Booker T. Jones

In Booker T. Jones, the seed was planted early. Not yet a teenager, he was already hauling his stack of newspapers to Phineas Newborn’s front yard where, while folding them for his after-school delivery route, he could listen to the jazz great practice piano.

With those notes ringing in his head, he’d set out into the neighborhood, picking up the sound of the
streets, the sound of the city, the sound of the citizens–and form new rhythms in his musical mind.

Some seeds fall near the tree, some are carried by the winds to distant lands. Booker’s first fruits were drawn from the root of American music–the Mississippi Delta’s blues became soul and rock and roll. Memphis and New Orleans passed those rhythms forth and back, then shipped them out across the globe. Booker found his destiny manifested in California, leaving the murky provincialism of the Mississippi River for the vast embrace of the Pacific Ocean. Like any good pioneer, on his road from Memphis he brought only what he could carry, cherished what he could use, and he built a new life, sun-filled with possibilities, rich with distant echoes.