As our Stax tribute week plows on, it becomes even more conspicuous that Stax was a label full of legends, soul masters and trend setters. The most cursory trip through the Stax catalogue yields the usual characters: Otis Redding, Albert King, Wilson Pickett... you can probably fill in the rest. And the thing that bound these artists together, bundled them up into an identity and place in history under the banner of Stax, was the sound of the recordings themselves. Yeah, the signature Stax sound, the one that hangs in our collective pop-music unconscious, that gritty, powerful and triumphantly soulful sound, the crafters of which happened to be one legendary group: Booker T. & The M.G.'s.

As Stax's energetic session band (bass player Donald Dunn reminisces that they were "recording almost a hit a day for a while there") and a chart-climbing musical force on their own terms, Booker T. & The M.G.'s were like the soil nourishing and supporting all the Stax artists when the label was white-hot and its vocal artists were in full bloom. And not only were they perhaps one of the greatest backing bands of all time, beyond all consideration of the group as an enormously influential musical act, the talents of each individual member added up to much more than the sum of its parts. They were also songwriters and producers, and given their combined contributions to the label, I'm inclined to think that the players known as Booker T. & The M.G.'s were indeed the most integral part of Stax. Read on, and I think you'll agree.

The band nestled themselves deep inside Stax from almost the very beginning and stayed as its sonic foundation until the label's late '60s changes. Their beginnings were innocent enough: they were all in the studio to back up Sun star Billy Lee Riley, had some downtime and started riffing. Jim Stewart, then president of Stax, liked what he heard and recorded the jam. The resulting song was dubbed "Green Onions," and after some dispute about whether it should be an A-side or a B-side, it was released as a single and quickly rocketed to #3 on the Pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts. Thus Booker T. & The M.G.'s (named "the M.G.'s" after the now-defunct British car manufacturer) were born.

Along their collective path, every member of the group had an important and necessary contribution, both to the band's sound and to Stax itself. Booker T. Jones himself was only 16 when he played saxophone on the Rufus and Carla Thomas track "Cause I Love You," Stax's first hit, released when the label was still under the moniker Satellite. Beyond his keyboard and organ skills, he was also a strong songwriter, and cowrote plenty of Stax hits, perhaps most notably Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign." Meanwhile, Steve Cropper, the M.G.'s guitarist and a legend in his own right (Mojo Magazine rated him the #2 guitarist of all time in 1996, right behind Hendrix), also had a lot of weight at the label. He cowrote classics like "Knock on Wood," "In the Midnight Hour," "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," and others every man, woman, and child in the English-speaking world has heard at some point in their lives. He also served as an A&R man, and had an important role at the boards, being one of the head producers at the label and turning out more Stax singles and LPs than anyone's had the patience to catalogue. Al Jackson (Jr.), the man behind the kit, laid down the locomotion. As compiler Elvis Costello writes, he was the "perfect motor of so many Stax sides."And we shouldn't forget Donald Dunn, the man on bass who replaced original bassist Lewie Steinberg after the group's second LP, and whose flexible grooves and self-taught style filled out so many great tunes.