip Hug-Her” and “Time Is Tight.” (Mr. Dunn did not play on the group’s first and biggest hit, “Green Onions,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart in 1962; at the time he was a member of another instrumental ensemble, the Mar-Keys, which had a No. 3 hit of its own in 1961 with “Last Night.”) The group was unusual for the era in that it was racially integrated: Mr. Dunn and Mr. Cropper were white, Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson were black.

After Booker T. and the MG’s disbanded in the early 1970s, Mr. Dunn remained active at Stax as a session musician and occasional producer. He also performed or recorded with a long list of well-known artists, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, John Fogerty and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Reviewing a concert by Mr. Clapton in 1985, Robert Palmer of The New York Times praised Mr. Dunn as “perhaps rock’s most impeccably springy bassist” and said that his presence raised the band’s “level of playing all by itself.” One of Mr. Dunn’s most high-profile sideman jobs was with the band that backed John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in their incarnation as the Blues Brothers, playing a repertory that mixed Chicago-style electric blues with Stax-style R&B.“Other than Booker’s band, that’s the most fun band I’ve ever been in,” Mr. Dunn told Vintage Guitar magazine in 2007.

SOUCE National Day Cal, and New York Times