Hound Dog Taylor didn’t release his first album until his mid-50s.
But it’s taken on a legendary status in modern-day blues rock circles
I just started interviewing artists this summer, and the one common thread that seems to keep popping up is that, on their most recent album, they are interested in moving away from sounding too overproduced and polished, even keen to leave some imperfections in.
As a blues fan, I’ve always been interested in hearing that “rip-roaring good time” in person, and I think it's so appealing because it doesn’t concern itself with perfection; rather, it's this unmistakable energy, even raucous, in front of a crowd just celebrating a good time and the music that livens their surroundings up. That was Hound Dog Taylor's 1971 debut album, raw, ripping through 12 songs in about 40 minutes, with both originals and a few covers. It’s boisterous, uncompromising, and played by musicians in the moment, loving what they’re doing. In fact, his favorite way to start a show was to yell out, “Let’s have some fun.” By many accounts, Taylor was the life of the party and loved talking to and meeting people, though he did have a volatile temper at times and, at other times, was sad or regretful in his private life because he felt he didn’t accomplish enough.
The most interesting thing about his first album, Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers, is that Taylor was 54 when it was released. I think we’ve all seen those memes of people not reaching the peak of their career, or finding success later in life, and recording what, in hindsight, is one of the best blues-rock albums of the 1970s is for sure a candidate for such a meme.
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It’s not even certain when Hound Dog, born Theodore Roosevelt Taylor, was born. Maybe it was 1915, maybe it was 1916 or even 1917, but it was down south in the Mississippi Delta. Taylor didn’t have the easiest upbringing and ran away from home at the age of 9 to live with his older sister because he didn’t want to live with his stepfather anymore. He was also born with a rare condition where he had an extra finger on both hands and, much later in life, drunkenly cut off the extra finger on his right hand with a razor. Kind of brings to mind David Bromberg's “You gotta suffer to Sing the Blues” song.
Taylor grew up learning the piano and took up the guitar at 20. He moved to Chicago in 1942 to escape the hateful ignorance of his hometown, where a cross was burned outside his home. He mostly worked odd jobs into his late 30s while playing small clubs on the side and didn’t become a full-time musician until 1957, at around age 40. He really started gaining traction by 1967, when he toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival, which featured a who's who of African American blues artists of the era.
In 1970, Bruce Iglauer tried to show his boss at Delmark Records Hound Dog, rightfully so, but was declined. Not deterred and determined to release his music, Bruce formed his own record company a year later, Alligator Records, and Taylor was the first artist signed, recorded, and released by the label. Bruce believed in him even when he didn’t believe in himself. Bruce recalls in a 2019 article Taylor saying:
“Don’t spend the rest of your life hanging around with people like us.” — Bruce Iglauer recalling Hound Dog Taylor, bitenbytheblues.com, 2019
Hound Dog was pretty much given free rein to record his tracks as Bruce wanted to capture, to the best of his ability, what a live performance sounded like, rather than obsess over polishing the album. It was loose, using their battered amplifiers and instruments with the volume fully turned up, with no overdubbing. The band hated rehearsing, and most songs were the first or second take, recorded over two non-consecutive nights in late Spring of 1971.
Alligator would go on to become one of the most important independent blues record labels in U.S. history, and they signed some of the best blues rock stars of the era, including Albert Collins, Roy Buchanan, Lonnie Mack, and Luther Allison. Taylor released one more studio album with Alligator before passing away in 1975, but several more albums were released posthumously by Alligator, as well as one by JSP and another by Fan Club Records, both live. George Thorogood covered Taylor’s song “Just Can’t Make It” in 1980 and, most importantly, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1984 and told writer Bob Nuff that “he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good.”
