Story: Thomas crone

Photos: Ismael Quintanilla III & Auset Sarno

Son Volt’s latest album, Day of the Doug, is completely centered on the songs of the late Doug Sahm. It's a passion project that Son Volt founder Jay Farrar latched onto early in the pandemic. 

But the seeds for the project go back considerably farther than that. 

In the early 1990s, Farrar’s band Uncle Tupelo frequently played at a tiny, underground St. Louis live music dive called Cicero’s Basement Bar. There, the group would also often come together to perform sold-out shows as a country cover band known as Coffee Creek, adding multi-instrumentalist Brian Henneman to the original UT lineup of Farrar, drummer Mike Heidorn (also later of Son Volt) and bassist Jeff Tweedy (who’d go on to found Wilco). Eventually, Sahm would even appear on Uncle Tupelo’s 1993 swan song, “Anodyne,” singing and playing guitar on his own cut, “Give Back the Key to My Heart.” 

It was Henneman who’d originally brought the songs of the Texas songwriter to Coffee Creek’s attention. He and his then-band the Bottle Rockets eventually recorded and released a full album of his work, Songs of Sahm, via Bloodshot Records. To Farrar, Henneman and company’s 2002 effort provides a neat complement to the work that Son Volt’s has now offered up a couple of decades later. 

“The concept of doing the tribute record was born out of informal talks over the course of the pandemic,” Farrar said in a phone interview. “I had time to dig deep on his songs and found The Complete Mercury Masters. A ton of these songs are ones that I hadn’t heard before and I thought that they needed to be heard. Speaking of the Bottle Rockets, they did their tribute to Doug and that was the first round. This one’s about peeling back a second layer of his songs.” 

Some of the tracks were ones that singer/guitarist Farrar and his group – Andrew Duplantis (bass and backing vocals), Mark Patterson (drums), John Horton (guitar) and Mark Spencer (keys, guitar and backing vocals) – were toying around with during idle moments on tour. Duplantis and Spencer, in particular, were keen to tackle the project due to their Texas roots and the band eventually coalesced around the idea of full treatment of Sahm’s tracks. In total, 12 songs are featured on “Day of the Doug,” along with an intro and outro spoken by Sahm, who died in 1999.

With their session booked for just under a week, Farrar joined his band at Jacob Detering’s Red Pill Studio in his hometown of St. Louis. The band brought in a little outside musicianship, including local pedal ace Brad Sarno (who also mastered the record) and former Son Volt member Gary Hunt on fiddle. Each appeared on a track, while the rest of the group focused on creating as “live” a sound as possible. 

“What you hear on this record came during a time when we were touring and there’s an energy associated with that touring,” Farrar said. “That live chemistry just sort of happens and we captured it here. John (Horton) was the most-recent addition and he’s very experienced and works so hard on his craft. He’s got a wide musical palette that fits right into this style.” 

Farrar said that the business component to the project went well, as Duplantis had enjoyed time in a band with Sahm’s son, Shandon, one of the many points of contact that connected Son Volt and Sahm. 

“Going back to the fact that Doug is a folk hero in Texas, the word of a tribute record coming out had people rallying around it,” Farrar said. “Andrew was in touch with Shandon and we were able to get all the clearances we needed.”