Today in Music (1962): Booker T & the MGs topped the R&B chart with “Green Onions”

Green Onions Booker T. & the MGs

Writer(s): Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, Jr., Booker T. Jones, Lewie Steinberg Released: July 1962 First Charted: August 11, 1962 Peak: 3 BB, 3 CB, 3 GR, 3 HR, 14 RB, 7 UK, 39 CN, 73 AU, 7 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): 1.0 US Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 1.0 radio, 42.1 video, 239.82 streaming

Awards: Click on award for more details.

About the Song: Booker T. & the MGs were the house band for Stax records, “soul’s biggest hit factory after Motown.” TB The group of session musicians consisted of keyboardist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, drummer Al Jackson, and bassist Lewis Steinberg. With Donald “Duck” Dunn later replacing Steinberg, the collective would back classics by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave in the 1960s. The song “Green Onions” came about when the band were waiting to start a session with rockabilly artist Billy Lee “Red Hot” Riley. SS They started jamming and engineer Jim Stewart “got an earful of a low-down blues that the MG’s were cooking up. He thought it was dynamite. He quickly switched on the tape and caught it all.” SJ Then they played him a dance tune they’d been working on. The latter became “Green Onions.” SJ The single was backed by “Behave Yourself,” the first song the group had played for Stuart. SJ When it was released, Booker had just graduated from high school. SS The title apparently came about because, according to Cropper, someone said, “Boy, this is some funky music; this music stinks. What’s the stinkiest, nastiest thing you can think of?’” SJ Steinberg “declared green onions the funkiest thing he’d ever smelled.” SS Author and critic Dave Marsh said the song was “what happens when the best backup band in the universe decides it’s time to be noticed.” DM Thomas Ryan said it was “part R&B, part jazz, the groove was as uncluttered as a rhythm section could get without disappearing altogether.” SS Resources: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Booker T. & the MGs DM Dave Marsh (1989). The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. New American Library: New York, NY. Page 81. SJ Bob Shannon and John Javna (1986). Behind the Hits: Inside Stories of Classic Pop and Rock and Roll. Warner Brothers, Inc.: New York, NY. Page 103. SS Steve Sullivan (2013). Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings (Volumes I & II). Scarecrow Press: Lanham, Maryland. Page 479. TB Thunder Bay Press (2006). Singles: Six Decades of Hot Hits & Classic Cuts. Outline Press Ltd.: San Diego, CA. Page 54. First posted 1/18/2024.

Otis Redding was killed in a plane crash: December 10, 1967

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In the closing days of 1967, legendary soul singer Otis Redding was due for some performances in the Midwest. After a television appearance in Cleveland, he was set for a concert in Madison, Wisconsin. However, on its final approach into Madison, the private plane crashed into a lake three miles from the runway. Redding and six of the other seven people on board were killed.

Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, the song of a gospel singer and a housekeeper. From an early age, Otis began singing with the church choir and at age ten he took up drumming and singing lessons. He cited Little Richard and Sam Cooke as major influences. As a teen, Redding parlayed a numer of talent show contest wins into paying gigs and in 1960 moved to Los Angeles with his sister and wrote his first songs. While touring as a band member and later a featured artist, Redding met Phil Walden who would help Otis get signed to Confederate Records. This led to Redding being signed with Stax, where he achieved all his chart success and became “arguably the most exciting singer on the roster of Memphis-based Stax/Volt Records.” ^HI

He scored his first hit with “These Arms of Mine”, a #20 R&B hit in 1963. Over the next few years, he scored top 5 R&B hits with “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “Respect”, “Satisfaction”, and “Try a Little Tenderness”. However, it wasn’t until 1967 that mainstream audiences really discovered him. An appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival had exposed his talents to a largely white rock-oriented audience. Also, Aretha Franklin took her cover of Redding’s “Respect” to the top of the charts.

Weeks after his death, Redding scored not only the biggest song of his career, but one of the biggest songs of all time. In the book The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era 1954-1999, Dave’s Music Database ranks Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” at #12. Redding had left the song unfinished – a whistled verse served as a placeholder for lyrics he had yet to write. The whistling has now become an iconic part of the song which became history’s first posthumous #1 hit. ^HI

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Awards:

• one of the top 1000 music makers of all time
  
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
  
• R&B Foundation
  
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee
  
• Songwriter Hall of Fame inductee
  
• one of the top 100 singers of all time
  
• one of the top 100 songwriters according to the DMDB
  

Resources and Related Links:

• Otis Redding’s DMDB Encyclopedia entry
  
• History.com Soul legend Otis Redding dies in a plane cras near Madison, Wisconsin
  
• Wikipedia.org Otis Redding
  

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Staple Singers “I’ll Take You There” hit #1

I’ll Take You There The Staple Singers

Writer(s): Al Bell (see lyrics here) Released: February 1972 First Charted: April 1, 1972 Peak: 11 US, 12 CB, 4 GR, 11 HR, 14 RB, 30 UK, 21 CN, 6 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 1.0 radio, 27.7 video, 138.41 streaming

Awards: Click on award for more details.

About the Song: “The Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There’ never mentions any particular god, or any set of beliefs. It only imagines a place where things are better. But it’s still hard to hear it as anything other than a gospel song – one of the purest and most direct that ever went to #1 in America.” SG Roebuck “Pops” Staples, the family patriarch, said, “We always tried to do material that was uplifting.” FB The song “came out while the Civil Rights struggle was still raging…And yet it imagines a time, or a place, where things might get better…There’s a beautiful audacity in that image — the same beautiful audacity that has powered gospel music since before the advent of recorded sound. And while we’re still not there, we can hear some version of that imagined utopia in that groove.” SG Mavis Staples, who sings lead on “Take You There,” said, “When we heard Dr. Martin Luther King preach, we said, ‘If he can preach this, we can sing it.’” SF Pops grew up in the Mississippi Delta playing with blues greats including Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. He moved to Chicago during the depression and started singing with his family at his brother’s church in 1948. Four years later, they signed to their first record company as the Staple Singers. In 1968, Al Bell signed them to Stax. He was credited with “I’ll Take You There.” He said the song came to him in his father’s back yard after his brother’s funeral, but Mavis said they co-wrote the lyrics in her apartment. She was furious about not getting credited, which partially led to the group departing Stax in 1975. SG The song “might be the first reggae-influenced single to make it to #1 in America.” SG It takes from a 1969 reggae instrumental called “The Liquidator.” Bell played it for the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who claimed they didn’t know it was someone else’s record. They thought it was a demo Bell recorded. SG Rolling Stone’s David Fricke described “I’ll Take You There as the “epitome of the Muscle Shoals Sound.” WK It is also “a great showcase for Mavis,” SG who mostly ad-libs the call-and-response vocals. “She’s casual and commanding, whooping and grunting but always staying in the pocket. Sometimes, she takes over, bringing the full force of her voice. Sometimes, she just sits back and enjoys what’s happening.” SG Resources: DMDB encyclopedia entry for The Staple Singers FB Fred Bronson (2003). The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (5th edition). Billboard Books: New York, NY. Page 312. SF Songfacts SG Stereogum (2/27/2019). “The Number Ones” by Tom Breihan WK Wikipedia First posted 1/23/2023.