ARTHUR ALEXANDER – RAINBOW ROAD / DOWN THE BACK ROADS / IN THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL / COME ALONG WITH ME (S4R55)
Arthur Alexander was born in Florence, Alabama in 1940 and in his formative years listened to both Country and R&B radio stations, which influenced both his singing and songwriting style.
Two of his first single releases on the Dot record label in 1962, the self-penned “Anna” and “You Better Move On”, spawned cover versions by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones respectively, which elevated his prominence in the music world.
Further 45 rpm releases on Sound Stage Seven and Monument followed before he was signed to Warner Brothers in 1972. A self-titled album was released in the same year, produced by Tommy Cogbill in Memphis and recorded at American Sound.
Although two singles were released from the album, none of the four tracks featured on this EP were. Here you will find a fabulous take on the much-loved “Rainbow Road” and three other gems.
Arthur died from heart failure in 1993, but his legacy as a unique and individual artist will never be diminished.
Get the Arthur Alexander EP from Soul4Real right here.
TONY JOE WHITE – THIS GUY´S IN LOVE WITH YOU / JUST LOOK AT YOU / KEEP ON MOVIN´ TRAIN / MISSISSIPPI DELTA (S4R54)
The music of Goodwill, Louisiana’s “Swamp Fox” Tony Joe White always had soul at its core.
A songwriter of timeless classics including “Rainy Night In Georgia” and “Polk Salad Annie”, TJW never shied away from ‘outside material’ that suited his style – as demonstrated by two of the four rarities in this Soul4Real release.
Of the 400+ versions of Bacharach/David’s “This Guy’s In Love With You”, just ten preceded TJW’s upbeat treatment, cut at Memphis’ Lyn-Lou Studio in October 1968 along with his own “Keep A Movin’ Train” during his Continued album sessions.
His gutbucket essay on Bobbie Gentry’s “Mississippi Delta” and another original “Just Look At You” were recorded in Paris during TJW’s 1969 European tour – although audibly they could have been tracked closer to home.
These recordings waited 35+ years for release on a now-deleted CD boxed set. This EP presents their 7-inch vinyl debut.
Between 1968 and his passing in October 2018, TJW released 16 studio albums. These rarities from his 60s Monument sessions are integral to that long-playing legacy. – TONY ROUNCE
Get the Tony Joe White EP from Soul4Real right here.
Choctaw Ridge– New Fables of The American South explores a new country sound, one that emerged at the end of the 60s in the wake of Bobbie Gentry's 'Ode To Billie Joe', a shock number one hit in 1967. When singers like Gentry, Jimmy Webb, Michael Nesmith and Lee Hazlewood moved from the south to Los Angeles to make it in the music business, they were not part of the Nashville in-crowd and they forged a new direction.
'Ode To Billie Joe' was the tip of the iceberg, and it's success helped a bunch of singers and storytellers to emerge over the next three or four years. Some of the tracks on this collection bear that song's stamp more clearly than others: Sammi Smith's moody 'Saunders' Ferry Lane' had a similar mystery lyric, and Henson Cargill's 'Four Shades Of Love' is a portmanteau, with one (or possibly two) of the theoretically romantic situations ending in death.
Suddenly, character sketches of southerners became a lot more rounded - women didn't have to stay home, or take abuse at the office, and darkness wasn't only found at the bottom of a bottle. Storytelling is the link between all of the songs on this collection. We have cautionary tales about what could happen to someone who heads for the bright lights and doesn't make it, ending up in the grasping hands of 'Mr Walker' (Billie Joe Spears), or on the 'Back Side Of Dallas' (Jeannie C Reilly), or on a mortuary slab in the case of the songwriter with the 'Fabulous Body And Smile' (Robert Charles Griggs). And there are stories about wanting to go home - Nat Stuckey's 'What Am I Doing In LA?' and Charlie Rich's 'Feel Like Going Home' - and others from Ed Bruce and Lee Hazlewood, who know that their home isn't home anymore.
The tracklist and fulsome sleeve notes have been put together by Bob Stanley (Saint Etienne) and Martin Green (Smashing, The Sound Gallery), who have been collecting these records for decades. The voices are resonant and relatable, and the productions take in the best of what pop had to offer in the late 60s and early 70s. Before the factionalism between smooth pop-conscious Nashville and the hedonistic 'outlaws' made it look inward again, this was a golden era for an atmospheric, inclusive and progressive country music. It began on the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.
Choctaw Ridge – New Fables of The American South, 1968-1973 is out July 30. Pre-order a copy directly from ACE Records right here. Watch Jeannie C. Riley perform "Back Side of Dallas" and listen to Sammi Smith's delightfully dark "Saunders' Ferry Lane" and Jim Ford's epic "Harlan County" – which is among the best of the bunch – following the track listing below.
