Home » Jazz Musicians » Booker T & the MG's

Booker T & the MG's

Booker T & the MG’s - band/ensemble

There are few instrumental songs that have the instant recognition factor, combined with enduring popularity as the 1962 classic hit “Green Onions,” by Booker T & the MG’s.

As the house rhythm section at Stax Records, Booker T. & the MGs all but single-handedly shaped the course of Southern soul music in the Sixties. Besides providing solid, consistently creative backing for the Memphis label’s legion of great soul singers as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, and bluesman Albert King, whom they backed on his 1967 classic “Born Under A Bad Sign” The quartet created a body of instrumental recordings that defined the genre and era.

The originators of the Booker T. sound were guitarist Steve Cropper, whose slicing, economic riffs influenced a generation of other guitar players, and Booker T. Jones himself, who provided much of the groove with his floating organ lines. In 1960, Jones started working as a session man for Stax, where he met Cropper. Cropper had been in the Mar-Keys, famous for the 1961 instrumental hit "Last Night," which laid out the prototype for much of the MG's sound with its organ-sax-guitar combo. With the addition of drummer Al Jackson and bassist Lewis Steinberg, they became Booker T. & the MG's. In a couple years, Steinberg would be replaced permanently by Donald "Duck" Dunn, who, like Cropper, had also played with the Mar-Keys.

The band's first and biggest hit, "Green Onions" in 1962, came about while jamming in the studio waiting for Billy Lee Riley to show up for a session, they came up with a classic minor-key, bluesy soul instrumental, distinguished by its nervous organ bounce and ferocious bursts of guitar. For the next five years, they'd have trouble recapturing its commercial success, though the standard of their records remained fairly high, and Stax's dependence upon them as the house band ensured a decent living.

In the late '60s, the MG's really hit their stride with "Hip Hug-Her," "Groovin'," "Soul-Limbo," "Hang 'em High," and "Time Is Tight," all of which were Top 40 charters between 1967 and 1969. As a band that featured two Blacks and two Whites playing as tightly together as possible, they also set a somewhat underappreciated example of both how integrated, self-contained bands could succeed, and how both Black and White musicians could play funky soul music. As is the case with most instrumental rock bands, their singles contained their best material, and they're best appreciated via anthologies. But their albums were not inconsequential, and occasionally ambitious. They did an entire instrumental version of the Beatles' Abbey Road, which they titled “McLemore Avenue” in honor of the location of Stax's studios. For those of us who like both bands, it’s a gas to listen to.

Read more

Tags

2
Album Review

Booker T & the MG's: The Complete Stax Singles: Volume 1 (1962-1967)

Read "The Complete Stax Singles: Volume 1 (1962-1967)" reviewed by Doug Collette


There have been other, more wide-ranging collections of the music of Booker T & the MG's—the three-CD, sixty-five track Time Is Tight (Stax,1998) most prominently—but The Complete Stax Singles Volume 1 (1962-1967) is comprehensive on its own terms. As is Real Gone Music's custom, the label has gone to great lengths to make sure the vintage packaging matches the enhanced audio content and also invoked the services of writer Ed Osborne, whose historical essay does studious and scholarly justice to ...

Read more articles

Recording

Concord Music Group Releases Booker T. & The MGs "Green Onions" As Part Of Stax Remasters Series

Concord Music Group Releases Booker T. & The MGs "Green Onions" As Part Of Stax Remasters Series

Source: conqueroo

Title track inducted into GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 1999 and Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2012 LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Concord Music Group will release Booker T. & the MGs’ Green Onions as part of its Stax Remasters series on July 24, 2012. Enhanced by 24-bit remastering by Joe Tarantino, two live bonus tracks and newly written liner notes by Grammy Award-winning Stax historian Rob Bowman, the reissue not only spotlights one of the most entertaining and ...

Jeremy Baum
keyboards

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

The Complete Stax...

Real Gone Music
2019

buy

Melting Pot (Ritual...

Lone Hill Jazz
2004

buy

Melting Pot (Ritual...

Lone Hill Jazz
2004

buy

Time Is Tight

Lone Hill Jazz
1998

buy

That's The Way It...

Lone Hill Jazz
1994

buy

Melting Pot / Soul...

Lone Hill Jazz
1993

buy

Videos

Similar

Jimmy McGriff
organ, Hammond B3
Albert King
guitar, electric
The Meters
band / ensemble / orchestra

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.