The King Of The Dance Halls’ eclectic recordings for Texas producer Huey Meaux. Over 20 years of music across two CDs, almost all mastered from fresh transfers of the original tapes.
South Louisiana has given us dozens of fine artists down the years. And none finer than Warren Storm, who in 2015 celebrates his 66th year as a working performer, and whose career has long merited the kind of comprehensive overview Ace is delighted to bring you this month. It doesn’t start right at the beginning and, as Warren is still highly active, it doesn’t come right up to the end, but over 20 years of great music is featured in this bumper compilation of recordings he made with independent Texas producer Huey Meaux.
There wasn’t really any genre of music Warren couldn’t turn his hand to, and Huey Meaux recorded him in just about every style imaginable, from the straight-ahead swamp pop of his early 60s sides to the honky tonk country of his 1980s 45s. In between he tackled uptown and southern soul, garage-style rock’n’roll and even a couple of bizarre attempts at skewed psychedelia, issued under the alias Abel.
The roughly chronological presentation allows the evolution of this great artist to come through in a natural and pleasing manner. Ours is not the first package of this period of Warren’s work, but it’s far and away the most extensive, featuring, as it does, just about everything he cut for Huey Meaux. All tracks have been mastered from fresh transfers of the original tapes, which are still stored in the vaults of Sugar Hill Studios in Houston, where many of the later sides were recorded. Warren has personally endorsed this reissue of his rare recordings guaranteed to delight all lovers of South Louisiana music.
Tony Rounce
