The Swamp Fox
Author of Polk Salad Annie, Rainy Night In Georgia and more, Tony Joe White left us on October 24.
HALF A century ago, as psychedelia settled down, American pop/rock had its mind blown afresh. It discovered the exotic fantasia of its own hinterland, most fascinatingly in the steamy backwaters and back roads around the Mississippi Delta. Where The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s songs sprang from study and imagination, perhaps the supreme stylist of what producer Jerry Wexler coined as ‘swamp rock’ was the real thing. The seventh son of a Louisiana cotton picking family, Tony Joe White, born in July 1943 and felled by a heart attack in October, never left his rural roots, with stardom something he could take or leave despite having all the rugged good looks and slow Southern charm of the next Elvis Presley. Inspired to sing and play when his brother brought home a Lightnin’ Hopkins record, White was a wilful primitive performing Elvis, Hopkins and John Lee Hooker tunes with just a Stratocaster, his “whompa stompa” wah wah pedal and a drummer recruited when his own foot on a Coke crate no longer boogied hard enough for the bucket-of-blood clubs of Louisiana and Texas. Hearing Bobbie Gentry’s Number 1 smash Ode To Billie Joe in the summer of ’67 sparked him into songwriting, likewise drawn from life and local lore, however improbable that might seem on, say, 1971’s They Caught The Devil And Put Him In Jail In Eudora, Arkansas. That record’s Stax-style driving rhythm and horns fleshed out White’s unvarnished growl and stabbing, chattering guitar, the whole funky gumbo irresistibly evocative of the gnarled, fertile, insanely humid South. Though his albums seldom sold beyond the cognoscenti who read songwriting credits on other performers’ hits, he never seemed too bothered, mostly thanks to Elvis adding White’s 1968 song Polk Salad Annie to his regular live set, then Brook Benton’s multimillion-selling 1970 version of the instant classic ballad Rainy Night In Georgia. That his own profile remained low is demonstrated when, 19 years later, Tina Turner cut four new Tony Joe songs on her hit album Foreign Affair; meeting him, she burst out laughing, having assumed he must be black. Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Shelby Lynne, Nancy Wilson, Etta James, Isaac Hayes, Joe Bonamassa and Carmen McRae also covered his songs, and in 2014 the Foo Fighters’ televised version of Polk Salad Annie introduced him to a new, younger audience. Rejuvenated in the new millennium as a songwriter and recording artist, Tony Joe White never reinvented himself, with his last studio album Bad Mouthin’ including ’60s live staples Boom Boom and Baby Please Don’t Go among its compelling blues covers. He may not have been a wide-ranging artist, but he cut soul deep.
“Stardom was something he could take or leave.”