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Multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter whose
musical career began at the age of five when he sang "Teardrops in My
Heart" on San Antonio's KMAC radio station. He continued to perform on the
radio, doing a two-year stint on The Mutual Network and at the age of eight
joined The Louisiana Hayride radio show. So versatile was this child prodigy,
who played fiddle, mandolin, and steel guitar, he often appeared with
big-time country music artists like Webb Pierce, Hank Thompson, Hank
Williams, and Faron Young. He
recorded his first single, "A Real American Joe", at age
eleven. He was even invited to
play in The Grand Ol' Opry in his teens, but Mom laid down the law
and made him finish school. Fair
enough: Between his studies he
managed to front The Dell-Kings, The Markays, and The Pharaohs. In 1964, when Beatlemania was at its
height in the States, a record producer by the name of Huey P. Meaux, whom
Doug had been hounding for a record deal, finally succumbed on the
condition he let his hair grow.
Meaux was obsessed with coming up with an American equivalent of The
Beatles, noting two of The Fab Four's strong suits were their
infectious rhythms and the way they constructed their songs to be sung on
the beat. A Cajun man himself,
Meaux encouraged Doug to write something in Cajun two-step. Sahm, along with longtime friend
Augie Meyers and members of their respective bands at the time, formed The
Sir Douglas Quintet, a moniker bequeathed on them by Meaux, who tried to
market them as an English band.
They stepped into the studio in January 1965 and laid down
"She's About A Mover", which went top twenty in the U.K.
and the U.S. The Sir Douglas
Quintet had staged their own mini-American Invasion. They were not, however, The
Beatles. The band split after
Sahm was arrested for marijuana possession. It seemed like the right time to get
out of Dodge, or in this case, Corpus Christi, and Doug emigrated to San
Francisco and started up The Honkey Blues Band and eventually re-formed The
Sir Douglas Quintet, with Augie Meyers in tow. They managed another hit, the title
track from their album Mendocino. It was around this time that
Doug's solo career began to take off a little bit. He was doing session work for the
likes of The Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson and in 1973 Jerry Wexler lured
Sahm from Mercury to Atlantic with his own ideas of a supergroup, which
also shared the name of the LP, Doug
Sahm and Band. The
"band" in this case comprised David Bromberg, Dr. John, Bob
Dylan, and Flaco Jimenez.
Jimenez would continue to collaborate with Sahm and Meyers, along
with another one of Doug's longtime friends, Freddy Fender, under the
moniker The Texas Tornados, sixteen years later. An earlier incarnation of the group,
including Atwood Allen, Jack Barber, Harry Hess, Harvey Kagen, Augie
Meyers, Frank Morin, George Rains, and Doug Sahm released an album in 1976
called Texas Rock For Country Rollers. Sahm and Meyers continued to be
joined at the hip in the '80s, when they signed with, of all labels,
Swedish Sonnet, and surprised themselves by scoring platinum with a song
called "Meet Me in Stockholm", one of the biggest hits ever
recorded in Scandinavia. A
couple of years later, Doug was involved in an automobile accident and
decided to move back across the Atlantic to Canada, eventually returning to
Texas. In 1989, he rejoined
Fender, Meyers, and Jimenez at a concert in San Francisco as The Tex-Mex
Revue. It was not long after
that they reverted to their old name, The Texas Tornados. In this reincarnation, they managed
to record four albums, two of them live, and won a Grammy for Best
Mexican/American Performance for their recording of "Soy de San
Luis". They were much in
demand in the '90s, invited to Farm Aid, The Montreaux Jazz Festival,
and Bill Clinton's Presidential Inauguration. Unfortunately, Doug Sahm would not
live to see the end of Clinton's term. He died of a heart attack in his
sleep in a New Mexico motel room on 18 November 1999.
Doug Sahm
& The Texas Tornados recordings
Cowboy Peyton
Place (Doug Sahm)
Sources:
1.
http://www.dougsahm.com/
2.
http://www.laventure.net/tourist/sdq_hist.htm
3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Tornados
4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Sahm
5.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5924301/texas_rocker_doug_sahm_found_dead_in_new_mexico/
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