32. Booker T and the M.G.s – Green Onions

Seeing as it wasn’t long since Jimmy Smith liberated the Hammond organ from gospel church uncoolness, this fiery album, bursting into life with the ever-familiar title track and tearing through groovy reworkings of classics like Acker Bilk’s ” Stranger on the Shore” and Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman”, is quite something. It’s down to Booker T’s energy and bar band swagger combined with Duck Dunn’s bass guitar that the whole thing works. It’s a soul album in the truest sense, when such a thing barely existed, but it has its heart in rock too, both with its highlight, the stinging cover of “Twist and Shout” and the southern rock legacy it left in its wake.