Skinny Legs and All

The horns announce this one with a kind of gleeful absurdity — punchy, loose, grinning. Tex was one of the great Southern soul raconteurs, a man who understood that humor and sensuality weren't opposites but natural partners, and this record is the full expression of that instinct. The groove is lean and insistent, James Brown-adjacent but with a rolling ease that Brown's recordings rarely permitted, the rhythm section locking into something almost hypnotic beneath Tex's increasingly animated delivery. The subject is desire divorced from conventional beauty standards — Tex preaching, testifying, declaring attraction without apology, with the conviction of a revival tent sermon. His vocal range here is less about technical display and more about charisma and timing, the voice an instrument of persuasion and comedy in equal measure. The backing singers punctuate his proclamations with mock-serious affirmations, the whole thing functioning as performance and argument simultaneously. This came out of the same early-'60s Southern soul moment that Tex helped define — rougher than the Detroit sound, earthier, less concerned with polish. It's a party song in the deepest sense, the kind that sounds better when the room is full and the floor is sticky. You put this on when you want something that will make people laugh before it makes them move.