Booker T Jones: The Life, Music And Legacy Of The Legendary Stax Soul Architect

“I convinced them [that they needed me],” Jones said in 2019. He played piano and organ to show off his other skills – the ones he would soon be most celebrated for – and got the gig of organist on the William Bell session. Stax kept him on after that, so Jones had to juggle high school, a paper round and his new job, which involved playing until ten or 11 every night. “That was my thrill, every day,” he has said.

Stax was finding its place in American music, and Jones was there right from the very beginning – an essential part of its developing Memphis sound. “I would say it’s a simple, earthy sound, you know, just born out of our blues and country and jazz roots, and also gospel,” Jones has said of the common themes across those vital early Stax releases. “It was a sound that, you know, we consciously tried to keep simple and with a lot of feeling.”

Green Onions: “An accident”

In order to financially support the nascent Stax, Estelle Axton opened a record shop in 1960. Also named Satellite, the store soon became much more than a source of income for the label: it was a popular hangout for local teenagers and thus an essential gauge for Axton to understand what sounds appealed to the younger generation.

It was through the record shop that the now 17-year-old Jones met the 20-year-old Steve Cropper. Cropper worked behind the counter and, as Jones found out, also played guitar. They teamed up with two older musicians, Al Jackson, Jr, (drums) and Lewie Steinberg (bass), for a 1962 Stax session, and, when the singer they were scheduled to play with didn’t turn up, the four started grooving together. “That happened as something of an accident,” Jones has said. As the musicians jammed around a Jones organ riff, Stax co-owner Jim Stewart – who happened to be in the studio at the time – recorded it. This was Behave Yourself: the bluesy swagger that would be one side of the group’s debut single.

“Jim told us that we needed something to record for a B-side because we couldn’t have a one-sided record,” Jones has recalled. “And one of the tunes that I’d been playing on piano we tried on Hammond organ so that, you know, the record would have organ on both sides, and that turned out to be Green Onions.” The instrumental piece was put out under the name Booker T And The MGs, and was an absolute smash: it got to No.3 on the Billboard chart. More than that, it seemed to express something – without a word – of a new generation coming into its own, and has been a constant on TV and movie soundtracks ever since its release.

Almost immediately, other artists began covering Green Onions. It was so versatile it could mutate into a surf twang (as in the 1963 version by The Surfaris) or become an electronic buzz on the 1969 Moog synthesiser version by Dick Hyman.

The MGs: pioneering instrumental soul music

The success of Green Onions meant there was a demand for an album. Also called Green Onions, Booker T And The MGs’ debut long-player was energetic yet classy, mixing up group originals with instrumentals of early soul cuts made famous by the likes of Ray Charles and Mary Wells.

The album that followed, 1965’s Soul Dressing, took a different approach. This was mainly group originals and was incredibly diverse; for although The MGs were known as soulful, they could easy conjure up smoky after-hours clubs (Night Owl Walk) or modish pop (Plum Nellie). Best of all was Chinese Checkers, a deep jam that anticipates the way funk music would merge with progressive rock at the end of the decade.

Altogether, Booker T And The MGs released 12 albums on Stax, including a Christmas album, in 1966. There are gems across all the releases, but perhaps the greatest of the group’s albums was 1967’s Hip Hug-Her, whose title track became another big hit for The MGs and perfectly mixes soul with psychedelia to help soundtrack that fabled “Summer Of Love”.

As a racially diverse band, Booker T And The MGs broke down boundaries in the 60s. “I think, you know, when we were playing music, that nobody really cared that we were interracial,” Jones said in 2007. “I think they cared more about the music. I think whites and Blacks both didn’t pay too much attention to the racial aspect of it.” However, when the band were touring in the still-segregated South, the harsh reality of separate travel and restaurants became obvious.

“We were always in somebody else’s territory, no matter where we were,” Jones has said. “But Steve [Cropper] and Duck [Dunn, who had replaced Steinberg on bass], and all the white members of Stax began to love soul food. And I think they preferred to hang out at our restaurants. So we just really didn’t have a problem as long as the rest of the world didn’t have a problem with us.”

The Stax house band: crafting soul classics

Alongside their career as a record-releasing act, Booker T And The MGs continued to play on dozens, even hundreds, of Stax records. These include classics by Wilson Pickett, Sam And Dave, William Bell and Carla Thomas.

Perhaps the most lauded of all The MGs’ sessions was for Otis Redding’s 1965 masterpiece, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul. “He seemed to be possessed at that time,” Jones said, in 2013, of Redding. “Nobody was quite sure what was going on with him. He just seemed to be in a hurry. Not a hurry – obsessed. And we didn’t understand why. We just went along with it. If he wanted to go for 24 hours, we just did it.” Booker T And The MGs backed Redding during his fevered appearance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, and were also in the studio with him for his final recording session, when he laid down (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.

Jones was not only impassioned in his session work: his structural and formal knowledge of music brought an outward-looking, multifarious quality to his playing. Like Nina Simone and Roberta Flack, Jones was inspired by an impressive number of musical styles, histories and cultures, and had a scholar’s confidence in using them in his own work.

“At Stax, there was an infusion of the knowledge of composition through me to my partners,” he said in 2019. “The songs got some structure, I think, subconsciously, through me, through the knowledge I acquired through learning and studying music from the past: European music, African music, Eastern music, all the things that I learned at Indiana [University] that I wouldn’t have gotten out of the air.”

Leaving Stax and branching out: progressive funk maestros

Towards the end of the 60s, Stax was in flux. The death of Otis Redding, in December 1967, had shaken everyone; and there had been changes to distribution and ownership. A new co-owner, Al Bell, was now the primary supervisor of the label’s output.