Choctaw Ridge – New Fables of The American South, 1968-1973
01 The House Song - Lee Hazlewood
02 If Only She Had Stayed - Chris Gantry
03 Endless Miles Of Highway - Jerry Reed
04 The Back Side Of Dallas - Jeannie C Riley
05 Way Before The Time Of Towns - Hoyt Axton
06 Strawberry Farms - Tom T Hall
07 Down From Dover - Dolly Parton
08 July 12, 1939 - Charlie Rich
09 What Am I Doing In LA? - Nat Stuckey
10 Mr Stanton Don't Believe It - Rob Galbraith
11 Saunders' Ferry Lane - Sammi Smith
12 Four Shades Of Love - Henson Cargill
13 Drivin' Nails In The Wall - Waylon Jennings & The Kimberlys
14 Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town - Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
15 Why Can't I Come Home - Ed Bruce
16 Mr Walker, It's All Over - Billie Jo Spears
17 Harlan County - Jim Ford
18 Widow Wimberly - Tony Joe White
19 Belinda (Alt take) - Bobbie Gentry
20 Joanne - Michael Nesmith & The First National Band
21 Mr Jackson's Got Nothing To Do - John Hartford
22 Alone - Lee Hazlewood & Suzi Jane Hokom
23 Fabulous Body And Smile - Sir Robert Charles Griggs
"Bubba Jones" is off Tony Joe White's posthumous Smoke From The Chimney album out May 7th.
Here's the scoop on "Bubba Jones"...
Leave it to the late, great Tony Joe White to write what may very well be the only bonafide badass bass fishing song and never get around to sharing it with the world. That is, until now. Appearing on his upcoming posthumous album, Smoke from the Chimney, "Bubba Jones" follows a mostly-fictional character on his chase to land a world-record largemouth bass.
“My dad loved to fish. It was his favorite hobby,” says White’s son, Jody White. “He would travel many miles to find the best fishing holes, or to explore places he heard about where large fish had been caught.” Jody describes the character as “a hybrid, fictional character that Tony Joe made up in his head, combined with his inner self who had a burning desire to catch the world record largemouth bass.”
In pure Tony Joe White fashion, along with the greasy production from Dan Auerbach, Bubba Jones’s tale unfolds with a rollicking backbeat and deep and smokey vocal delivery—not to mention sweltering slide guitar from Marcus King. Auerbach pegs “Bubba Jones” as quintessential Tony Joe White. “No-one else could do it like Tony Joes does,” says Auerbach. “When is the last song you heard name check Red Man and Gatorade?”
Watch the clip for Tony Joe White's "Bubba Jones" below.
Smoke From The Chimney
Smoke from the Chimney, a nine-song album of never-before-heard Tony Joe White tunes, will be released by Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label on May 7th (you can pre-order a copy right here). Produced by Auerbach and rounded out by Nashville’s most seasoned studio musicians, Smoke from the Chimney started out as a number of unadorned voice and guitar demos from White’s home studio before being transformed into full band arrangements harkening back to the albums he recorded in the late 60s and early 70s in Nashville and Muscle Shoals—just as he was emerging as an internationally recognized songwriter and recording artist.
In the last 10 to 15 years of his life, White would preserve new compositions or revisit older tracks in his home studio with only a guitar—usually his Fender Stratocaster—and that inimitable voice. After his father’s death in 2018, Jody White started transferring those multitrack home recordings to digital files. Looking back on the moment he unearthed the demo of Smoke from the Chimney, he recalls a mix of happiness, gratification, and shock. As he continued to find other songs that didn’t make an album, he moved the material into a separate folder. Within a year, those select recordings would evolve into Smoke from the Chimney.
“These songs feel like a collection to me and they all seem to work together, in a weird way, even though they’re so different,” says Auerbach. “There’s some heartbreaking ballads and some really raunchy carnal blues. But it all works together like scenes of a movie.” The cast of musical characters brought in by Auerbach to accompany White’s guitar and vocal recordings includes legendary keyboardist Bobby Wood (Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett), Nashville pedal steel ace Paul Franklin, next-generation guitar hero Marcus King, and Grammy and ACM award-winning fiddler Stuart Duncan, just to name a few.
Jody believes that his father would love the way Smoke From the Chimney turned out. “I feel like it’s validation that Tony Joe was one of the greatest of all time,” he says. “That he could make something so potent, even so late in life, is something that not many people can do. I think it’s going to make people who loved him already love him even more.”
Tony Joe White's Smoke From The Chimney will be issued by Easy Eye Sound on May 7. Watch the clip for "Boot Money" below.
Here's the scoop...
