DOUG SAHM
I couldn't locate "At the Crossroads", one of Sweetheart's favorite songs (and mine), and Sahm's barrel-house version of Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby" would have been my choice for Saturday night becoming early Sunday morning.
But it's early in the week, we all need an uplift, and no better than a native San Antonio true-blood showing how the music never stops. Doug Sahm was stopped by a heart attack in Taos New Mexico (Kachina Inn / in his sleep ) in 1999. He'd just turned 58. He should have lived to be 200 by how much body and soul he gave to his music, life and baseball (a fan).
He started out as a child prodigy on fiddle, steel guitar, mandolin, and at the age of eleven was on the stage at the Skyline Club in Austin with Hank Williams. The date: December 19, 1952. Hank Williams would die less than two weeks later on New Year's day.
Sahm led the life the majority of white rock 'n' roll musicians can only dream about, mainly because he played almost every genre and looked it, too. From the Sir Douglas Quintet (with his Texas accent, and 2/5s of the band members being Hispanic, plus Augie Meyers, trying to pass off as an early British invasion 60s band — you just have to love the nerve of this guy), his own bands on the Mercury and Atlantic labels, the Texas Tornados, Los Super Seven supergroup, his two sons playing with dad and now on their own — it was all the neverending tour that Bob Dylan was undoubtedly inspired by. Doug Sahm was doing it since he was a kid, when he cut his first record "A Real American Joe". By the time he was a teenager, it is said he was offered a permanent spot at the Grand Ole Opry, but his mom shot the idea down wanting her son to finish school. Yep, he was but a mover.
(let's pretend it's Saturday, late)
(and no getting away without the Texas Tornados:
Augie Meyers, Doug Sahm, Freddy Fender, Flaco Jimenez)
