Booker T And The Mg S Views

• Music

In 1965, Steinberg was replaced by Donald Duck Dunn, who has played with the group ever since. Al Jackson, Jr. was murdered in 1975. Since then, the trio of Dunn, Cropper and Jones have reunited on numerous occasions using various drummers, including Willie Hall, Anton Fig, Steve Jordan and Steve Potts.[4]

The band were formed as the of the house band of Stax Records, providing backing music for a variety of singers such as Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. In summer 1962, seventeen-year-old keyboardist Booker T. Jones, twenty-year-old guitarist Steve Cropper, bass player Lewie Steinberg, and Al Jackson Jr., a drummer making his debut with the company, were in the Memphis studio to back up former Sun Records star Billy Lee Riley. During downtime, the four started playing around with a bluesy little organ ditty reminiscent of Ray Charles. Jim Stewart, the president of Stax Records, liked what he heard and hit the “record” button. He liked the finished product enough to want to release it.[citation needed] Cropper remembered a riff that Jones had come up with weeks earlier and before long, they had a second song.

Stewart wanted to release the single with the first song, titled “Behave Yourself”, as the A-side and the second song as the B-side. Steve Cropper and radio disc jockeys thought otherwise; soon, Stax released Booker T. & the M.G.'s' “Green Onions” backed with “Behave Yourself”. In conversation with BBC Radio 2's Johnnie Walker, on his show broadcast on September 7, 2008, Cropper revealed that the record became an instant success when DJ Reuben Washington, at Memphis radio station WLOK, played it four times in succession, this even before the tune or the band had an agreed name.

Instrumental singles and albums would continue to be issued by Booker T. & The M.G.'s throughout the 1960s. However, although a successful recording combo in their own right, the bulk of the work done by the musicians in the band during this era was as the core of the de facto house band at Stax Records.[8] Members of Booker T. & The M.G.'s (often, but not always, performing as a unit) 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.[9]