The story goes that the legendary Huey P. Meaux, the self-described "Crazy Cajun," figured a band that combined Cajun musical sensibilities with the then dominant and popular British Invasion sound might go over big on the pop charts (no one can say that Meaux, offbeat as he was, didn't have prescient vision). Enter
Doug Sahm and
the Sir Douglas Quintet were born. Recording for Meaux's Pacemaker and Tribe imprints,
the Quintet mixed a garage band approach and some British jangle with informed bits of conjunto, R&B, Cajun, country, and blues elements to create an amazingly fresh and accessible hybrid that prefigured the roots-driven Americana movement of the 1990s by three decades. Meaux packaged up the group's various singles for his labels in 1965 and released them on an LP called The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet, which -- along with some additional material from the time period -- forms the basis for this CD collection. There are some great recordings here, including the big hit "She's About a Mover," a wonderful and timeless cover of
Freddy Fender's "The Rains Came," and the brilliant
Sahm original "In Time" (how on Earth was this not a hit?), but it lacks any of the band's later Mercury material (they signed to Mercury in 1968), and thus the great single "Mendocino" is absent, which means this set only tells the first part of the story. The music is great, but the title is as deceptive now as it was in 1965, and actually it's become even less accurate. ~ Steve Leggett