Artist:   Sir Douglas Quintet
Song:   "Song of Everything"
Album: Best of Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet
Label:   Mercury
Year:    1968

His name might be forever associated with the Tex-Mex treasure “She’s About a Mover,” but Sir Douglas Sahm was by his own admission a man of many worlds. He sat in on steel guitar with Hank Williams when he was only nine years old, and later recorded with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and everyone in between while he carried on one of the crazier careers in music. His masterpiece album, though, is Honkey Blues, which veered wildly from country hoedowns to psychedelic freakouts. “Song of Everything” sounds like an outtake from a rootsy Sgt. Pepper’s spin-off, with an unmistakable horn line propelling everything at just the right moments, while Wayne Talbert’s piano throws in mad dashes of Thelonious Monk. Sahm himself, fresh from two years of bouncing around the Bay Area and Big Sur’s redwoods after an untimely marijuana bust in Corpus Christi, is running on Owsley’s finest. He never quite recaptured the hallucinogenic shimmer of this song on later efforts, but over the next 30 years before his death in 1999, Sahm was able to record just about every other style of music imaginable, creating a reputation as the ultimate groover no matter what hat he was wearing. For someone whose biggest chart success came as a Texan pretending to be part of the British Invasion, Doug Sahm knew that music really has no boundaries, and as long as you play with pure feeling and absolute soul, anything is possible. “Song of Everything” indeed.