Tony Joe White was a firm favourite artist from the first time I saw him, appearing at the BBC Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street, London, recording a set for Radio One’s ‘In Concert’ series back in 1973. His rich, deep south voice and groove-style guitar made an immediate impression on me, and my selected video clip is one of his best-known songs, ‘Polk Salad Annie’, which I recall he played on that first live acquaintance.
Interviewed in 2014, White said, “I heard ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ on the radio, and I thought, man, how real, because I am Billie Joe, I know that life. I’ve been in the cotton fields. So I thought if I ever tried to write, I’m going to write about something I know about“. So his song references his upbringing in rural Louisiana, a hard life but with larger-than-life characters; the title character is named after a girl who collects pokeweed, looking like a turnip green, which grows wild in the swamps, to make a poor man’s salad, tasting a bit like spinach. Annie “made the alligators look tame”, her mother worked on a chain gang, and the song has some classic lines, including “gators got yer grannie, chomp chomp”.
There are plenty of live performances to choose from on YouTube; this is my favourite, recorded in Austin, Texas, in 1980, with White playing as a trio as he often preferred, complete with a spoken intro over the tightest of grooves, starting with a call to his bassist and drummer of ‘4’. This performance includes some trademark bluesy grunts and growls, a funk guitar solo while keeping that groove moving, and harmonica.
Elvis Presley took to the song and featured it in his live shows during the 1970s, but White’s own take on his song couldn’t be beaten even by the King himself (IMHO)!
