The Swamp Fox Returns, April 2001
Maybe best known for his hits Polk Salad Annie and the hits he has written for people such as Tin Turner,
TONY JOE WHITE is a compelling performer - and firm festival favourite - in his own right.
LAST YEAR on a trip to Louisiana we wandered off the interstate in our rented Ford Taurus and landed in what seemed to be a rather nondescript place called Oak Grove. But, of course, Byron Festival-goers this is akin to visiting the Vatican (okay, maybe that is a stretch!) because it just happens to be near the birthplace of one of the favourite visitors to Byron, Tony Joe White - a man, who is as quiet and paidback as the place in which he was born. (In fact, you start to think that the phrase 'laid bark' was coined just for him).
"It weren't even no town" he recalls, in his usual relaxed style, "there was a church and a cotton gin and one store like the outback. Musically, most people around there were into gospel and that kind of thing and I'd bear it in church a lot. I kind I got into the blues early when I was about fifteen, my brother brought an album home of Lightnin' Hopkins. So it was like, we didn't have much else to do other than play the guitar, work and go to school. So with an environment like that it made music really special to me, because it was a big part of my life."
Obviously the quiet life gave TJW plenty of time to hone his writing skills and by the time he was eighteen he had left high school and was playing small clubs.
"I had left Louisiana and went to Texas," he says. "I was doing a lot of Elvis Presley, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin' Hopkins. I kind of got tired of singing everybody else's songs, so I decided to sit down and try and do something that I knew about and I knew about polk salad and rainy nights down in Georgia. I use to work down there for the Highway Department. So, I just borrowed it out of desperation because I was getting tired of everybody else's songs."
There was one song in particular that was a surprising inspiration for Tony - Bobby Gentry's Ode To Billy Joe.
"When I heard that song," he explains, "I thought, you know man, 'I m Billy Joe, I've lived that life' and I was going, 'that's so cool that somebody has laid down the truth in what was really something they knew about.' I think that had a lot of effect on me too. Whatever it was, I was glad it had kicked in."
One of the biggest surprise of all." he says, "Because I didn't know nothing about other people cutting your songs. I was just writing and playing. I was doing a lot of Elvis stuff in the clubs. I had my hair combed in teh big wave and I could really sing pretty well like him in them days. Then all af a sudden someone calls us and says Elvis is getting ready te do Polk Salad Annie in Las Vegas and I thought 'Man, there ain't no boundaries in music.'
"We hung out together out there and then I saw him in Memphis a couple I times. He always treated me really good man. He liked writers and he liked guitar playing. He didn't know too much guitar work, but he liked my own licks and stuff. He always treated me really cool, I wish he, could have stuck around a lot longer."
While Tony Joe's own recording career might have been spasmodic (due to shortsighted record companies) it was his songwriting which sustained him and one of his biggest breaks came with Tina Turner's multi-platinum album Foreign Affairs included four of his songs including the hit Steamy Windows.
"It was almost like a dream to do something like that because Tina was up on my pedestal list as high as you can get," says the songwriter "It may have been even bigger than meeting Elvis... but to be in the studio with her and record and not only getting to play guitar with her but recording four of the songs - I was just like floating along. Man, I was just kind of like flying."
"Tina Turenr thought I was black, until we met in the studio," laughs Tony "She said ever since Polk SaIad Annie she said, 'I always thought you were a black man.' She was just dying laughing when she saw my white face sticking in the dressing room there."
Coinciding with his latest tour of Australia, White will have a brand new acoustic album available.
"That's an album I have had in mind for about twenty-five, thirty years." he explains. "People have always asked me if I would ever do an acoustic, solo album. My studio is an old house, kind of like a hotel, it had a bell on top, it's got tall ceilings and wooden floors and good echo in the room. I just had a microphone on my acoustic, one on my voice and I put a microphone on my foot down by the floor. I just left it set up over a period of six, seven months and when I felt it I'd stop, sit down and sing a song, play it. All of a sudden I had the whole album ready"
Tony finds his song writing inspiration by taking his guitar and a couple of six-pack of beer into the woods near his house, lighting a campfire and sitting up all night writing. (Kind of like the way we prepare the magazine!).
It gives new meaning to the term 'woodshedding.'
"Come bark in a few days later and if I don't push it, it's usually all right," he laughs. "I con promise you, I don't write much. It's like, just over a period of a few hours through the night, it kind of helps you concentrate to get out, it gives you a little buzz, cold beer. Sometimes I write on the road, but very seldom. It's usually after i get back."
While his new album might be quietly acoustic TJW's stage show is anything but serene. Armed with his drummer "Boom Boom" the singer/songwriter/guitarist makes enough noise to make you believe that there are four musicians on stage. In fact, I have seen people backstage, checking for other musicians!
"Boom Boom jut lays a good foot in there and there's a high hat and big snare," says White, "My guitar is kind of mellow, it sounds like at least there's a bass and some other thing every now and than. But I have had people say it sounds like seven pieces going. But it's like, it's a happening, there's some feeling thing. There's something wild about on stage with just me and the drummer because I can switch to any song at my time and do anything!"
April 2001.
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