Dough Sahm & The Sir Douglas Quintet

Doug Sahm once sang, "You just can't live in Texas if you don't have a lot of soul," and, as a proud son of the Lone Star state, he seemed bent on proving that every time he stepped in front of a microphone. Whether he was playing roots rock, garage punk, blues, country, norteño, or (as was often the case) something that mixed up several of the above-mentioned ingredients, Doug Sahm always sounded like Doug Sahm – a little wild, a little loose, but always good company, and a guy with a whole lot of soul who knew a lot of musicians upon whom the same praise could be bestowed. Pulling together a single disc compilation that would make sense of the length and breadth of the artist's recording career (which spanned five decades) would be just about impossible (the licensing hassles involved with the many labels involved would probably scotch such a project anyway), but this disc, which boasts 22 songs recorded over the course of eight years, is a pretty good starter for anyone wanting to get to know Sahm's music.

Guitarist, composer, arranger, and songwriter Doug Sahm was a knowledgeable music historian and veteran performer equally comfortable in a range of styles, including Texas blues, country, rock & roll, Western swing, and Cajun. Born November 6, 1941, in San Antonio, TX, he began his performing career at age nine when he was featured on a San Antonio area radio station, playing steel guitar…

The story goes that the legendary Huey P. Meaux, the self-described "Crazy Cajun," figured a band that combined Cajun musical sensibilities with the then dominant and popular British Invasion sound might go over big on the pop charts (no one can say that Meaux, offbeat as he was, didn't have prescient vision). Enter Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet were born. Recording for Meaux's Pacemaker and Tribe imprints, the Quintet mixed a garage band approach and some British jangle with informed bits of conjunto, R&B, Cajun, country, and blues elements to create an amazingly fresh and accessible hybrid that prefigured the roots-driven Americana movement of the 1990s by three decades. Meaux packaged up the group's various singles for his labels in 1965 and released them on an LP called The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet, which – along with some additional material from the time period – forms the basis for this CD collection.

Doug Sahm, aka "Sir Doug" of the Sir Douglas Quintet, rock & roll's first long-haired redneck, was a walking compendium of Texas music styles. Whether it was Texas blues, Tex-Mex rock & roll, garage, country, R&B, soul, singer/songwriter, and anything in between, Sir Doug could wail it and nail it. What's more, he would tell you so. Just the natural, Texas facts, ma'am. Most of this two-disc collection is culled from the Sir Douglas Quintet's Tribe Records years, produced by "Crazy Cajun" Huey P. Meaux, when the SDQ burst upon a Beatle landscape with one of rock & roll's all-time anthems, "She's About a Mover." The trademark sound of Sir Doug's country-boy, blues/rock vocals and Augie Meyer's simple, driving Vox organ lines, evident on "She's About a Mover," is the original blueprint for garage rock…

On January 12, 1970, 'Time' magazine placed The Band on its cover with the headline, 'The New Sound of Country Rock.' In the taxonomy of popular music, Country Rock was now a thing, a categoryby 1970. There were Country Rock browser bins in some stores, and trade magazines like 'Billboard'routinely classified records as country-rock or country/rock, expecting readers to know what they meant.

On January 12, 1970, 'Time' magazine placed The Band on its cover with the headline, 'The New Sound of Country Rock.' In the taxonomy of popular music, Country Rock was now a thing, a categoryby 1970. There were Country Rock browser bins in some stores, and trade magazines like 'Billboard'routinely classified records as country-rock or country/rock, expecting readers to know what they meant.