Booker T and the MGs: What does ‘MGs’ stand for?
Band names are a tricky thing to master, and there’s no guaranteed formula for success. One workaround, though, is creating music good enough to render your name more or less irrelevant.
Booker T and the MGs, for instance, had such a grip on the world of R&B excellence that few people have ever thought to question what an MG actually is.
Admittedly, Booker T and the MGs and their rather strange name were never really intended for mainstream consumption during the early days. For all intents and purposes, after all, they were the Stax house band, tasked with providing often uncredited backing for the label’s ever-expanding roster. The group might have appeared on the majority of the label’s hits post-1962, but their name rarely appeared on record sleeves or in the hit parade.
That practice wasn’t all that uncommon within the world of 1960s soul, either. If you look at the unbeatable empire of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, for instance, their house band – The Funk Brothers – remain virtually unknown to the mainstream to this very day, despite having performed on more hit records than The Beatles and Elvis Presley combined.
Booker T and the MGs might have gone the same way, had it not been for one of the greatest instrumental tracks to ever grace the airwaves, ‘Green Onions’.
Born from a studio jam in which Jones was experimenting with a Hammond M3 organ, the single soon became one of Stax’s most iconic sounds, and the intensity of its commercial success – topping the R&B charts and peaking at number three in the pop singles charts – elevated Booker T and the MGs beyond the confines of an uncredited house band.
In the months and years that followed, the MGs became one of the label’s greatest assets, sitting comfortably alongside the likes of Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding. However, their unlikely success did leave some questions unanswered.
Going back to Motown and their house band for a moment, The Funk Brothers is a pretty straightforward name, with no margin for misinterpretation, but MG could be anything from a British sports car brand with a reputation for unreliability, to a machine gun utilised by the Waffen-SS during World War II.
So, what does it stand for?
Surprisingly, there is more debate over the meaning of the name than you might expect. During their 1960s heyday, Stax’s official stance was that MG stood for ‘Memphis Group’, but that line has certainly been disputed. After all, the plurality of the name ‘Booker T and the Memphis Groups’ doesn’t make much sense at all.
Instead, former Stax producer Chips Moman once claimed that the band took its name from the fact that he owned an MG sportscar, which has more of a ring of truth, particularly given that a prior Motown house band, The Triumphs, was also named after one of his cars – it seems as though the producer had a thing for British sportscars of questionable quality.
Booker T Jones himself has confirmed the vehicular connection on a variety of occasions, but Stax itself has routinely denied those claims – likely because the car company might come asking for royalties, in that case.
Regardless of the true meaning of MGs, which does seem to be at least partly influenced by the car brand, the most fitting meaning comes from Donald ‘Duck’ Gunn, who once joked in an interview that the name actually stood for ‘Musical Geniuses’.
