Doug Sahm – "Poison Love" (1973)

And I know this love

Is surely not for me

The late Doug Sahm made his radio debut at age five and released his first record when he was 11.  He was on stage with Hank Williams, Sr., in Austin, Texas, for Hank’s final stage performance on December 19, 1952.  (Williams died in the back seat of a car less than two weeks later.)  

Doug Sahm with Hank Williams, Sr.

The story goes that Sahm was offered a chance to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry a few years later, but that his mother said no – she wanted him to finish junior high school.

Sahm was a jack of all trades – his music is a mix of rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, R&B, and Mexican conjunto music, and that eclecticism is the essence of Texas popular music.  Texas is a great big melting pot of musical cultures and styles, and Sahm’s records epitomized that.

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Maybe Sahm would have been a bigger commercial success if he had stuck to one style of music.

In the sixties, he moved to San Francisco after forming the Sir Douglas Quintet, a faux British Invasion band that had two hit singles – “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino.”  

I found the group’s first album in the cutout bins at Grandpa’s, a long-gone-but-not-forgotten discount store in my hometown that made Walmart look like Nieman-Marcus.  It was in the three-for-a-dollar section, and I figured that was a fair price for the two aforementioned hit singles.  But the album turned out to be a gem.

Sahm recording with Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, who was another fan of that album, once said, “Look, for me right now there are three groups: [the Paul] Butterfield [Blues Band], The Byrds and the Sir Douglas Quintet.”

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After the Sir Douglas Quintet broke up, Sahm moved back to Texas and was signed to an Atlantic Records deal by famed producer Jerry Wexler.  His Atlantic albums – which consisted of equal parts country songs and blues tracks – featured guest appearances by Bob Dylan, Dr. John, and the Creedence Clearwater Revival rhythm section (Doug Clifford and Stu Cook).

Sahm’s seventies albums sold poorly, and he spent much of the eighties touring and recording in Europe (he had a hit album on a Swedish label) and Canada.  

In 1989, Sahm formed a Tex-Mex supergroup, the Texas Tornados, who released seven albums and won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Record.

Sahm died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Taos, New Mexico, in 1999.  He was 58 years old.

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Sahm was kind of the Texas version of Oklahoma’s Leon Russell.  Both were multitalented musicians who sounded good no matter what style of music they were playing.  And both were underrated by the public – although not by the many superstar recording artists they performed with.

Click here to listen to Sahm’s 1973 cover of “Poison Love,” a country song that was first recorded in 1950.  It’s an excellent example of Sahm’s eclecticism – the instruments backing Sahm on this track include mandolin, dobro, honky-tonk piano and Tejano-style accordion.  (It’s sloppy as hell in places – Sahm has only a tenuous grasp on the song’s lyrics – but sloppiness ain’t all bad.)

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