Poultry In Motion: The Hasil Adkins Chicken Collection, 1955-1999

Chickens were to Hasil Adkins what blue suede shoes were to Elvis, what horn-rimmed glasses were to Buddy Holly, what the duck walk was to Chuck Berry. Chickens were his signature, his muse, his motivator. Over his 50-year career, Adkins recorded dozens of songs using chicken symbolism—they're mentioned as often in tunes about sex and murder as they were in songs about eating. For this reason, Norton Records decided to compile an all-chicken release for its penultimate collaboration with Hasil. The earliest song here is 1955’s “Chicken Walk,” a dance-punk tune recorded in the shack behind the Adkins family home in Boone County, W.V. From there, the tracks skip from 1986’s “Chicken Flop” (a tight, clean tune by Adkins standards) to 1962’s “Chicken Twist,” a gnarly, detuned blues trudge. To celebrate the compilation, Hasil penned six new chicken songs, a manageable order for the man who wrote 7,000 songs before dying in 2007. Even though they're separated by decades, the new songs exist on the same continuum as the old ones, proving that while history moved forward, the Haze remained in his own zone, gnawing happily on an infinite portion of poultry.