Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels put out a handful of 45s in the mid-60s. The second, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go,” was cut in 1963, in an era where Texas seemed uniquely blessed at combining blues and country music: blues structure and sentiment were married to country subjects and instrumentation. This combination seemed on the whole less conscious than that of examples elsewhere—e.g., the brilliant, but more deliberate musicians at Muscle Shoals. (And in later decades, much of the work in this direction dressed itself a motley of the exterior tics and lyric tropes of both genres.) McClinton’s lyric is as simple as any: somewhat repetitively emphasizing the sense of desperation at the prospect of loss. It’s the strain in his voice, reinforced at intervals with harmony, that provides necessary dimension. I would contrast this with typical genre-form lyrics, which may be successful combinations of words and music, but fail to convey a particular sense of the speaker: they are songs—often good songs—but songs without a voice. McClinton connects.

McClinton was a professional musician from fifteen—not quite as prodigious as Doug Sahm¹—at which point he was in a Ft. Worth house band backing Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland. In a story recounted in Hit Parader he says:

One night we were playing a song called “Fanny Mae” by Buster Brown. We were backing him up and Jimmy Reed in the same night, and I had just bought me a harmonica because they were two of the best, ya know, and I was ready to learn. Well, we were sittin’ in the dressing room before the show—I didn’t drink at the time—but they were both passing a quart of Old Grand-Dad, and I was sittin’ in the middle helping em drink it—never did see the show.

But anyway the harmonica took him on a European tour for Bruce Channell’s “Hey Baby” in 1962, where he met the Beatles and, as quoted in Hit Parader “taught whichever one to play something on blues harp” (some other accounts have it as Lennon). A certain resemblance also follows between “If You Really Want” and the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.” Perhaps that was what helped it eventually hit Billboard, if two years after its initial release. It finally became something of a Texas country standard probably thanks to a version recorded by Waylon Jennings. But success eluded McClinton himself until the late-70s, when he penned “Two More Bottles Of Wine,” which became a number one hit for Emmylou Harris. And in the ’80s—on, as it happens, the Muscle Shoals label—his music became commercially successful but slackened compositionally, trading its hard-earned blues for what sounds to these ears like second-hand soul.

1. Sahm was a San Antonio blues-country musician asked on as a permanent member of the Grand Ole Opry while still in primary school. In fact, Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet covered this tune on their first LP, Mendocino — in 1969, by which point they were hippies and this song was firmly an oldie; yet reconfigured on that album to accommodate Augie March’s Vox transistor organ, it melds in perfectly with their repertoire: McClinton and Sahm, as different as their lyric personalities may be, do seem to share that particular Texas country-blues sensibility.