Tony Joe White
Live From Austin, Tx (RP RSD 19)

Recorded live December 5, 1980 and features the classic ‘Polk Salad Annie’ along with ‘Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up Tp Be Cowboys’. Few rockers wring more out of less, and cut across more musical categories in the process, than Tony Joe White. The bard of the Louisiana swampland makes it look so natural and sound so organic, telling stories with his wah-wah guitar over a spare, stripped-down rhythm section. Yet this 1980 live taping for the Austin City Limits series offers more than variations on a theme of “Polk Salad Annie” (his 1969 smash about a granny-chomping gator). As a writer, he shows an affinity for tender balladry on the soulful “Rainy Night in Georgia” (a chart-topper for Brook Benton) and “Billy,” while cuts such as “Mama Don’t Let Your Cowboys Grow Up to Be Babies,” “Red Neck Women” (not to be confused with Gretchen Wilson), and “That’s the Way a Cowboy Rocks and Rolls” would find him today classified as country. Though “Disco Blues” is pure boogie, “I Get Off on It” could pass as disco. And for those who can’t get enough of “Polk Salad Annie,” there’s plenty more in that vein as well. –Don McLeese.