Carnival of Soul

A little more than midway through Allen Hill’s album “All Over the Map With Allen Hill,” he turns down the volume a little and offers “Soul Travels,” a song that finds him singing a philosophical type tune about musical stylings with Houston legend Archie Bell.

The song touches on the old Doug Sahm comment: “You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul.”

Sahm is a sort of spiritual godfather of Hill’s album, right down to the album’s cover, with Hill striking a pose as an homage to a well-known cover photo of a Sahm’s anthology.

Hill, like his hero, believes there’s good and bad music, but he also believes the scale slides depending on the listener. “Whether it’s Khalid or the Kingsmen, if I like it, I like it,” he says. “And if I don’t . . . I’m happy somebody else does.”

He plays in several local bands, but Hill is best known in Houston as the preservationist and figurehead of the Allen Oldies Band, a group that uproots diamonds from a radiant time in music history from the 1960s. He’s the kind of person who absolutely doesn’t see “one-hit wonder” as a pejorative, but rather a badge of honor.

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He’s a Houston music lifer for more than 30 years, playing with Banana Blender Surprise, the El Orbits and so many other bands, a scroll of names would devour my space here. With “All Over the Map,” though, he gets back to his youth when he was working on new songs rather than preserving old ones. Some of the tunes date back to the early ‘90s. A few were written minutes before he recorded them for the record. But he lets the tone of the record arise not from some singularly defined vibe or genre, but rather the breadth of his affinities.

He points out that “Soul Travels” zips along with his life and career making music in Texas.

“That song is more about an attitude of being authentic and true, and respecting the past while creating the future,” he says. “I remember after Stevie Ray Vaughan died, everybody with a hat and a Strat was trying to play his licks. And they didn’t know that the licks they were playing were Albert King licks. The whole point of Stevie’s sound was taking the past and making that part of your own sound. Stevie’s gift was like that of Doug Sahm, Archie Bell, Wilson Pickett, Roy Head, George Jones, Willie Nelson. You know them immediately. And you pay attention. That to me is the definition of ‘soul’.”

Not surprising for a guy as busy as Hill — who runs a brisk music booking business by day — the album is teeming with movement, whether it’s the surf-rock songs like “Surfer’s Sunset” or tunes with more narrative like “2 Gigs and a 1 Way Ticket to Amsterdam,” which was written from his own musical travels, with a chorus that expresses a sort of enthusiasm at impending travel, while the verses tell the story.

So “All Over the Map” proves a title that refers to Hill’s decades of music-related travel while also touching on the variety of sounds on his album as well as the very different sorts of musicians he books. There should be something for everybody somewhere on the record. After all, Hill’s philosophy is such that the music we divide into genres often grows from the same soil. But he’s aware different listeners hear different songs.

“Look, with a booking business, you’re going to get opinions,” he says. “So I know it’s all subjective. And I tell people that. I say it’s like eating food, only most people don’t hire bands three times a day. But I want you to have an opinion. Love something or hate it. I learned that with the Allen Oldies Band. You play for kids, and you realize with each song you’re either the devil or the guy that has the biggest bang of candy on the planet. If they cover their ears, that’s a clear zero-star review. But when you see them dancing, that’s better than any review.”

andrew.dansby@chron.com