Sir Douglas Quintet - Style

Style

The Quintet played varied styles with an instrumental line-up that was typical of blues bands: one guitarist, keyboardist, bassist, and drummer, and a member who could play either trumpet or saxophone. Despite the blues-band line-up and a musical influence from the blues, the Quintet's live sets didn't over-emphasize misery or tension in the lyrical content or musical feeling of the songs. They included such blues classics as "I Don't Believe" (originally by Bobby Blue Bland), along with the upbeat "Hey Little Girl" (originally by Texas blues man Frankie Lee Sims) and "T-Bone Shuffle" (originally by blues giant T-Bone Walker) in their sets and on record. But downhearted songs, of the sort that make up much of the blues genre, were represented as a part of the spectrum, only – because they reflected a facet of life. Most of the songs in the Quintet's repertoire were joyful or "liberated" in feeling.

Also, with most songs there was no "star instrumentalist" aspect, and players just contributed to the larger whole of the song performance.

The Sir Douglas Quintet is considered a pioneering influence in the history of rock and roll for incorporating Tex-Mex and Cajun styles into rock music. However, early influences on the band's emerging Texas style were of course broader than this, and included ethnic and pop music from the 1950s and 1960s, such as doo-wop, electric blues, soul music, and British Invasion. The Quintet brought older styles into a contemporary context, for instance by adapting the doo-wop feel, beat, and chord progressions – without the nonsense syllables of original doo-wop. In one way, this simply meant incorporating slow songs with the 50s progression, characteristic of doo-wop. The Quintet fully assimilated this into a late-1960s rock venue approach. Perhaps even more off-beat for a rock band of that era than inclusion of doo-wop type songs was that the band also brought-in styles like western swing and polka (a country & western form and rhythmic style, from the Texas Hill Country, rather than a straight European style). It was an accomplishment to manage this without a satirical approach, but instead with complete investment in the music.

In the mid-1960s, the band relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and absorbed features of the nascent San Francisco Sound, including the loud and lush electric bass tone and freer percussion and guitar stylings. Band members also explored musical elements specific to modern jazz at that time. For studio recordings, they sometimes added an extra session musician or two, often to flesh out the brass dimension of a track's sound. Good examples of what they produced by absorbing the new jazz and psychedelic elements into their music can be found on the album Sir Douglas Quintet + 2. The lyrics in a Quintet song like "The Song of Everything" are plainly in the realm of the mystical, whimsical lyrics regarded as one of the characteristics of psychedelic music.

In live performances, blues, often with swing or shuffle beats, was usually a substantial component of the set. Besides doing their own original material, the Quintet revived several classics such as Jimmie Rodgers' "In the Jailhouse Now" and Freddy Fender's "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" to be found on the albums Son of San Antonio and Texas Fever, respectively.

In 2005 they were among the new class of musicians chosen for the nominating ballot to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. and they could be nominated again on the ballot for 2013 class.