And from 2003, a live version with Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn

As the house band for the Stax/Volt labels, Booker T. and the MG’s helped define the spare, punchy sound of “Memphis Soul” music. By contrast to Motown’s orchestrated, pop-soul records, the Stax approach was lean, economical and deeply groove-oriented. Between 1963 and 1968, Booker T. and the MGs appeared on more than six hundred Stax/Volt recordings, including classics by such artists as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell. As a result of Stax’s affiliation with Atlantic Records, the group also worked with Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Albert King. Moreover, Booker T. and the M.G.’s were a successful recording group in their own right, cutting ten albums and fourteen instrumental hits.

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. 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”. Booker T. Jones said:

That happened as something of an accident. We used the time to record a blues which we called ‘Behave Yourself,’ and I played it on a Hammond M3 organ. Jim Stewart, the owner, was the engineer and he really liked it and wanted to put it out as a record. We all agreed on that and Jim told us that we needed something to record as a B-side, since we couldn’t have a one-sided record. One of the tunes I had been playing on piano we tried on the Hammond organ so that the record would have organ on both sides and that turned out to be “Green Onions.”

The group’s guitarist Steve Cropper brought a copy of this song to the Memphis radio station WLOK the day after they recorded it. The morning DJ, Rueben Washington, was a friend of Cropper’s, and put the song on his turntable to hear off-air. After listening to just part of the song, he cut off the record that was on air and started playing “Green Onions” for his listeners. Says Cropper:

He played it four or five times in a row. We were dancing around the control room and believe it or not, the phone lines lit up. I guess we had the whole town dancing that morning.

As for the name of the song, this is another example of Rock stories, fables, and myths that often occur. Booker T. is quoted as saying:

Because that is the nastiest thing I can think of and it’s something you throw away.

But later, on a broadcast of the radio program “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” on June 24, 2013, Jones was asked about the title and said,

The bass player thought it was so funky, he wanted to call it ‘Funky Onions’, but they thought that was too low-class, so we used ‘Green Onions’ instead.

But according to Steve Cropper, the title is not a marijuana reference; rather, the track is named after the Green Badger’s cat, “Green Onions”, whose way of walking inspired the riff. Here’s Steve Cropper telling a story of how the song happened:

The exact origin of the band’s name is a matter of dispute. Jones has stated that it was Jackson who named the group after its youngest member, while “M.G.” is supposed by many to refer to “Memphis Group”, not the sports car of the same name (reportedly when the car company expressed disapproval, they claimed the initials as “Memphis Group.”). However, musician and record producer Chips Moman, then working with Stax, claims that they were named after his car, and that the label that Stax‘s publicity department declared that “M.G.” stood for “Memphis Group” only after he left the label. Tending to confirm this story is the fact that Moman had played with Jones in an earlier Stax backing group named the Triumphs, named
after his car.

The anchors of the Booker T. sound were Steve Cropper, whose slicing, economic riffs influenced many other guitar players, and Booker T. Jones himself, who provided much of the groove with his floating organ lines. In 1960, Jones started working as a session man for Stax, where he met Steve Cropper. Cropper had been in the Mar-Keys, famous for the 1961 instrumental hit “Last Night,” which laid out the prototype for much of the MG’s (and indeed Memphis soul’s) sound with its organ-sax-guitar combo. With the addition of drummer Al Jackson and bassist Lewis Steinberg, they became  Booker T. & the MG’s. Within a couple years, Steinberg was replaced permanently by Donald “Duck” Dunn, who, like Cropper, had also played with the Mar-Keys.

Members of Booker T. & The M.G.’s, often performing as a unit, performed as the studio backing band for Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Albert King, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, The Staple Singers, Wilson Pickett, Delaney & Bonnie and many others in the 60s. They played on and produced hundreds of records, including classics like “Walking the Dog”, “Hold On (I’m Comin’)”, “Soul Man”, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)”, “Midnight Hour”, and “Try a Little Tenderness”. Cropper co-wrote “Knock On Wood” with Eddie Floyd, “In the Midnight Hour” with Wilson Pickett, and “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” with Otis Redding, among other songs.

Because Jones was studying music full time, Stax writer/producer Isaac Hayes often stepped in on the occasions when Jones was unavailable for session work. On several sessions Jones and Hayes played together, with one playing organ and the other on piano. However, Jones played on all the records credited to “Booker T. & The M.G.’s,” and Hayes was never an official member of the group.

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 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. 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.

In 1969, Dunn and Jones, in particular, had become admirers of the Beatles, especially their work on their album “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.

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, and also included a cover of George Harrison’s “Something”. 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”.

In 1970 Booker T. & the M.G.’s also sat in with Creedence  Clearwater Revival 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”. It has been suggested that John Fogerty’s interest in putting a Hammond B-3 on the album “Pendulum” was an acknowledgement of Jones and the admiration the two bands had for each other.

The group gradually disintegrated after the sale of Stax in 1968, although the rhythm section of Dunn and Jackson continued to play on many subsequent Stax recordings. 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”, in 1971. Before “Melting Pot” was recorded, Jones had already left Stax and moved to California, because he disliked the changes that had occurred under the label’s new chairman Al Bell. Booker T. Jones branched out into record production and worked on a music degree at Indiana University. Cropper opened a studio in Memphis in 1969 and moved to Los Angeles to do session work in the mid-1970s. Jackson went on to provide a solid backbeat for Al Green. All the while, Booker T. and the M.G.’s remained an ongoing entity, albeit an intermittent and casual one – that is, until the senseless murder of Jackson by a home intruder in 1975. In 1993 the remaining members came together to back Neil Young on a tour. In 1994 they released “That’s the Way It Should Be”, their first album in more than twenty years, with Steve Jordan as drummer on most tracks.

“Green Onions” has been covered by a variety of big names over the years. Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers performed a live version in 1997, Pink Floyd played it for the BBC in 1968, Roy Buchanan created an extended version for his album Loading Zone in 1977.

“Green Onions” was ranked No. 181 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; it is the only instrumental on the list. The track is currently ranked as the 137th Greatest Track of All Time, as well as the best track of 1962, by Acclaimed Music. In 1999, “Green Onions” was given a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. In 2012, it was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, a list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” American sound recordings. “Green Onions” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2018, as one of the five new entrants in the Classic of Blues Recording (Song) category.

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