This week in Texas music history: ‘She’s About a Mover’ enters the charts

On April 2, 1965, the Sir Douglas Quintet’s single “She’s About a Mover” entered the Billboard charts.

Doug Sahm led the quintet, and the young man was no stranger to the spotlight. He’d been a steel guitar prodigy — learning the instrument at five, hanging out with Hank Williams and earning an invitation to the Grand Ole Opry.

He’d pivoted to garage rock after turning the invite down and was joined in the 1965 quintet by Augie Meyers on Vox organ, Jack Barber, Frank Morin, and Johnny Perez.

The group made music in the mold of San Antonio’s Chicano Soul and West Side Sound, where orquesta tejana met rhythm and blues. You can hear it in the track — the way that Augie’s organ and Barber’s bass line play off one another just as accordion and bajo sexto would in conjunto, all the while channeling Ray Charles’ “What I’d Say” and the Coasters’ hit “Searchin.’”

Huey Meaux, who produced the track, didn’t give it that San Antonio frame, though. Meaux had seen his regional record business suffer in the face of the British Invasion, and so, in his words, “I took a little Phillips phonograph, bought all the Beatles LPs, went to a motel with a case of Thunderbird wine and sat down to figure out what these cats were into.  After two days of drinking and listening, I got it. They were playing the beat on the beat.”

He then called up Doug Sahm, told him to start growing his hair in a Beatle bob and write a song like that. The band dressed in Mod suits and Chelsea boots and wouldn’t reveal their drawls with stage banter.  The Sir Douglas Quintet would come off as British lads.

The thin ruse may or may not have been why the song caught fire. It didn’t last long, though.

The quintet appeared on the TV program Hullabaloo, hosted by fellow Texan Trini Lopez. On a stage that continued the faux-British theme — a fabricated castle, models in knights’ armor, Sahm and the boys in full Merseybeat mode — Lopez came on after the song and told the audience, “But I have a surprise for you,” before unmasking Sir Doug as a Texan.

“I bet we even fooled Lyndon,” Lopez quipped.

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