“When Otis sang, we had a sense of destiny” AN AUDIENCE WITH BOOKER T JONES
“‘Green Onions’ is still a challenge for me. It seems simple, but it’s not that easy to play”
“I’M working on music all the time,” says Booker T Jones, having just stepped away from the piano at his home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. “That’s who I am and what I do, from the first time I can remember.” Jones is currently putting the finishing touches to an LP of reworkings of songs from his formidable back catalogue, to accompany his new autobiography Time Is Tight. For instance, “’Cause I Love You” has been re-recorded with Joshua Ledet and Evvie McKinney taking the place of Rufus & Carla Thomas.
“It was the first record I ever played on,” remembers Jones. “I was maybe 15 years old, and David Porter came and got me out of an algebra class. He’d been associated with the people over on McLemore [Avenue, home of what was soon to become Stax Records] and he knew they wanted a little sax on the track, so he borrowed the band director’s car and came and
