On May 25 and June 2, 1971, the rawest, roughest-edged, most joyful blues band in Chicago recorded their first album. With the help of two fledgling producers, Bruce Iglauer and his friend Wesley Race, they cut multiple takes of twenty-five songs in two evenings, recorded live and mixed as they were being recorded. The album, issued in August of that year, was simply named after the band: Hound Dog Taylor And The HouseRockers, the first release from a brand new label called Alligator Records.
Alligator was a leap of faith, an underfinanced one-man operation run out of an efficiency apartment. It was launched with an album by a band virtually unknown outside the local bars where they played. The album captured the band’s glorious racket and the vibrant, rocking spirit of the South and West Side Chicago blues clubs—simple neighborhood taverns in the city’s black community where mostly Southern-born, working class people bonded together and sloughed off the frustrations of their day-to-day hard lives by listening and dancing to the honest, rhythmic, joyful and cathartic music they had grown up with—the blues. Two of the three members of the band—Hound Dog, a fifty-five-year-old former sharecropper and factory worker, and Brewer Phillips, a part-time construction worker, had come to Chicago from Mississippi looking for decent jobs. The third member, drummer Ted Harvey, a loading dock worker, came from the Windy City. They had no reputation, no booking agent or manager, and they were not creating music that sounded much like anything getting played on any form of commercial radio. Yet their unbridled energy, unfettered joy and raw soulfulness of their music somehow communicated to people all over the world, making them blues legends and making their debut recording a classic that continues to be discovered by legions of new fans.
Forty-five years later, Alligator Records, now with a catalog of almost three hundred albums, continues to be bound by the same philosophy that led to that first recording—that direct, unvarnished, straight-from-the-soul blues and blues-rooted music, the music we call “Genuine Houserockin’ Music,” speaks to some primal, necessary place in people’s consciousness. We believe that our music, if delivered by charismatic, soul-stirring artists, and if publicized, promoted and marketed with unwavering energy, will find a worldwide audience, stand the test of time, and keep the label moving forward for years to come.
Disc 1
01. Lil' Ed And The Imperials - Hold That Train
02. Son Seals - Cotton Picking Blues
03. Shemekia Copeland - Devil's Hand
04. Elvin Bishop - Can't Even Do Wrong Right
05. Toronzo Cannon - Bad Contract
06. Charlie Musselwhite - The Well
07. Marcia Ball - The Tattooed Lady And The Alligator Man
08. Tommy Castro And The Painkellers - Common Ground
09. Carey & Lurrie Bell - The Road Is So Long
10. Koko Taylor - Voodoo Woman
11. Selwyn Birchwood - Don't Call No Ambulance
12. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats - Callin' All Fools
13. Joe Louis Walker - Too Drunk To Drive Drunk
14. Lee Rocker - Crazy When She Drinks
15. Moreland & Arbuckle - Take Me With You (When You Go)
16. Jimmy Johnson - Your Turn To Cry
17. Delbert McClinton - Givin' It Up For Your Love
18. Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers - Take Five
19. Anders Osborne - Let It Go
20. Mavis Staples - Will The Circle Be Unbroken
Disc 2
01. James Cotton & Joe Bonnamassa - Cotton Mouth Man
02. Albert Collins - If Trouble Was Money
03. JJ Grey & Mofro - 99 Shades Of Crazy
04. Jarekus Singleton - I Refuse To Lose
05. Michael "Iron Man" Burks - Empty Promises
06. Roomful Of Blues - Turn It On, Turn It Up
07. Lazy Lester - Raining In My Heart
08. Johnny Winter - Shake Your Moneymaker
09. Curtis Salgado - Walk A Mile In My Blues
10. The Kentucky Headhunters With Johnnie Johnson - Stumblin'
11. Billy Boy Arnold - I Ain't Got You
12. Ann Rabson - Gonna Stop You From Giving Me The Blues
13. Smokin' Joe Kubek & Bnois King - Freezer Burn
14. Guitar Shorty - I'm Gonna Leave You
15. A.C. Reed & Bonnie Raitt - She's Fine
16. Luther Allison - Will It Ever Change
17. The Holmes Brothers - Amazing Grace
