‘Alligator Records: 50 Years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music’ Review: Indestructible Blues

[peekaboo]

The legendary Chicago label celebrates its 50th anniversary with a compilation of its greatest hits, from Shemekia Copeland’s 21st-century blues to the original Hound Dog Taylor anthem that started it all

Hound Dog Taylor and Bruce Iglauer

Photo: Alligator Records/Nicole Fanelli

June 21, 2021 3:48 pm ET

Fenton Robinson

Photo: Alligator Records/Paul Natkin

In the 1960s, the small Delmark label brought attention to the rough, jazz-influenced blues of Chicago’s West Side—and promulgators such as Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Junior Wells. In the 1990s, the Fat Possum label spotlighted the thumping, hypnotic blues of northern Mississippi’s hill country—and introduced the world to R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford. And in between, in the 1970s, Alligator Records came along. Chicago-born, the label is marking its golden anniversary with an exciting, epic 58-track set, “50 Years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music,” out now.

Alligator’s origins can be traced to the night in 1971 when Bruce Iglauer, its founder and president ever since, caught the loud, rhythmic and unrecorded Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers band at Florence’s Lounge in Chicago. It was love at first hearing. He’d been mentored by Delmark’s founder Bob Koester, but that outfit was not particularly focused by then on identifying the next generation of the city’s blues players. At age 23, Mr. Iglauer was. He recorded Taylor and company, ran this new label from his apartment, and before long was looking for other Black performers on the scene who could appeal to rock-raised Boomer blues enthusiasts in similar ways. “Genuine Houserockin’ Music” became the official company slogan.

Photo: Alligator Records

Appropriately, the lead-off track on this anniversary set is that first recorded band, Hound Dog Taylor blasting a distorted, staccato guitar stream like a Morse code message that says “Just dance!” The song is “Give Me Back My Wig,” establishing Alligator’s core direction—good-time social music used to get through and past blue feelings, and not the more introverted cries and musings of earlier-generation folk blues.

New blues stars introduced by the label in the ’70s are central in the early album tracks, including Fenton Robinson (“Somebody Loan Me a Dime,” which became a blues standard), the smooth and riveting Son Seals (“Telephone Angel”) and the fiercer Lonnie Brooks (“Cold Lonely Nights”). All three were in the singer and electric guitar ace mold, but, refreshingly, their guitar solos were directed, dynamic and tight. The corporate slogan could have been “No noodling.”

Koko Taylor

Photo: Alligator Records/Steve Kagan

As the label grew, fitting name artists who weren’t from the Chicago club scene were signed, such as Texans Albert Collins, Gatemouth Brown and Professor Longhair (heard here on “It’s My Fault Darling,” more Alligator stomp than his typical New Orleans roll). Chicago veterans who needed and got a new round of attention became Alligator artists, too, including Koko Taylor, James Cotton and even Mavis Staples. Ms. Taylor would be featured on the label for decades. On this set she belts “I’m a Woman”—not the light Peggy Lee/Maria Muldaur chestnut, but a muscular female turn on Muddy Waters’ “I’m a Man.” The celebrated triumvirate of Albert Collins, Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland placed Alligator at the center of the 1980s blues revival. Their haunting track “The Dream” is included here. 

The artist roster can be heard expanding further to include a select group of singing white electric guitar players—qualified for inclusion by offering the same core strengths in rhythm, taste and being firmly nonimitative as others in the stable—including Roy Buchanan (“That Did It” appears here), Lonnie Mack (“Ridin’ the Blinds”) and Johnny Winter (“Lights Out”). Rather than resting in that no doubt commercially advantageous, more mainstream blues-rock position, Mr. Iglauer has kept right on seeking out the next significant players. It’s admirable, and it’s paid dividends.

The powerful yet warm singer Shemekia Copeland would be signed just out of high school in 1997 and has become a leading light on Alligator and in 21st-century blues. She’s represented by one of her very recent, pointed songs, “Clotilda’s on Fire.” Contemporary Alligator artists have dominated the annual Blues Music Awards of the past several years. Representative, winning 2020s tracks close out the proceedings—Christone “Kingfish” Ingram’s “Outside of This Town,” Selwyn Birchwood’s “Living in a Burning House,” and veteran Chicago hands Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite’s “Midnight Hour Blues.”

Alligator Records has a through story that’s lasted. The house continues to rock—as does this revealing, engaging set.