hound dog taylor

Record companies are usually at their best when close to the street, turnlng up talent rather than just distributing it. The Chess label was so close to the street it felt the sweat. Polish immigrant brothers Leonard and Phil Chess owned clubs around Chicago and from the late 40s started recording some of the most formative R & B and...
> blues/3462/chess-blues-taking-it-from-the-street/

Whatever his style was, fame wasn't interested in embracing it. The closest this rockabilly blues screamer -- who started in the mid Fifties -- came to wider recognition was when the Cramps covered this song. But for Hasil (pronounced "hassle"), he just had to make do with juke joints and bars, and being a punk rocker long before...
> fromthevaults/2849/hasil-adkins-she-said-1966/

The blues goes in cycles of visibility: there were those great days of the late Forties/Fifties in the South and the early Sixties in Chicago; the British blues boom of the early/mid Sixties (John Mayall, Clapton, the first Fleetwood Mac etc) and then . . . You can tick them off just by a name alone: Alligator Records (Hound Dog Taylor and...
> blues/3401/oli-brown-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-ruf-yellow-eye/

Singer Wilson from North Carolina is yet another of those US blues (and jazz) artists who found a more sympathetic and profitable environment in Europe and these days operates out of Germany playing festivals and clubs across the Continent. Ironically -- because he grew up in the church, listened to country music at home and joined the army...
> blues/3371/big-daddy-wilson-love-is-the-key-ruf-yellow-eye/

First, there is no Vol 1 or Vol 2, but this addition to Taylor's catalogue of "trance blues" which follows the excellent Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs of last year is certainly a welcome one. Taylor takes a very different view of the blues: while others see it as an idiom with strict stylistic codes if not chord progressions,...
> blues/3339/otis-taylor-clovis-people-vol-3-telarc/

When Jim Carroll died in September 2009 at age 60, it went largely unnoticed by the rock culture which had once embraced him, and spoken about this New York poet-turned-singer in the same breath as Patti Smith and Lou Reed. Carroll's rock career was admittedly short -- a few albums in the early Eighties and little else -- but his literary...
> fromthevaults/2855/jim-carroll-people-who-died-1980/

The Rev Gates (b 1884) was preacher-cum-gospel singer whose style was often call-and-response in the manner of Baptist churches. He worked out of Atlanta and aside from sermonising he was a prolific recording artist, some estimates say he recorded around 200 songs and sermons from around 1926 when he scored big with Death's Black Train is...
> fromthevaults/3274/reverend-jm-gates-hitler-and-hell-1941/

Just as Run DMC found when they hooked themselves up with a metal guitar part from Aerosmith for Walk This Way (here) -- and King Kurlee confirmed when he got Blackmore Jnr in to play the classic Smoke on the Water riff (here) -- when hip-hop appropriates from tough rock the results can be pretty powerful. Caveman out of High Wycombe, were...
> fromthevaults/3173/caveman-im-ready-1991/

For a brief period before they shortened their name to Chicago and became boring -- and for my money it was very brief and they became very boring -- this big group with an ever-changing but hardly memorable line-up were a tanked-up rock band. Their debut album in '69 was a double, they had a political edge as befitted the volatile times...
> fromthevaults/3052/chicago-transit-authority-im-a-man-1969/

I'm sure the heavily tattooed Curran from Austin, Texas wouldn't make any claims of great originality (although he does pen more than half this album, his song titles include Reel Rock Party, Psycho, Lusty L'il Lucy, Filthy and so on). But he simply slices off large and rowdily enjoyable slabs of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Little Richard, Gene...
> music/3064/nick-curran-and-the-lowlifes-reform-school-girl-eclecto-grooves-southbound/

Blues and jazz artists often used coded language to get their lyrics past record companies and radio programmers, so you would get a song like When I'm In My Tea (by Jo-Jo Adams, 1946) about marijuana or Dope Head Blues by Victoria Spivey about cocaine. Sex was everywhere and there is no mistaking the meaning of songs like Poon Tang (by the...
> fromthevaults/2809/dirty-red-mother-fuyer-1947/

When this out-of-the-blue single raced around the globe at the height of Beatlemania it sounded like a typically gimmicky hit of the period (the band name, Sam wearing a turban and the group dressed like Arabs didn't exactly deny it) and you might have expected them to disappear immediately. But they didn't. They came back with a slightly...
> fromthevaults/2796/sam-the-sham-and-the-pharoahs-wooly-bully-1964/

Writing about music is a sedentary affair today: CDs are reviewed, and artists are interviewed by phone, in a comfortable hotel or their record company office. Latterly, to my regret, it has been like that for me -- but not so for Cartwright whose previous book Princes Amongst Men saw him on the road in some bad and strange parts of Eastern...
> writingelsewhere/2786/more-miles-than-money-journeys-through-american-music-by-garth-cartwright/

Although the blues can be a sophisticated music, there's something more earthy, vibrant and appealing about it when it is played from somewhere further south than the cerebral cortext. Hound Dog Taylor played from a point somewhere between the heart, the gut and the groin -- and made the most thrilling music to come out of the Chicago blues...
> essentialelsewhere/2791/hound-dog-taylor-and-the-houserockers-hound-dog-taylor-and-the-houserockers-1971/

With an American history over a century long, the blues isn't easy an easy journey to begin on: do you go at it chronologically from slave chants and field hollers, or work back from white popularisers like George Thorogood, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Led Zeppelin? Given that most people live in what we might call the post-rock era it might be...
> essentialelsewhere/795/various-artists-chicago-the-blues-today-vol-1-1966/