Listen/Download -GeneTaylor – The Hunch
Greetings all.
We have arrived together at the end of yet another week, surprisingly enough, intact.
Thanks to a lifetime of dental neglect – interrupted repeatedly by trips to the dentist for succor – I am now nursing a toothache, which thanks to my convoluted schedule I won’t be able to have treated until next week. I shall bear up as best I can, and hope I don’t get punched in the mouth (not as easy as you’d think…).
The tune I bring you today was something I picked up back in the spring at one of the Asbury Lanes Garage/Record sales. Despite the fact that these little soirees often look dismal upon first approach, they have proven to be surprisingly fertile when it comes to excavating vinyl. There are never a whole lot of dealers, but the ones that do show up often have a select few quality items for those willing to dig.
This particular visit saw the arrival of a cat I had never seen before with about a dozen boxes of sleeved 45s. I made a beeline to his spot (perched between two lanes) and started working. I generally flip through singles a handful at a time (easier than checking them out inside the boxes), and managed to find something cool in the first stack. Who knows, had that first box been nothing but chaff, I might have moved on, but it wasn’t, so I didn’t, and ended up going home with a nice, fat stack of quality one-dollar records, the vast majority of which were worth far more (many of them having appeared in this space in the time since).
When I happened upon ‘The Hunch’ by Gene Taylor, neither the song nor the artist were familiar, but my Spidey sense suggested to me that I was looking at yet another soul dance 45, so I dropped it into the keeper stack and kept on working.
As it turns out, my suspicions were correct. Now, I understand that on does not need to be Sherlock Holmes to make the assumption I did, but give me some credit here.
When I got the record home and placed the needle on the wax, I was rewarded with an upbeat Northern-friendly dancer. The overall vibe suggests an affinity for the sounds of Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago and as suggested previously, the lyrics are fairly standard dance-craze ish. The record is very cool, but gets a lot cooler once the handclaps and the sax solo come in about halfway through.
The bummer here is that I have been unable to turn up anything of substance on Mr. Taylor himself. There is precious little info on the record label (other than that he seems to have written the song). I found a number of mentions that Taylor returned to the studio in 1969 (four years after ‘The Hunch’) to record a deep soul 45 for Minit records (produced in Memphis by Bobby Womack), and a couple of intriguing mentions that suggest that Taylor was from the south (one placing him in New Orleans, which I have been unable to back up).
If Taylor was indeed from New Orleans, he wouldn’t be alone in his emulation of the Chitown sound, having been preceded by both Eddie Bo (‘Let’s Let It Roll’) and Eldridge Holmes (‘Emperor Jones’) in that regard.
If anyone has any solid info on Mr. Taylor, please drop me a line.
I hope you dig the song, and I’ll be back Monday with a new edition of the Funky16Corners Radio podcast.
Peace
Larry
Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press
PS Head over to Iron Leg for some LA folk rock.
Funky16Corners 
December 11, 2009 at 8:29 am
This record was new to me as well. It comes late on in the dance craze era, and people didn’t seem to hunch in any great number did they? But it’s a great record, and thanks for introducing me to it. I’m off for a hunch now.