Booker T. Jones had recorded hits for Stax even before he graduated from high school.
Still the Memphis native knew he had more to learn.
"As my musical experiences unfolded, I could play music I could hear," he said in a recent
telephone interview. "People who heard me thought I was really good, but they didn’t know I wasn’t
reading that music, that I was playing something I heard and even at that I couldn’t play everything I
heard in my mind. So I knew that I needed to get some training from somewhere."
Also, with a father who was a teacher, his family expected him to go to college. So he attended the
University of Indiana, commuting back to Memphis for recording sessions.
He was already earning extra money writing out the lead sheets that were sent to the Library of Congress
for copyright purposes. And he could score a few horns and strings.
"But when it came to writing for full orchestra I needed the training I got in Indiana," Jones
said.
That education gave him "the compositional skills and the basic knowledge of knowing how the music
was put together, the theory that got me through those years of writing songs," he said. "It
was invaluable. It was a lot of fun, too."
Just this spring, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana awarded Jones an honorary doctorate of music.
"I’m real proud of that."
