Booker T. & the M.G.'s were an American instrumental, R&B, and jazz band formed in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962. The band helped shape the sound of Southern soul and Memphis soul. The original members of the group were Booker T. Jones (organ, piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg (bass), and Al Jackson Jr. (drums). In the 1960s, as members of the Mar-Keys, the rotating slate of musicians that served as the house band of Stax Records, they played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Bill Withers, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, and Albert King. They also released instrumental records under their own name, including the 1962 hit single "Green Onions". As originators of the unique Stax sound, the group was one of the most prolific, respected, and imitated of its era.
In 1965, Steinberg was replaced by Donald "Duck" Dunn, who played with the group until his death in 2012. Al Jackson Jr. was murdered in 1975, after which Dunn, Cropper, and Jones reunited on numerous occasions using various drummers, including Willie Hall, Anton Fig, Steve Jordan and Steve Potts.
The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2008, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2012, and the Blues Hall of Fame in 2019.
Having two white members (initially Cropper and Steinberg, later Cropper and Dunn) and two Black members (Jones and Jackson Jr.), Booker T. & the M.G.'s was one of the first racially integrated rock groups, at a time when soul music, and the Memphis music scene in particular, were generally considered the preserve of Black culture.
Early years: 1962–1964
Booker T. & the M.G.'s formed as the house band of Stax Records, providing backing music for numerous singers, including Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. In summer 1962, 17-year-old keyboardist Booker T. Jones, 20-year-old guitarist Steve Cropper, and two seasoned players, bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr. (the latter making his debut with the company) were in the Memphis studio to back the former Sun Records star Billy Lee Riley. During downtime, the four started playing around with a bluesy organ riff. Jim Stewart, the president of Stax Records, was in the control booth. He liked what he heard, and he recorded it. Cropper remembered a riff that Jones had come up with weeks earlier, and before long they had a second track.
Stewart wanted to release the single with the first track, "Behave Yourself", as the A-side and the second track as the B-side. Cropper and radio disc jockeys thought otherwise; soon, Stax released Booker T. & the M.G.'s' "Green Onions" backed with "Behave Yourself". In an interview with BBC Radio 2's Johnnie Walker in 2008, Cropper recalled the song's immediate popularity after Reuben Washington, a disc jockey at Memphis radio station WLOK, played it four times in a row, prompting calls from listeners asking if it had been released.
The single went to number 1 on the US Billboard R&B chart and number 3 on the pop chart. It sold over one million copies and was certified a gold disc. It has been used in numerous movies and trailers, including a pivotal scene in the motion picture American Graffiti.
Later in 1962, the band released an all-instrumental album, Green Onions. Aside from the title track, a "sequel" ("Mo' Onions") and "Behave Yourself", the album consisted of instrumental covers of popular hits.
Booker T. & the M.G.'s continued to issue instrumental singles and albums throughout the 1960s. The group was a successful recording combo in its own right, but most of the work by the musicians in the band during this period was as the core of the de facto house band at Stax Records. Members of Booker T. & the M.G.'s (often, but not always, performing as a unit, and usually supported by a horn section) performed as the studio backing band for Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, the Staple Singers, Wilson Pickett, Delaney & Bonnie and many others in the 1960s.
They played on hundreds of records, including classics like "Walking the Dog", "Hold On, I'm Comin'" (on which the multi-instrumentalist Jones played tuba over Donald "Duck" Dunn's bass line), "Soul Man", "Who's Making Love", "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)", and "Try a Little Tenderness", among others. Along with their counterparts in Detroit, Motown's Funk Brothers, as a backing band to numerous hits, they are considered to have originated much of the sound of soul music—particularly, in the case of the M.G.'s, Southern soul—in which "the groove" is paramount.
In the mid-1960s, Jones was often away from Memphis while studying music full-time at Indiana University. Stax writer and producer Isaac Hayes usually stepped in when Jones was unavailable for session work, and on several sessions Jones and Hayes played together with one on organ, the other on piano. However, Hayes was never a regular member of the M.G.'s, and Jones played on all the records credited to Booker T. & the M.G.'s, with one exception: the 1965 hit "Boot-Leg", a studio jam with Hayes playing keyboards in Jones's place. According to Cropper, it had been recorded with the intention of releasing it under the name of the Mar-Keys (the name, which predated the creation of the MG's, had sometimes been used on singles by the Stax house band). However, as recordings credited to Booker T. & the M.G.'s were meeting with greater commercial success than those credited to the Mar-Keys, the decision was made to credit "Boot-Leg" to Booker T. & the M.G.'s, although Jones did not participate in the recording.
