A look Back on Stax

Amid the civil rights movement, melting-pot music group Booker T. & the M.G.s served up influential Southern soul garnished with green onions.

By KEMBREW MClEOD

“Back in 1962, we were breaking the law in a big way just by playing music together in Memphis,” storied songwriter Booker T. Jones recalled. “And while it was OK to break the law if you’re in the right place, like at Stax, in general, it was never OK.”

Sixty-two was the year Jones’ interracial band—Booker T. & the M.G.s—scored a number three hit with the instrumental track “Green Onions.” Stax Records was the legendary soul music label that released their debut single. Throughout the ’60s, the group also served as the independent label’s house band, playing on dozens of stone-cold classics, backing Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas and other major R&B artists.

Together, they changed the direction of popular music with a sound that was funkier and grittier than Motown, its more polished competitor to the north. Stax also broke down racial barriers with its integrated team of songwriters, musicians and staff who worked together during a time when Jim Crow laws still maintained a strong grip on the American South.

Stax was based out of a defunct cinema at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, which contained a record store at the front of the house and the company’s studios further back.

“The Satellite Record Shop was in the concessions area at the old theater, and there was a rack of records that people could browse through,”

Jones recalled. “The salesperson would play records that customers requested, which is how I heard so many influential songs, and the two clerks were Estelle Axton and Steve Cropper.”

Stax co-owner Axton—who was white, like Cropper—was well-aware that her record label was flouting segregation laws, so she didn’t think twice about hiring a Black teenager for

“I got the job at Stax in 10th grade,” Jones told me. “I played piano and Hammond organ there, so it became a regular job for me every afternoon after school, and weekends.”

Jones started out on reed instruments at age 7, when he taught himself how to play his neighbor’s oboe. The following year his father bought him a clarinet, which paved the way for him to play alto, tenor and baritone saxophones. Eventually, piano became Jones’ primary instrument, which led to him playing the organ during his church’s Bible class for men on Sunday mornings.

Although Jones is best known for his skills on the Hammond B3 organ, his first gig as a session musician involved playing the baritone sax on Carla and Rufus Thomas’ “Cause I Love You” in 1960. He had befriended Stax staff songwriter David Porter, a senior at Jones’ high school who had heard they needed someone to play on the track.

Jones still vividly remembers the day that Porter showed up at the doorway of his algebra class with a wide-eyed look on his face. Within minutes they were cruising to the recording session in a car borrowed from the school’s band director.

Jones attended Booker T. Washington High School—which, like himself and his father, was named in honor of the famed African-American community leader—and education was a pillar of family life. Booker T. Jones Sr. was a high school math and science teacher who had a former student, Floyd Newman, who introduced Jones Jr. to the Memphis music scene.

“Floyd was the only guy that my dad would trust to take me to the clubs,” Jones said of the late, great Newman, “and he did that for years. I met him at my high school, where he was working as a teacher at the time, and his part-time job was playing baritone sax in the house band at