Hound Dog Taylor
If you like your Blues over-amplified and dirty so that it scalds your ears and forces your feet to move then Hound Dog’s your man. He’d been playing the small clubs around Chicago for twenty years before getting a recording done on a small independent label. He was a veteran who knew no other way other than what he learnt working those small clubs. There was nothing sophisticated about it. He brought his slide guitar skills to bear in producing some of the rawest Blues imaginable.
I love Elmore James but I love Hound Dog second. When I first heard those licks on his Elmore inspired ‘Roll Your Moneymaker’ I was smitten. He’d taken the Elmore idea and made it his own. Then ‘Sadie’ was equally amazing. He was so relaxed and uninhibited. It sounded like it had been recorded in a small club. I went and bought the first album and it was full of the same. ‘Give Me Back My Wig’ was covered by George Thorogood who was one of his protégés. That tells you something.
The sad thing is that he’d only just got going and then he was gone. Lung cancer did for him. His third album came out posthumously with a few more releases mopping up the dregs and a couple of live gigs. That’s all we had.