8/24/2022
Performances and Artists
Artists never know when their big breaks will come – and for Booker T. Jones, his arrived in the middle of a high-school algebra class.
Already a multi-instrumentalist known for playing at Memphis clubs, Jones was surprised to have his math class interrupted by his friend, producer David Porter. Porter passed along an urgent message: Stax Records needed a saxophone player for a recording session right away, and Jones could have the job, if he wanted.
Borrowing the school band director’s car and speeding over to the record studio, Jones played his very first recording session at 16 years old.
“That was the most successful moment of my life,” Jones remembers. “David Porter took me to Stax Records to go through a room I’d wanted to go through for years.”
Needless to say, this launched an epic career. Now a multi-Grammy winner and inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Jones became a titan of instrumental jazz and soul music with Booker T. & the MG’s, the studio house band for Stax Records throughout the 1960s.
His group collaborated with icons such as Otis Redding and Ray Charles, and recorded numerous top 10 hits, including “Green Onions” that sold a million albums when Jones was still a senior in high school.
Still recording and performing worldwide today, Jones also remains one of the most acclaimed Hammond B3 organ players in history.
“I feel like I’m the same musician that I was when I was 4. The same drive, the same creative force is there,” Jones says. “It’s something inside me that I hear music playing in my mind or in my sleep, and my job is to try to control it and try to make it something that works.”
Finding the Magic Instrument
While Jones plays saxophone, piano, guitar, tuba and more, most fans know him for his masterful prowess on the Hammond B3 organ.
He discovered this instrument through his boyhood piano teacher. He saw her closed organ every lesson, but he mistook it as a China cabinet until she opened it one day.
“She showed me it was a B3 organ and played a few notes on it, and gave me the information that I didn’t have enough money to take lessons for it,” he recalls. “I got an additional paper route and started taking organ lessons.”
He knew right away the extra work would be worthwhile. The organ’s versatility gives him endless opportunities in composing and performing across a variety of genres.
“It’s a consummate instrument,” he explains. “It’s a combination of a synthesizer and an organ, there are no pipes, but the sounds are synthesized and you can mix them together. It’s a bit of a hybrid.”
A Groundbreaking House Band
As the house band for Stax Records, Booker T. & the MG’s didn’t just set the standard for soul and jazz. The group also broke down racial barriers, as a biracial musical group in the 1960s.
“We were an example, and we were happy to be that,” Jones remembers. “We were Blacks and whites, but we were normal, natural people. We were a family.”
The group didn’t tour often because they spent so much time in recording sessions, he says. But when they did travel to perform, the group members had to get “crafty” in working around the obstacles of segregated restaurants and hotels.
“We didn’t have to do much talking. It was just a matter of which restaurant we were close to, and who was going in,” he recalls. “(It was a matter of) which hotel we were close to, and who was going to go in and get the keys.”
The band’s work in the studio included life-changing experiences, he adds. This included recording with music legend Otis Redding on hit songs like “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay.”
“To be making music with someone like that is just plain inspiring. His presence and his purpose caused music to well up inside of me,” Jones says. “A lot of the lines that end up on the music was just inspired by being around him and listening to him sing.”
Jones still strives to match that same vigor and groove when he plays today, he adds.
“As a company (at Stax), the goal was to make original, simple, accessible music based on the blues, and just basically to have a good time and enjoy ourselves,” he says.