Classic Stax Single of the Week
November 23rd, 2007 byClassic Stax Single of the Week
Booker T. & the MGs “Hip Hug-Her”
From the album Hip Hug-Her, May 1967
#6 R&B, #37 Pop single (released February ‘67)
“Green Onions” is admittedly the most popular Booker T. & the MGs single from the chart perspective (#1 R&B, #3 Pop single) and undoubtedly a cornerstone of their musical legacy.
But my favorite MGs single is found snuggled deep in the middle of disc one of Time is Tight. “Hip Hug-Her” was the MGs first Top 40 Pop hit since “Onions” and sold about 400,00 singles. It is the first cut on Time is Tight to showcase Jones on what became his trademark voice, the Hammond B-3 organ (previously, he most often played the smaller spinet model).
Hip-huggers were a late 1960’s / ’70s style of blue (denim) jeans that the wearer didn’t pull up to the waist, they rode up (or down) only to the hips. Cast on a certain type of female form, especially when that form undulated in the basic even primal rhythm of walking, hip-huggers attracted the eyes to certain feminine curves and could prove quite alluring.
Though credited to Jones, Cropper, Dunn and Jackson, Jones recalls in the Time is Tight booklet that, “I can remember I was in college when I wrote ‘Hip Hug-Her.’” One smiles at the thought of the collegian Jones, sitting on a sun-shined bench or perhaps under a tree, and discovering the inspiration for his song’s swaying, almost sensual, rhythm and sharp melody. Cropper’s barbed-wire guitar cuts out the opening, then a mid-song solo, like stiletto heels, while Jackson and Dunn bounce out a simply swinging rhythm.
Just like the old saying: It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that.
