Booker T. Jones cannot escape history. It’s an omnipresent force made tangible in the form of lifetime achievement awards and a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His instrumental hit “Green Onions” with The Booker T. and the MGs is over a half-century old and still retains a timeless cool that’s impossible not to strut to. As the leader of the Stax house band, he defined a sound that set the parameters of soul and R&B music for generations. He has built an honest-to-God legacy, yet nobody seems interested in the man’s own history, just in the many legends his career touched, like Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles and Otis Redding.

In promoting his latest album, Potato Hole, his first album in decades, Booker T. has been consistently pushed for details on his friendship with Otis Redding or what it felt like to work in the Stax recording studios. You can hear him pause in interviews before answering those questions, as if to give the interviewer enough time to take their questions back. That rarely happens. He dutifully answers in a voice barely louder than a whisper, in a drawl that sounds more at home in New Orleans than his hometown of Memphis.

Though he speaks with affection about the many shows he’s played throughout his career (he seems to remember every gig with amazing clarity), Booker T. isn’t one to get sentimental about the past; he’s not done making music. He has surrounded himself with a group of younger veterans like Mark Ford of the Black Crowes, and the Thunderbird’s Ronnie James Weber. And when not touring with his new band, Booker T. is realizing one of his childhood dreams: preparing to perform the works of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and, perhaps, creating his own symphony.

“I have a burning urge to compose,” he says of his little-known love for classical music. “When you sit in the middle of a beautiful auditorium while an orchestra is playing, there is no better experience.”

Classical music is where Booker T. learned about melody. Throughout his career, he’s used it as a grounding influence in all his music. According to Booker T., the works of Beethoven played a large influence on Potato Hole. The man has a voracious appetite for music of all types and their place in music history. More than just a renowned organ player, Booker T. is a scholar. Back when he was leading the Stax house band in creating genre-defining hits, he was pouring over the history of music at Indiana University. It’s where he learned the intimate details of creating a legacy, and Booker T. believes legacies are made in the schools.

“This conversation is making me feel like I have a place [in history],” says Booker T.. “A lot of people tell me that a number of schools are studying some of the stuff I wrote. It’s very gratifying it’s happening in the school. The people that influenced me a lot, I found through music schools. I owe everything to my organ teacher, my piano teacher and my mother, who was a classical pianist, and her mother taught her. I feel gratified that people are able to learn from me.”

Not that Booker T. is setting out to write music for the history books. He doesn’t have aspirations that big anymore. He’s content to let the days take him wherever they lead, trusting his new agent and manager to map out an appropriate new stage in his career. He may be just as hungry as he was when he was a teenager plucked out of algebra class to play sessions at Stax records, but he’s got a little more history. As much as he’s not interested in rehashing what’s come before, he also doesn’t care how he’ll define his future.

“One way for me to be disappointed is to have a vision and not be able to do it,” he says. “I used to try to plan it all out, but now, I have no idea what I’m doing in six months. I’m living like that now, and I’m happy with that. I don’t really have a vision.”

There is no pause. Just a chuckle.