Cornell Luther Dupree was one of the most recorded guitarists in American popular music, and one of the least recognized. The industry nickname was Mr. 2500, after the number of sessions he reputedly played. The surviving credit trail runs to more than 450 distinct records by 232 different artists, and that is only what got written down.

He was born in Fort Worth, Texas on December 19, 1942, and graduated from I.M. Terrell High School there. He grew up around a saxophonist from the same city, King Curtis, who reached New York first and then sent for the guitarist he remembered from home. Dupree took the first airplane flight of his life and arrived in Manhattan on October 1, 1962. The following night he was onstage with Curtis's band, and he stayed with that group through 1966, backing the soul singers who passed through it.

His breakthrough as a studio player came with Brook Benton's "Rainy Night in Georgia," recorded for Brook Benton Today in 1969 and produced by Arif Mardin. The record is built mostly out of space, and the guitar part exists to fill that space without ever crowding the singer. That instinct, for playing exactly enough, became the reason producers kept calling.

From 1967 to 1976 he was a member of Aretha Franklin's touring band. He is on Aretha Live at Fillmore West (1971), Amazing Grace (1972), Young, Gifted and Black (1972) and "Rock Steady," and on King Curtis's own Live at Fillmore West from the same 1971 run. Alongside that he worked constantly across the New York studios: Donny Hathaway's Live (1972), Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973), Miles Davis's Get Up with It (1974), Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Blacknuss (1972), Archie Shepp's Attica Blues (1972), Barbra Streisand's Guilty (1980) and Mariah Carey's Emotions (1991).

Atlantic gave him a record of his own in 1974. Teasin' (Atlantic SD 7311) is the clearest single statement of where he sat musically, and the personnel list makes the case on its own: Richard Tee on keyboards, Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, and David "Fathead" Newman and Joe Farrell splitting the tenor solos. Rainey arranged the horns for the first three tracks and Tee took the remaining five. It is a room full of improvisers making a record aimed at radio, which is the working definition of crossover jazz.

Two more leader albums followed on the Versatile label, both arranged and conducted by Mario E. Sprouse: Cornell Dupree's Saturday Night Fever (1977), an all-instrumental reading of the Bee Gees songs from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and Shadow Dancing (1978), which brought in Hank Crawford on alto saxophone as a special guest, with Will Lee on bass and Chris Parker on drums.

The band that made his name visible was Stuff. It grew out of a standing gig at Mikell's in Manhattan and became one of the odder propositions of the decade: two guitars, two drummers, and no singer. Dupree and Eric Gale shared the guitar chairs, Richard Tee played keyboards, Gordon Edwards played bass, and Steve Gadd and Chris Parker traded the drum seat. Five albums came out on Warner Bros. between 1976 and 1980. The self-titled 1976 debut, produced by Herb Lovelle and Tommy LiPuma, went platinum in Japan, and More Stuff (1977) drew a Grammy nomination for the band.

Stuff played the Casino at the Montreux Jazz Festival on July 2, 1976. That performance is the only known concert footage of the group playing on its own, and it was finally issued on DVD in 2008, thirty-two years later. The photograph on this profile was taken by Lionel decoster at Montreux on the same day.

Stuff broke up in 1982. New York session work contracted around the same time, so Dupree moved to Los Angeles, where he recorded the theme music for The Cosby Show, and returned to New York in 1985 when the work did.

His own recording career continued on a smaller scale and on better terms. Coast to Coast (Antilles, 1988), with Richard Tee on piano and Chris Parker on drums, earned the single Grammy nomination of his career, at the 31st Annual Grammy Awards in 1989, for Best R&B Instrumental Performance. He co-led Return to the Wide Open Spaces (1990) with David "Fathead" Newman and Ellis Marsalis, recorded live at the Caravan of Dreams in his home town of Fort Worth. Can't Get Through (1991) and Child's Play (1993) were both co-produced with his wife, Erma Dupree, the latter featuring Paul Shaffer on piano and Randy Brecker on flugelhorn. Bop 'N' Blues (1995) is his most straight-ahead jazz date, with Herbie Mann contributing rhythm arrangements and liner notes.

He appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, wrote an instructional book called Rhythm and Blues Guitar, and in 2002 Yamaha built him a signature model based on the Fender Telecaster he had been modifying since 1971.

In 2003, at 60, he joined Roy Hargrove's band The RH Factor for Hard Groove (Verve, released May 20, 2003), cut at Electric Lady Studios in New York alongside D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello, Common and Q-Tip. Thirty years earlier he had played on Lightnin' Rod's Hustlers Convention (1973), a record regularly named among the direct ancestors of rap. He is on both ends of that lineage.

Cornell Dupree passed away at home in Fort Worth on May 8, 2011, aged 68, from emphysema, while awaiting a lung transplant. His wife Erma and his daughter Celestine were with him. Roughly eight weeks earlier he had recorded I'm Alright at Public Hi-Fi in Austin, Texas, playing through the sessions on oxygen, with George Porter Jr. of the Meters on bass. It was released the year he passed away.

Dupree played rhythm and lead simultaneously, which is the single technical fact that explains his career. His vocabulary was built on parallel-fourth double stops and parallel-sixth fills drawn from blues rhythm playing, delivered with a hybrid picking technique that alternated downstrokes with upstroke finger brushes. One producer described the effect as one man taking the place of three.

The tone was clean, vocal in its phrasing, and deliberately unhurried. He came out of Texas blues guitar and spent a decade absorbing New York studio discipline, and both are audible: "Okie Dokie Stomp" on Teasin' is a Texas blues instrumental played by someone with a session player's sense of restraint.

His main instrument from 1971 onward was a heavily modified Fender Telecaster, its unused screw holes filled with large metal bolts, fitted with a Gretsch-style DeArmond pickup in the middle position and an extra control plate. He ran it through a Standel thinline into a blackface Fender Twin Reverb. Earlier he played a Guild Starfire III with King Curtis, and before that a Gibson Les Paul Custom that was lost in a fire.

He was not a soloist by temperament. His skill was making the person in front of the microphone sound better, which is why his name is on thousands of records and on very few marquees.