BOOKER T & MG'S - Hip Hug - Her (Sealed) (LP)

Coming nearly five full years after Booker T. and the MGs' first hit, 1962's "Green Onions," "Hip Hug Her" isn't as effortless a groove, but it does show how much tighter and even funkier the group had become in the intervening half-deacde. Clearly, the introduction of Donald "Duck" Dunn, replacing original bassist Lewis Steinberg, had a galvanizing effect on the group's bottom end; Dunn's bass, not Booker T. Jones' organ, is what's driving this powerful single. Nothing more than two minutes and 22 seconds' worth of a muscular, bass-led groove with some incidental organ and guitar solos, "Hip Hug Her" is about as purely rhythmic as mainstream pop music got in the late '60s.