Booker T. honored with 2007 GRAMMY Achievement Award

Yesterday Booker T. was named a 2007 Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award recipient for his work with the seminal instrumental group Booker T. & The MG's. Also receiving the award with the pioneering keyboardist are guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, drummer Al Jackson (posthumously), and Lewie Steinberg, the group's original bassist.

Other artists honored with 2007 Lifetime Achievement GRAMMYs are Joan Baez, Maria Callas, Ornette Coleman, the Doors, the Grateful Dead and Bob Wills.

The lineup of Cropper, Dunn, Jackson and Jones backed recordings by such artists as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Albert King, The Staple Singers, and Wilson Pickett. The group were million-sellers in their own right as one of the top instrumental outfits of the rock era, with hits including "Green Onions," "Time Is Tight," and "Hang'Em High." As a band that featured two blacks and two whites playing as a cohesive group in the highly-charged south of the '60s, the band set an example of how music can transcend racial divisions. Booker T & The MGs are also 1992 inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Mavis Staples signs with Anti-; New Album April 2007

Soul/gospel legend Mavis Staples recently completed work on We'll Never Turn Back, the most personal and polemical album of her career, on which she breathes new life and personal history into songs of the Civil Rights Movement. Set for April 24, 2007 release, the album was produced by Ry Cooder, and marks Mavis' debut for Anti- Records.

We'll Never Turn Back combines raw, emotional, contemporized versions of some of the freedom songs that provided the soundtrack to the civil rights movement of the 1950s/60s, along with other traditional songs, and new originals written by Mavis and Ry.

Soul music authority Rob Bowman ('Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records') listened to We'll Never Turn Back and had this to say:

"For over fifty years, Mavis Staples has been a national treasure, working her vocal magic on the highways and byways of gospel, folk and soul music. With both her family group, the Staple Singers, and as a solo artist in her own right she has helped to define much of what is righteous and soulful in American music. In the early 1960s, the Staple Singers began to work with Dr. Martin Luther King singing in support of the Civil Rights movement.

With We'll Never Turn Back, Mavis Staples has come full circle, singing songs that were seminal to a movement and time that helped form her as an artist."