Steve Cropper, Blues Brothers band member and Booker T. &
the MG’s guitarist, has died.

Pat Mitchell Worley, president and CEO of the Soulsville
Foundation, told the Associated Press that Cropper’s family
notified her of his death. Cropper died Wednesday in Nashville, according to Worley.

Worley’s foundation operates at the Stax Museum of American
Soul Music in Memphis, where Cropper’s former employer,
Stax Records, used to be.

Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper in 1968.

On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolled off the assembly
line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in
Kenosha, Wisconsin.

By 1979, however, sales had faded considerably. Today,
polls and experts agree: The Pacer was one of the worst
cars of all time.

By the end of the 1960s, AMC was the only surviving
independent automaker in the United States.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its bad reputation, the
Pacer has also earned a spot in pop-culture history.

In January 1954, Nash-Kelvinator Corporation began the
acquisition of the Hudson Motor Car Company (in what
was called a merger).

The new corporation would be called the American Motors
Corporation. An earlier corporation with the same name, co-
founded by Louis Chevrolet, had existed in Plainfield, New
Jersey, from 1916 through 1922 before merging into the
Bessemer–American Motors Corporation.