For all the hoopla over the recently re-emerged Roky Erikson – and its mostly well deserved seeing as the 13^th Floor Elevators are as important to rock and or roll as Nirvana – there’re a slew of relatively unknown figures from decade’s past that maintained a more stringent level of quality. Not to knock Erickson, but listening to his work from the last few decades leaves a bit to be desired.

Hasil Adkins’ catalog doesn’t suffer from that.

Beginning as a boy less than ten years old, Adkins, born in West Virginia some time during the late thirties, started his career by fashioning primitive percussion instruments out of whatever was sitting around – garbage, junk, washtubs, anything. Mesmerized by a neighbor’s guitar and entranced by hillbilly singles he heard blaring from record players, Adkins figured that the sounds could be emulated by a single person. As legend has it, the guitarist, drummer and song writer thought the records he heard were the result of a single person performing. Luckily for listeners he based the rest of his life on that concept.

Rattling around in the hillbilly cum rock and roll ghetto, Adkins reportedly wrote several thousand songs and held within him the knowledge of a few thousand more covers. All of that material was the impetus for Norton Records beginning to distribute his recordings. And seeing as there’s no shortage of material, there persists, even today five years after his death, an outpouring of material.

The majority of his songs might be perceived by straight folks as a clutch of novelty songs – there’s a focus on chickens and contorted body parts alongside all of those sweet and lonely love songs, each rendered in sloppy rockabilly form.

Collected on Chicken Walk, Adkin’s lyrical predilections become pretty clear. Opening with a song the Cramps saw fit to cover, “She Said,” the disc moves on to  include tracks like “The Hunch” as well as less well known tracks like “Miami Kiss.”

What’s remarkable about all of this – apart from the sheer prolific writing abilities Adkin’s possessed – is the variety of rhythmic variation that’s taken advantage of. In previously noting Adkin’s early percussive adventures, which no doubt confounded his parents, those textures and oddly personal beats were somehow transferred to his guitar playing. Sure, most of it counts as revved up, unique country music. But the stop and go approach to so many tracks, including “Donnie Boogie” counts as a unique understand of country and its eventual descendants.