On May 7, Smoke from the Chimney, a nine-song album of never-before-heard Tony Joe White tunes, will be released on Easy Eye Sound. Produced by Dan Auerbach and rounded out by Nashville’s most seasoned studio musicians, Smoke from the Chimney started out as a number of unadorned voice and guitar demos from White’s home studio before being transformed into full band arrangements harkening back to the albums he recorded in the late 60s and early 70s in Nashville and Muscle Shoals – just as he was emerging as an internationally recognized songwriter and recording artist.
It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to restore something great from the past; to take the time to examine, catalog, and care for every last task without resorting to bolt-on mail-order parts and cheap paint. What was always great deserves that extra care and attention to detail, and when the time came for White’s son and manager, Jody White, to revisit his dad’s catalog of unreleased songs, he knew Auerbach was the one to make them shine once more.
In the last 10 to 15 years of his life, White would preserve new compositions or revisit older tracks in his home studio with only a guitar – usually his Fender Stratocaster – and that inimitable voice. Most of that material would ultimately wind up on his late-career albums. But when an unproven song didn’t make the cut for a release, or if he couldn’t get another artist interested, the song stayed right where it was as Tony Joe moved on to other things. This dismissal was not a reflection of the song’s quality; in fact, it meant quite the opposite, as he would often reserve his best material for other artists.
After his father’s death in 2018, Jody started transferring those multitrack home recordings to digital files. Looking back on the moment he unearthed the demo of Smoke from the Chimney, he recalls a mix of happiness, gratification, and shock. As he continued to find other songs that didn’t make an album, he moved the material into a separate folder. Within a year, those select recordings would evolve into Smoke from the Chimney. Jody says that even in those basic tracks, that definitive Tony Joe White groove instantly stood out. “He always finds a tempo and a pocket that is exactly right. and it’s a little bit different than anybody else would choose themselves,” he says.
Ever since meeting Tony Joe backstage at an Australian music festival in 2009, Auerbach sought to make a record with him. For nearly a decade, Jody tried to line up session time for them but Tony Joe demurred. “For one reason or another, my Dad would never just want to go into a studio and write with somebody, or go work with somebody,” Jody says. “He liked to do it at his place, and his way, and it turned out how it turned out, you know what I mean? So, this album really all worked out perfectly. He was making these tracks for Dan all along, but we just didn’t know it.”
Auerbach agrees. “Jody and I had been talking about this record for so long, and it didn’t happen for a reason,” he says. “It’s because it wasn’t supposed to happen. I was in a nervous cast of characters until the last few years, and if you’d given it to me any earlier, it wouldn’t have been right. I felt like all these people on the record were the right people and they laid in there behind Tony Joe. It felt really magical when we were making it happen.”
“These songs feel like a collection to me and they all seem to work together, in a weird way, even though they’re so different,” says Auerbach, who is releasing the album on his Easy Eye Sound label. “There’s some heartbreaking ballads and some really raunchy carnal blues. But it all works together like scenes of a movie.” The cast of musical characters brought in by Auerbach to accompany White’s guitar and vocal recordings includes legendary keyboardist, Bobby Wood (Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett), Nashville pedal steel ace, Paul Franklin, next-generation guitar hero, Marcus King, and Grammy and ACM award-winning fiddler, Stuart Duncan, just to name a few.
Jody believes that his father would love the way Smoke From the Chimney turned out. “I feel like it’s validation that Tony Joe was one of the greatest of all time,” he says. “That he could make something so potent, even so late in life, is something that not many people can do. I think it’s going to make people who loved him already love him even more.”
Across five decades as a performer and storyteller, Tony Joe White (a.k.a. “The Swamp Fox”) left an indelible mark on American music. His catalog offers indisputable classics such as, Polk Salad Annie and Rainy Night in Georgia, and his songs have been recorded by Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, and Tina Turner.
Tony Joe White – Smoke From The Chimney
1. Smoke from the Chimney
2. Boot Money
3. Del Rio, You’re Making Me Cry
4. Listen to Your Song
5. Over You
6. Scary Stories
7. Bubba Jones
8. Someone Is Crying
9. Billy
You can pre-order a copy of Smoke from the Chimney righthere. Check out Robert Schober's animated clip for "Boot Money" below.
Check out the swampy-sweet title track off Tony Joe White's forthcoming Bad Mouthin' album below.
Tony Joe White’s music is as primal as a lizard’s backbone. It echoes from the magnolia groves and bayous of his Louisiana childhood, and looms into the present every time he unleashes the molasses and tanned-leather combination of his guitar and voice. The legendary songwriter’s new blues-based album, Bad Mouthin’, which arrives September 28, comes straight from the swamps with its blend of classics and five White originals, including two of the first songs he wrote—just before penning his breakthrough hits “Polk Salad Annie” and “A Rainy Night in Georgia” in 1967.