Individual session credits notwithstanding, the Stax house band—Cropper, Jackson, Jones, and Steinberg, along with bassist Dunn (Cropper's bandmate in the Mar-Keys); keyboardist Isaac Hayes; and various horn players, most frequently Floyd Newman, Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love (the latter two later formed the Memphis Horns)—set a standard for soul music. Whereas the sign outside Detroit's pop-oriented Motown Records read "Hitsville U.S.A.", the marquee outside of the converted movie theater where Stax was based proclaimed "Soulsville U.S.A."
Later success: 1965–1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s consistently issued singles from 1963 to 1965, but only a few made the charts, and none was as successful as "Green Onions". Their second album, Soul Dressing, was released in 1965. Whereas the Green Onions album contained mostly covers, every composition but one on Soul Dressing was an original. After contributing to that album, Steinberg left the group, and Dunn (who had played on previous Stax sessions) became the group's full-time bassist.
During a tour when the band was in Los Angeles playing in a Stax Revue, an informal jam session with three of the M.G.'s was recorded in Hollywood in 1965, initiated by DJ Magnificent Montague who played congas. The resulting track, "Hole in the Wall", was issued by Pure Soul Music in October 1965 credited to the Packers with writing shared by Montague, Cropper, Jackson and Jones. The track reached number 43 on Billboard, and made the Top 30 on Cash Box. All other songs released by the Packers had no involvement from Booker T. & the M.G.'s.
After a period of commercial decline, Booker T. & the M.G.'s finally returned to the Top 40 with the 1967 instrumental "Hip Hug-Her". It was the first single on which Jones played a Hammond B-3 organ, the instrument with which he is most closely associated (he used a Hammond M-3 on all of the earlier recordings, including "Green Onions"). The group also had a substantial hit with their cover of the Rascals' "Groovin'". Both tracks are included on their album Hip Hug-Her, released in the same year.
In the spring of 1967, they joined a group of Stax artists billed as the "Stax/Volt Revue" on a European tour, in which they performed in their own right and backed the other acts. In June of that year, they appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, playing their own set and then backing Otis Redding, alongside performers like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who, and Jefferson Airplane. They were invited to perform at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, but drummer Jackson was worried about the helicopter needed to deliver them to the site, and so they decided not to play.
The albums Doin' Our Thing and Soul Limbo were released in 1968. The track "Soul Limbo", featuring marimba by Terry Manning, was a hit (later used by the BBC as their theme for cricket coverage on both TV and, latterly, radio's Test Match Special), as was their version of "Hang 'Em High". In 1969, the band scored their second biggest hit with "Time Is Tight", from the soundtrack to the movie Up Tight!, scored by Jones, which reached No. 6 on the Billboard pop charts.
For the 1969 album Damifiknow!, the Mar-Keys name was revived. The members of the group were explicitly identified in the album credits as the sextet of Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, Al Jackson, and horn players Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson (no relation to Al). The album didn't receive much attention, and the core quartet soon returned to playing and performing as Booker T. & the M.G.'s.
Reinterpreting the Beatles' Abbey Road and gig with CCR In 1969, Dunn and Jones, in particular, had become admirers of the Beatles, especially their work on Abbey Road. The appreciation was mutual, as the Beatles had been musically influenced by the M.G.'s. John Lennon was a Stax fan, who fondly called the group "Book a Table and the Maitre d's" (in 1974, Lennon facetiously credited himself and his studio band as "Dr. Winston and Booker Table and the Maitre d's" on his original R&B-inspired instrumental, "Beef Jerky"). Paul McCartney, like Dunn, played bass melodically, without straying from the rhythm or the groove. The Beatles had even floated the possibility of recording their 1966 album Revolver at Stax, but backed out when fans besieged the Memphis studio.
In 1970, Lennon's wish was granted, in a sense, when Booker T. and the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (named for the street where Stax Records was located), on which they performed instrumental cover versions of thirteen of the songs on Abbey Road, condensing twelve of them into three medleys. The album's front cover is a parody of the front cover of Abbey Road; the back cover, with the blurred image of a mini-skirted woman at the edge of the photo, also mirrors that of Abbey Road.
Also in 1970, Booker T. & the M.G.'s sat in with Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) for a jam, and they were the opening act for that band's January 31 performance at the Oakland Coliseum, which was recorded for the CCR album The Concert.
Jones's departure from Stax and Melting Pot In 1971, Booker T. and the M.G.'s released what would be their last Stax single, "Melting Pot", and their last Stax album, also called Melting Pot. "Melting Pots repetitive groove-oriented drumming, loping bass line, and tight rhythm guitar made it an underground hit popular in New York City block parties. The song has often been sampled by rappers and techno DJs. The full-length album version of the track is over eight minutes long and contains a passage (not included on the single) featuring some particularly powerful flourishes from Jones's Hammond B-3. Melting Pot also includes the tuneful Native American–influenced track "Fuquawi", which was also released on a single, coupled with "Jamaica This Morning".