Top Track Music

Booker T & the MG’s – green onions/ Some days I inspired by an old memory then there are times that I hear an oldie but a goodie on the car radio and I just have to share it with you. This song moves my soul. It’s so much fun. I hope you like it, and if you never heard it before, well your in for a treat. Enjoy.

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.^[9] 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, Steve 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.

The single went to number one on the R&B charts and number three on the Pop charts and is now considered one of the most important riffs in rock history. It is featured in countless movies/trailers including a pivotal scene in the motion picture American Graffiti and on TV every year.