New series: Deep South – Roy Head

We’re going to give our “Your Sister’s (Record) Rack” series a rest for the time being. But we’re starting a new weekly series, “Deep South,” which focuses on artists who came up and in many cases performed almost exclusively in the southern United States.

Why the South? Well, tell me if you can think of any other places that have produced music like New Orleans, and Memphis, and Nashville, and Austin. The list goes on and on. In this series we hope to spin a few records that originated from those places, and connect the dots by visiting smaller areas in between.

Today let’s begin in our home base of Houston, Texas, with Roy Head. Roy is best known for his 1965 hit “Treat Her Right,” which is perhaps one of the best examples of that curious genre known as “blue-eyed soul.”

“Treat Her Right” was cut in Houston’s own Gold Star studios, with legendary producer Huey Meaux at the dials. The song reached No. 2 on the pop charts, and has been covered in ensuing years by the likes of Jimmy Page, Bruce Springsteen and many others.

Roy cut this hit and many follow-ups with his band the Traits, which formed in 1958 when most of the members were still teenagers. Head would leave the band behind in the 1970s for a solo career. He would cut rockabilly, lots of soul and even some psychedelic stuff before he settled into a country genre but he never repeated the success he had in 1965 with “Treat Her Right.”

Head still lives and works in the Houston area and he is a fixture on the Ponderosa Stomp, the annual roots music festival held each spring in New Orleans. Roy’s son Jason “Sundance” Head was a contestant on Season 6 of “American Idol.”

MP3: “Treat Her Right”

MP3: “Apple Of My Eye”

MP3: “Treat Me Right”

MP3: “Boogie Chillun”

MP3: “Just A Little Bit”

Roy Head at the Ponderosa Stomp

Walkin’ To New Orleans: Rockin’ Sidney

Rockin' Sidney (with accordion) and friends in 1985

We are going to linger for one more day in Cajun country, before making the final push to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.  Today we look at one of the biggest hits to ever come out of Louisiana.

In 1984, a strange sound was enveloping the nation.  It could heard squawking from an outdoor stage in Texas or bouncing between the steel and glass skyscrapers of Manhattan.  The sound was the greasy notes of an accordion played by one Rockin’ Sidney Simien, on his song “My Toot Toot.” 

Simien recorded the song in his lavish mobile home near Lake Charles, Louisiana, slathering instruments over a drum machine track.  “My Toot Toot” was a novelty song where the singer warns “don’t mess with my toot toot.”  Of course, people read all kinds of things into the lyric: don’t mess with my drugs,  don’t mess with my (name your favorite part of the male or female anatomy).  The song’s accordion solos just SOUND nasty, so it was easy to read stuff into it, but Simien insisted at the time the “toot toot” of the title is just a Cajun French term of endearment.

Walkin’ To New Orleans: Jivin’ Gene

Mardi Gras is a little over a week away, and we thought we’d take a leisurely stroll eastward to the Crescent City.  But along the way, let’s visit with some of the great musicians we have been lucky enough to encounter in past years.  The fertile crescent that stretches atop the Gulf of Mexico from Austin to New Orleans is inhabited by some of the greatest musicians in the country.  You know about Austin and we’ll get to New Orleans in time, we promise.  But first …

We start in Port Arthur, Texas, hometown of Janis Joplin, the Big Bopper and the Winter brothers (Johnny and Edgar).  If you grew up there in the 1950s or the 1960s, rock and roll is in your blood – it was certainly on the radio back then, and it was definitely in the air.  I grew up on a quiet street in Groves, Texas (snuggled next to Port Arthur) and did all the usual things a kid did in the early 1960s.  But every once in a while the quiet was cracked by the ring of a rock and roll band rehearsing in a garage a few doors down.  After investigating, I learned that the garage belonged to our neighbor Gene Bourgeois, known as “Jivin’ Gene.”

Lost Classics? Kinky Friedman

 

Kinky Friedman sometime in the 1970s, at the Texas Opry House with dancing “waitret” in background.

Kinky Friedman is an artist for whom the term “politically incorrect” is inadequate.  Even “obnoxious” is inadequate.  Kinky is an equal opportunity offender, no one escapes his satirical aim.  And his albums are all pretty much the same: tasteless or hilarious, depending on your point of view (or state of intoxication).