Booker T Jones on "Georgia on My Mind"

One by Willie

John Spong

Music, Music Commentary

4.8 • 833 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Booker T. Jones is one of the true geniuses of American music, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer as a keyboardist, composer, and bandleader (see “Green Onions,” “Soul Man,” “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” etc.), but also as a producer, which is the role he played in the creation of Willie’s 1978 masterpiece, Stardust. It was a highly improbable pairing and production, and on this OBW episode, Booker explains all of it—how he met Willie, how they picked the songs, how they ended up recording in Emmylou Harris’s living room—with a focus on the Hoagy Carmichael classic, “Georgia on My Mind.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Texas Monthly.
0:07.0	Hey there, I'm John Spong with Texas Monthly Magazine, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really
0:22.2	love. This week, we visit with one of the true titans of American music, Booker T. Jones, a man whose
0:29.2	list of accomplishments is shockingly long and impressive. With his band Booker T and the MGs, he wrote and
0:34.7	recorded Green Onions in 1962 while he was still in high school,
0:39.8	before they went on to become the de facto house band at Stacks records and play on classics like
0:44.8	Soul Man and sitting on the dock of the bay. And then, as all true Willie fans know, in 1978,
0:51.1	he produced and played on what many considered to be Willie's masterpiece,
0:55.1	Star Dust.
0:56.3	At the time, everything about that collaboration was unlikely, and Booker's going to get into all of it.
1:01.5	How he met Willie, how they settled on those songs, how Willie and his manager, Mark Rothbaum,
1:06.9	had to fight just to get the album made and to get Booker at the helm, and then how they recorded it, and of all places,
1:14.3	Emmy Lou Harris's living room.
1:16.3	And then, because his focus song is Georgia on my mind,
1:20.0	we listen to a rare version of Willie and Ray Charles playing it together
1:23.3	that Booker had never heard before.
1:26.4	It's a really special conversation
1:28.1	with an absolute genius.
1:30.6	So let's do it.
1:33.3	It's hard.
1:37.9	Georgia.
1:47.0	Georgia. Georgia Georgia So, first question's always a little goofy, but particularly so in this instance.
	...

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