Hound Dog Taylor: probably my all-time favorite bluesman

October 26, 2010 at 6:34 PM

Hound Dog plays what is known as "slide guitar." As you can see, he has a small metal tube over his 4th finger (not his pinkie, as The Hound has a small extra finger even farther over!). Slide guitar is sort of the ultimate: a guitar sound, and a violin's pitch freedom. Instead of having to bend notes by pushing the strings, the slide player simply angles the tube and slides to exactly the right place to get the sound he wants.

Hound Dog Taylor was a big influence on George Thorogood. (Another major influence to the latter is of course John Lee Hooker).

As a "white" kid growing up in the 70s on Rock, I was mostly exposed to the blues in a second-hand manner without even realizing that there was a whole history to it distinct from Rock. It was George Thorogood that first pointed me back then to the reality that Blues is a whole world--a musical genre born in the Louisiana delta from black folk.

Looking back, it is interesting how rock and roll, marketed by racially timid white guys, ultimately led to a musical awakening, and a huge bridge of people and culture. Today, famous bluesmen play in big arenas to crowds of white folk. And white players were more than graciously accepted into the fold--Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, George Thorogood, and Billy Gibbons (another of my all time favorite musicians) to name a few, and many others.

There are interesting interviews with older black bluesmen, chronicling this evolution. A series was done on Sirus recently, interviewing Buddy Guy and B.B. King.

Music truly is a transcendent human endeavor, one which helps us all to become part of something bigger and I think better than ourselves--to gain understanding and interest in other's ways of doing things, an appreciation for "there isn't only one way to do things." Perhaps the best thing about it is that this musical connectivity is infectious. It doesn't require focus groups or interventions or laws or discussion groups or pundits and talking heads. It just happens. People who would otherwise not see eye to eye simple start to do so almost without knowing it. The music does it.

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Hound Dog Taylor: probably my all-time favorite bluesman

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