It's not very often that the musicians and producers who work behind the scenes get much credit, except perhaps for small print on album covers. It was only in later years, thanks to TV documentaries, that we learned about the Funk Brothers at Motown and the Wrecking Crew.
Once in a blue moon, the musicians who backed up the singers would have an instrumental hit of their own. It happened at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee. Four young men who were known as Booker T. & the M.G.’s were the rhythm section behind many of the sax hits of the 1960s.
Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and the Mad Lads all worked with these guys. Booker T. Jones keyboards, bassist Louis Steinberg and Donald Duck Dunn, drummer Al Jackson, and guitarist Steve Cropper. Steve recalls the recording session that resulted in that first hit. They were delayed by the engineers in the studio.
“I don't know why we were just kinda sitting there waiting and somebody started jamming on some blues, and we just started playing and when Jim Stewart went to turn on the talk back to say, ‘okay guys, we're happy to go home and see you tomorrow,’ we were in the middle of playing this blues thing. So he said, that's ‘kinda good.’ And he didn't say anything, he just reached over and pushed the button and recorded it. And we just kinda ended it with a laugh and, he hit the talk back and said, ‘hey guys, come in and listen to that.’ What? You were recording that? It was it really was a surprise. That song was named for a for a short bit, ‘Onions,” not ‘Green Onions’ because I thought that, green onions had a more commercial spark to it and I said a lot of people don't like onions, you know, because it's kind of a and, but I said everybody likes green onions, you know, some, you know, potatoes and some fried chicken. They went yeah, that's pretty good.”
“Green Onions” was the first of many instrumental hits for Booker T. & the M.G.’s.
Meanwhile, they provided rhythm for countless recordings at Stax, for Eddie Floyd, Sam and Dave, and so many others.
Steve Cropper remembers one session in particular that resulted in Otis Redding's biggest hit single.
“Well, Otis was clowning around with the seagulls, you know, which was an idea, later I said it would be nice to put the sound of seagulls in but I really do remember that the whistling thing came out of-- he and I originally, when we wrote the song, had this idea of of, some kind of a fade out thing and Otis was never lost for a fade out and, he just started whistling. This sort of happy go lucky thing and it was just sort of an accidental thing.”
Booker T. & the M.G.'s were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Steve Cropper was born October 21, 1941.
