“There’s just something in the air you know with me, down the South,” explains Tony Joe White in his distinctive drawl when I ask him what draws him back to Tennessee. “The fishing holes, the rivers, the swamps, the atmosphere the speed of things: it’s just a little bit slower, laid back.
“That’s what I’m saying. It’s kind of like Australia in a way to me. In the South you can kind of kick back a little bit.”
Of course, White is almost the living definition of ‘laid back’ though this belies the massive success he has had over the years with his songs – not necessarily for himself all the time (since the days of ‘Polk Salad Annie’).
White recalls that the turning point in his career came when he heard Bobbie Gentry’s song ‘Ode To Billy Joe.’
“At that time I had just left Louisiana, got out of hospital, was playing the clubs in Texas and Louisiana,” he remembers. “I hadn’t started writing really yet. I was just playing a lot of covers, a lot of Elvis Presley, a lot of Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and that thing, a lot of blues. When I heard ‘Ode To Billy Joe’ on the radio I thought, ‘Man! How real is that, I know that life,’ and I said, ‘boy if I ever start writing, I’m going to write something I know about.’
“So when it started coming down - and it wasn’t too much longer after that – ‘Polk Salad Annie’ started coming to me and ‘Rainy Night In Georgia’ - because I’d eating a lot of polk salad, because I had been in Georgia when it was raining at night. So that’s how it started. I was very lucky, from the start of it to write for a good reason, and that is from the truth.”
Believe it or not, White wrote both songs in the course of just one week – probably he most important week of his life.
“As it turned out those two songs enabled me to play my music and record it the way I wanted to the rest of my life,” he says. “That’s like financial and everything. Those two songs let me have a studio and let me write and play the way I wanted to and tour the way I wanted to so yeah, the most important week.”
While his songs have been covered by the likes of Elvis Presley, Tina Turner and even our own Beasts of Bourbon – and literally hundreds of others - White has always pursued his own recording career. It is a career that seems to have gained him more recognition in Europe and Australia than in his home country.
White’s last album, Uncovered, featured guest appearances from Eric Clapton, JJ Cale, Mark Knopfler, Waylon Jennings and Michael McDonald. It did not quite become the massive success that I predicted but it did affirm the esteem in which White is held by his peers.
Interestingly enough, for his new album Deep Cuts, White has you have gone back and revisited some of his earlier songs under the guidance of his son Jody. The result is, as the album title suggests, a batch of grooves as deep as a furrow on the Mississippi Delta.
While they has avoided ‘Polk Salad Annie’ he has recut ‘High Sheriff (of Calhoun Parish),’ ‘Roosevelt & Ira Lee’ ‘Homemade Icecream,’ ‘Soul Francisco’ and ‘Willie and Laura Mae Jones’ (also recently covered by his friend Shelby Lynne).
The new arrangements for the songs feature White’s rumbling voice and his distorted fuzz-box guitar in swamp funk beats and loops produced by his son Jody, who convinced his father to record the songs in analogue and then let him transform them with ProTools.
“He said to me, ‘I just want people of my generation and other generations to hear some of these words back then with a kind of a different groove to it, with a now type beat,” explains White. “I handed them over to Jody. I never would go to his place at all. I let him take it and just do it man. I thought he did a beautiful job of maintaining the swamp and adding the now to it.”
White explains that they only way the album would have happened is because, “it was blood, you know, my own son.”
The album, which opens with a two minute instrumental, appropriately titled ‘Set The Hook,’ is sure to evoke some interesting responses from long-time fans. If there is any justice it might also win him some younger fans.
“It would always be a surprise to me,” he continues, “because I never knew what he was going to do to it. It’s like turning your stuff over to a mad scientist up in his studio late at night, just sitting there figuring out all the grooves and stuff to do to your guitar. I went, ‘Man that’s pretty wild.’ So I thought it turned out cool.”
“There was no one else that could have done it,” he says of the album, which sounds like a Harley-Davidson rolling down Highway 61, “because he’s known these tunes all his life and he knew what he could mess with and what he could not mess with.”
White says that so far the reaction from fans has been positive. Late last year he did a 25-date tour of Europe and he says, “most everybody… was really into the whole thing, even the regulars, the regular swampers who come dig some music that way. I had a lot of audience that was 17, 18 year old kids coming now to it. So it so I do think he did reach a bunch of different ones.”
We will soon get a chance to hear the new Tony Joe White when he arrives with drummer Jeff Hale and Moogy Man, keyboard player Tyson Rogers.
“We are going to have a little more kick to it this time,” he says. “I love to come and play for the Australian people and the country itself. I’ve always told everybody if didn’t live over in the South I would live in Australia.”
Deep Cuts is available now through Swamp Records.