Roll Your Moneymaker

“Everybody Knows the Hound!”

Filmed at the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival Hound Dog Taylor (slide guitar and vocals), and his House Rockers featuring Brewer Phillips (bass), and Ted Harvey (drums).

The year after the release of his debut album “Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers” on the Alligator label, the Chicago trio led by Hound Dog Taylor found themselves on stage at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Their recent record was consider one of the greatest slide guitar albums of all time so it was no surprise that they would be invited back to attend the festival the following year.

In 1958, Chicago blues singer and harmonica player Shakey Jake Harris recorded “Roll Your Moneymaker” with a band including Magic Sam on guitar and Willie Dixon on bass. The song, a twelve-bar blues with breaks, featured the chorus “roll your moneymaker”. According to one Elmore James biographer, “Chicago blues lore has it that drummer & vocalist James Bannister was the author of a tune known as ‘Roll Your Moneymaker’, but never recorded it.”

Elmore James recorded “Shake Your Moneymaker” as an up-tempo twelve-bar blues featuring slide guitar at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios in New Orleans, Louisiana during a non-union, session during the summer of 1961. It was noted that the e in James’ “Shake Your Moneymaker” was inspired by “Got the Blues Can’t Brhythm guitar figure Satisfied”, recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928.

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