ALBUM: Tony Joe White, ‘The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings’
At the start of the ‘70s, Tony Joe White seemed on the verge of major stardom. His tongue-in-cheek, country-blues song “Polk Salad Annie,” released off his first album, 1968’s Black and White, had been a sleeper hit, climbing into the Billboard Top 10 nearly a year after it was released. In 1970, soul singer Brook Benton took another one of White’s compositions, “Rainy Night in Georgia,” to the Top 10 as well, while Dusty Springfield earned a modest hit with “Willie and Laura Mae Jones.”
More important than chart success, however, White had talent. The Oak Grove, Louisiana native’s distinctive sound dwelled somewhere between the bluesy, swampy rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bobbie Gentry’s country-soul-folk vignettes, topped with an earthier version of Elvis’s solidly Southern baritone. On the one hand, White stood out because no one else sounded quite like him. On the other hand, his disregard for conventional genre (and racial) lines made him a difficult prospect for a major label to market.
Nevertheless, Warner Bros. Records was eager to try. After recording his first three albums for the smaller label Monument Records, White switched to Warner Bros. for his next trilogy. These three records — 1971’s Tony Joe White, 1972’s The Train I’m On, and 1973’s Homemade Ice Cream — have now been collected by Real Gone Music on The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings, along with six single sides released between 1971 and 1974. Together, these recordings provide a portrait of a songwriter and musician at the peak of his powers, assisted with the kind of options and support that major label backing could buy.
Along with the change in labels came a change in producers — and potentially a change in sound. At Monument, White’s sessions had been helmed by Billy Swan, a Nashville songwriter whose tastes were simpatico with White’s. (Swan would go on to write and perform the number-one country-pop hit “I Can Help” in 1974.) White’s first album at Warner Bros., however, fell to the less-likely, but bigger-named, Peter Asher, formerly of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon (“A World Without Love”). Asher had since embarked on a second career on the other side of the recording booth, producing and managing James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. Those artists’ solidly mainstream folk-pop may have seemed an odd fit with a performer as idiosyncratic White, but fortunately Asher let White keep all his Southern grit.
Tony Joe White (1971) kicks off strong with arguably the best song White recorded at Warner Bros.: “They Caught the Devil and Put Him in Jail in Eudora, Arkansas,” a rocker combining a Southern gothic premise with the slice-of-life specificity of Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” This mixture of the fantastical and the mundane places the song in the uncanny realm of a distant childhood memory — one that, on its face, couldn’t possibly be real, yet features just enough concrete details that always nags at the back of your mind.
The rest of Tony Joe White lives up to this opener, from the dusky groover “The Change,” which subtly equates the transition into autumn with a more sweeping transformation, to the wah-wah barnburner “Voodoo Village,” to a take on the moonshiner’s anthem “Copper Kettle,” which simultaneously borrows heavily from Bob Dylan’s version and improves on it. Even potentially maudlin material, like the reunion of lovers after wartime (“Five Summers for Jimmy”) and a plea for paternal respect (“The Daddy”), are rescued due to White’s sincerity and sensitive eye. Likewise, “A Night in the Life of a Swamp Fox” enlivens the tired “it’s hard to be a rock star” cliche with a heavy dose of self-effacing humor. (As a bonus, you’ll learn what song obnoxious audience members used to request before “Free Bird.” Hint: it wasn’t “Polk Salad Annie.”) In short, there’s not a single weak track on Tony Joe White, his best album and an under-appreciated country-soul-blues-rock classic. If the compilation contained this album alone, it would already be an essential listen.
Luckily, White’s follow-up, 1972’s The Train I’m On, is no slouch, either. The album swaps out Asher for legendary producer and A&R man Jerry Wexler (best known for his work with Aretha Franklin), the Memphis Horns for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and the driving swamp rock for a mellower sound. The album opens with the inviting low-key groover “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby,” which Elvis Presley would make a Top 40 hit a few years later. The rest of The Train I’m On is more stylistically diverse than Tony Joe White, encompassing New Orleans R&B (“If I Ever Saw a Good Thing”), 12-bar blues (“As the Crow Flies”), novelty guitar workouts (“Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll”), and gospel-style organ (“The Train I’m On”).
As is often the case with White, however, the highlights of The Train I’m On are his sympathetic character sketches and story songs. Soulful ballad “The Family” introduces the album’s running theme of escape, showing that sometimes the best way to deal with a crumbling family unit is to just get out. The minimalist folk of “Sidewalk Hobo” paints a vivid picture of the faded life of a man on society’s edges with little more than an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. Best of all, however, is “The Gospel Singer,” a parable about a small town that awaits a visit by the title musician as eagerly as if he were Jesus Christ, only to betray their sacred values when he fails to meet to their hypocritical standards.
The lower-keyed sound that White showcased on The Train I’m On is stripped down even further on 1973’s Homemade Ice Cream, co-produced by White and influential engineer Tom Dowd. Apart from opening track “Saturday Night in Oak Grove, Louisiana,” a nostalgic reflection on smalltown teenage hanging out, and the bloozy “No News is Good News,” there’s little on the album that could be classified as a rocker. Instead, the album is heavy on lonesome ballads (including “For Ol’ Times Sake,” another favorite of Elvis) and laidback, sun-dappled folk. As a result, Homemade Ice Cream has a somewhat samey feel, popping a little less than its more eclectic predecessors. The darker clouds that hover over the record, however, are the most intriguing, whether it’s the swaggering “Backwoods Preacher Man,” which paints the Man of God as a man of action, or the haunting, regret-filled “Takin’ the Midnight Train” and “Did Somebody Make a Fool Out of You,” the latter of which adds a semi-menacing edge to White’s typically amiable persona.
After a pair of singles released in 1974, “Sign of the Lion” and the “unintentionally ironic” (to quote Ben Edmonds’ liner notes) “Don’t Let the Door (Hit You in the Butt),” Warner Bros. cut White loose, having failed to wring a single hit out of him. He bounced from label to label for his next three albums, updating his sound for the slicker new country sound. After getting his groove back at the end of the ‘80s, writing several songs for Tina Turner (including the hit “Steamy Windows”), White relaunched himself as a performer with the album Closer to the Truth in 1991. Those recording sessions returned him to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio where he recorded The Train I’m On nearly 20 years earlier. This time around, he was no longer an up-and-comer, but a veteran who had survived the vagaries of the music industry — one who managed to stay true to his swampy soul, even as it cost him his chance at stardom.
Order your two-disc set of Tony Joe White: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings from Real Gone Music today!
