Booker T & the MG’s :: Green Onions
In 1960, prominent civil rights activist and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aid Reverend Samuel Kyles arrived in Memphis and immediately observed a city where “there was not one thing integrated. From the cradle to the grave, everything was segregated in Memphis.”1 Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions created by institutional segregation, guitarist and sound engineer Steve ‘The Colonel’ Cropper worked closely and amicably with both black and white members of the Stax music-making community. In a recent interview featured in the 2004 film Soul Comes Home: A Celebration of Stax Records and Memphis Soul Music he stated:
The word ‘integration’ didn’t even exist in our vocabulary and the segregation of black here and white there, however you want to define it in today’s terms, also didn’t exist. It was just guys gettin’ together. There was absolutely no color in that studio; color never walked through that door.
Cropper’s candid testimony underscores the fact that Stax studio and the music it produced defied America’s ubiquitous segregation orthodoxy. At the same time, Stax’ profitable model of racial collusion offered the promise that black and white citizens could transform a Memphis where civic leaders defiantly shut down schools and pools rather than abide by a federal mandate to integrate them.
With two white members and two black members, Booker T and the MG’s represented a rare collaborative project one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Memphis. Although Stax owners, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, were not necessarily fixated on the fact that they sponsored an integrated band, they maintained that Stax, regardless of the process by which it became integrated, was ultimately an enterprise that fostered “black and white individuals making music for themselves.”2 Stewart further acknowledged the social implications of the Stax phenomenon by stating that “we were sitting in the middle of a segregated city, a highly segregated city and we were in another world when we walked into the studio.”3
If Stewart, Axton, or anyone at Stax had misgivings about reaching across the color line, the explosion of commercial success that Booker T. Jones, Lewis Steinberg, Al Jackson, and Steve Cropper were about to experience eclipsed these concerns quickly. On a steamy summer morning in 1962—before the MG’s had even decided upon a name for their outfit—the musicians arrived at Stax studios to serve as the back-up band for a white rock and roll singer by the name of Billy Lee Riley, whom Stewart believed could deliver a chart-topping hit. As they awaited Riley’s arrival, the MG’s began working out playfully a blues progression. Since Riley never appeared that day and because Jim Stewart liked what he heard coming from the band, Stewart decided to tape the session. The result of this impromptu recording was the single Behave Yourself.4
For the flip side of the record, the band began rehashing a riff that Jones had developed a few weeks earlier. As the rest of the band played along, Cropper realized that something remarkable had taken place. He exclaimed “Shit, this is the best damn instrumental I’ve heard in I don’t know when. I knew we had a winner there.” Because Stewart had recorded Behave Yourself and Green Onions intending fully to distribute it, the MG’s had to decide upon a name for their project on the spot. Jones claimed that the band was named when “Al Jackson said ‘Booker T and the…’ and he looked out the window and saw a little MG car and said ‘Booker T and the MG’s.’ It was all just a little bit more than a joke.”5
Shortly after the newly christened MG’s recorded the track, it would go on to become an instrumental anthem for both black and white America, peaking at Number One on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues chart in 1962 and Number Three on the Pop chart.6 This crossover success fully illustrated that the MG’s sound transcended the lines that divided American tastes into racially distinct categories. Moreover, the commercial triumph reinvigorated Stax by generating some much-needed income and bolstering Stax’ standing in the music industry. While Green Onions was distributed locally through Stax/Volt, Atlantic Records boosted its national circulation to over 750,000 copies. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic co-owner who helped to orchestrate national distribution, returned to the Stax studio in 1963 and sang the praises of the MG’s saying:
Their rhythm was the heart of the matter, the chief reason Memphis mattered. The even racial composition of Booker T and the MG’s became a metaphor in my mind for their extraordinary harmony, in and out of the studio. Booker T Jones, the keyboardist, and drummer Al Jackson were black; guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn were white; and Duck’s predecessor was Jewish (and African American). The results were anything but gray. The boys played in red clay soil, and I was walking into fertile territory. The funkiness of the music – bare-boned, yet razor sharp – knocked my dick in the dirt.7
Green Onions (3.3MB MP3)
Booker T & the MG’s (homepage)
1 Robert Gordin, Morgan Neville, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, 2007.
2 Stax Documentary, unreleased, showing at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
3 Quote obtained from the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
4 Bowman, 38.
5 Booker T Jones, Sound Opinions Interview, April 7, 2006.
6 Ibid, 39
7 Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, New York: Knopf, 1993, pg. 171.
That last line in the quote may not be very eloquent but it sure drives his point home!!