“When and where I grew up, blues was just about the only music I heard and truly loved,” says White, who’s 75 and, if anything, an even more visceral performer than in his youth. “I’ve always thought of myself as a blues musician, bottom line, because the blues is real, and I like to keep everything I do as real as it gets. So, I thought it was time to make a blues record that sounds the way I always loved the music.”
And that’s down-to-the-bone raw. Over the course of Bad Mouthin’ s 12 songs, White conjures a world of meaning that transcends the lyrics of classics like Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man,” Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Awful Dreams,” and Charley Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” using his deep river of a voice and the dark, spartan tones of his guitar to evoke the mystical South—a place where ghosts roam among abandoned pecan groves covered in Spanish moss and, indeed, the Devil might be encountered at a moonlit crossroads.
That White—who has penned hits and cuts for a compendium of fellow legends from Elvis Presley (“Poke Salad Annie”) to Brook Benton (“A Rainy Night in Georgia”) to Dusty Springfield (“Willie and Laura Mae Jones”) to Eric Clapton (“Did Somebody Make a Fool Out of You”) to Tina Tuner (“Steamy Windows”) to Willie Nelson (“Problem Child”) to Kenny Chesney (also “Steamy Windows”) to Robert Cray (who recorded White’s “Don’t Steal My Love” and “Aspen, Colorado” just last year)—would now craft a blues album after more than 50 years establishing himself as a heroic figure spanning the rock, country, R&B, and Americana genres is an incredible testament to his versatility as well as to his roots.
Mostly, Bad Mouthin’ features White accompanied solely by his road-worn 1965 Fender Stratocaster, the guitar he’s favored for his entire career. That’s all he needs to conjure the same kind of simmering emotional magic that John Lee Hooker distilled into his historic solo recordings—just one man and one guitar essentially defining what it means to be human in a story as simple and yet as profound as a Zen koan.
Five of Bad Mouthin’s stories, “Stockholm Blues,” “Rich Woman Blues,” “Cool Town Woman,” “Sundown Blues” and the title track, are plucked from his own past. When he sings “Bad Mouthin’,” about an abusive lover, White’s voice rings with the weariness of a man pushed to his limits. And in “Sundown Blues,” his spare lyrics capture the essence of a lonely heart over a slow smoky shuffle reminiscent of Hooker’s famed lowdown boogie beat.
On both of those tunes—which are early, rediscovered compositions that White first recorded for a local label in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1966—and two others, drummer Bryan Owings backs White. Owings is White’s frequent accompanist on tour, in the two-man band format that White enjoys. Owings has also performed and recorded with Emmylou Harris, Justin Townes Earle, Wanda Jackson, and many others. The duo are joined by bassist Steve Forrest on two numbers. And the album was produced by Jody White and engineered by Ryan McFadden.
Their recording strategy was unconventional. White moved a hodgepodge of gear from his home to his barn, where two former horse stalls became their studio. “The cement-floor saddle room with unfinished wood paneling had a window unit air conditioning box that had to be turned off for recording,” says McFadden. “The next stall over had a dirt floor covered with glued composite board. Tony cancelled the first session, saying he couldn’t sing in there because of the chemical smell of the glue. When I went back, Tony had filled the stalls with bowls of coffee grounds, cups of rice, dryer sheets, and decorative brooms made of bound twigs that were drenched in a cinnamon scent, sold at grocery stores around Halloween.” After that, each song was cut live in one or two takes. The approach perfectly captured the laidback open sound and sliding chords with thumb-plucked low-string lines that defines White’s blues-drenched guitar style. Since White plays good and loud, they put his 1951 Fender Deluxe amplifier in the back of his Land Rover, so its bawling tones wouldn’t interfere with the vocals and percussion tracks.
White, who was born in 1943 as the youngest of seven children on a cotton farm about 20 miles from the nearest town, Oak Grove, Louisiana, says the foundation of his music “comes from hearing blues singers play guitar with maybe just a harmonica or stomping their feet for accompaniment.” Adding a drummer, he cut his teeth playing school dances and then moved on to nightclubs along the Texas and Louisiana “crawfish circuit” of rough and tumble watering holes. And then the hits started happening, with “Polk Salad Annie” reaching number eight on the pop charts in 1968. Two years later, Brook Benton’s recording of “A Rainy Night in Georgia” topped the soul charts, and it’s been a wild ride since: decades of touring and recording marked by hit songs and collaborations with the likes of Eric Clapton, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mark Knopfler.
“If there’s anything like a line connecting everything that I’ve done, I would say it’s realness,” says White. “Even my songs that are sweet little love ballads—those are all real, inspired by real love and real life. Being real, being focused on what’s really going on around you, is something I learned early in my life.”
He pauses and laughs. “When you’re a little kid growing up down in the swamps, and you step on a cottonmouth … that’s real.”