Jones had been at Stax for nearly a decade by this point, and he felt the impact of these changes. Al Bell had given him the role of Vice President, but Jones felt this was for show rather than conferring any real responsibility. “There were titles given [to us],” he said in 1997, “but we didn’t actually make the decisions.” He was beginning to think he would not progress further within Stax, and would always be seen as an employee – a session man – rather than a creative force in his own right.

Jones, still only in his 20s, was certainly becoming more adventurous in his work. Great admirers of The Beatles, Booker T And The MGs interpreted the entirety of the Abbey Road album and released it as McLemore Avenue, in 1970. “I was in California when I heard Abbey Road, and I thought it was incredibly courageous of The Beatles to drop their format and move out musically like they did,” Jones said in 2009. “To push the limit like that and reinvent themselves when they had no need to do that. They were the top band in the world but they still reinvented themselves. The music was just incredible so I felt I needed to pay tribute to it.”

When he tried to branch out in a similar way, a disagreement with Al Bell led to Jones leaving Stax. While recording a song called Ole Man Trouble (a different song to the one of the same name featured on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul), Jones “spent a lot of [Stax’s] money” on session time, tracking horns and strings on what was one of his most ambitious compositions to date. Jones also did something else highly unusual – he sang on the track. Al Bell wasn’t comfortable with Jones developing in this way, and didn’t want to release the song. Frustrated, Jones erased his recording and left the label soon after. (Stephen Stills eventually released a version of the song on his 2005 album,Man Alive!)

But there was one phenomenal parting shot. Booker T And The MGs’ final Stax single was Melting Pot, issued in 1971. The eight-minute album version, an absolute powerhouse of funk, has been sampled by hip-hop luminaries such as Big Daddy Kane and Roxanne Shanté. It sits alongside the work of Jones’ old schoolfriend, Isaac Hayes, as a glistening, lavish groove.

Into the 70s: “Booker is the mellowest guy”

Leaving Stax after spending so many of his formative years at the label must have been tough. Jones also relocated from Memphis to California and, in 1971, married Priscilla Coolidge (Rita Coolidge’s sister). Jones had produced her first album, the wonderful Gypsy Queen, in 1970, and would go on to record a string of duet albums with his wife throughout the 70s. “Booker is the mellowest guy, and he always has music playing in his head,” Rita Coolidge said of Jones. She used his arrangement of Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher in 1977, and had a huge hit with the song.

Now away from the in-house system at Stax, Jones did more and more production and arrangement work for others. He produced, arranged and played on the debut Bill Withers album, 1971’s Just As I Am, which featured Ain’t No Sunshine. “The song was written pretty quickly,” Withers said in 2015. “It’s a very short song anyway. It has no introduction.” Withers wanted to write more words, to fill what he saw as gaps in the chorus, but Jones stayed his hand. “Booker said, ‘Nope, just keep it like that,’” Withers recalled.

Proving his diversity, Jones also produced the hit 1978 album by Willie Nelson, Stardust. Jones and Nelson were neighbours at the time, and Nelson asked Jones to arrange Moonlight In Vermont for him. Impressed, this led Nelson to enlist Jones to work on the album as a whole. Stardust was a collection of Nelson’s reinterpretations of pop standards – unlike anything Jones had been involved with before.

All of this was alongside a prolific solo career, beginning with the album Evergreen, in 1974, with regular releases following until the early 80s. Many of these albums were overlooked at the time, but contained the kind of tracks that would be rediscovered and aired years later by DJs. Tennessee Voodoo, from Evergreen, is a perfect example: a mellow, folkish jam pulsing with erotic tension, and a favourite with crate diggers. The album’s liner notes said it all: “Evergreen – eternal, forever alive, forever growing. Like Booker T and his music.”

Moving on and looking back: musical renaissance and literary success

Jones continued to release music, although there was a 20-year gap between 1989’s The Runaway and 2009’s Potato Hole. Potato Hole was recorded with the Drive-By Truckers, with additional guitar by Neil Young.

“This album has a lot to do with attitude,” Jones said at the time of Potato Hole’s release. “The MGs were never an in-your-face band – The MGs [are] a groove band. But this is in your face, this raw, gritty sound that’s too loud.” Jones mixes up the covers and originals as he did back in the Stax days, a highlight being the stuttering, glitchy version of OutKast’s Hey Ya. Potato Hole definitely marked a new dawn: as of that point, new Jones albums became semi-regular affairs. His 2013 album, Sound The Alarm, was even released on Stax, over 40 years after he left the label.

Interest in Jones’ career – and the Stax golden years he was such an essential part of – has never been greater. Writing in Time Is Tight, named after a Booker T And The MGs classic, Jones freely admitted, “I’m a musician, not a writer,” and instead of weaving a conventional narrative, he used his musical feel to underpin his words. In the Author’s Note, Jones writes, “Throughout the text, just after the subheadings, are eighth notes followed by numbers that refer to various musical phrases I have composed for this book. Each phrase is a musical representation of a feeling or temperament that matches or resembles the scene that follows, note by note.” This infuses the text not only with Jones’ memories, but with his musical soul.

Speaking in 1967, Jones tried to get across what Stax was all about. “We work very hard to create a mood,” he said. “When people listen to Stax records, they’re able to feel it.” This basic premise, even though his methods have evolved beautifully over the years, is still a constant for Jones – and audible at every stage of his career.

Jones still knows the power of his most famous groove. When asked, in 2013, how often he was asked to play the Green Onions riff when he was relaxing at a bar, he replied: “Pretty much every time. How often do I oblige? Most every time!”

Buy ‘Green Onions’ on 60th-anniversay green vinyl at the Dig! store.