Song Of The Day 3/28/2016: Swamp Dogg – “I Was Born Blue”

King Dinosaur offered up Swamp Dogg as part of Themeless Week. Man, oh man, what can you say about Swamp Dogg? A prolific R&B artist who said everything that was on his mind for about 20 years straight. And he wouldn't have come into our lives had a soul music wunderkind named Jerry Williams, Jr. not been screwed out of a lot of money in the accountancy-optional '60s music industry. Swamp Dogg was Williams' 1970 reinvention, at once an earnest eff-you to the self-cleaning major-label industry and the purest R&B expressionist the decade would ever see. He recorded everything he did in relative isolation in Alabama.  “I liked the ‘Dog’ part,” he told Spin. “A dog can shit on your rug, do anything, and you still like him. I just said, ‘put two g’s on that motherfucker.’ Now I had my own category." So he took the harder aspects of Muscle Shoals R&B, combined them with the satirical stance of his favorite Frank Zappa records, and came up with albums with seriously screwed-up cover photos like Total Destruction to Your Mind (released 1970, certified gold 1992) and the above, Rat On! Today's plaintive cry "I Was Born Blue" -- he may actually be talking about being born literally blue -- was from the former. Thanks King!