Tony Joe White teams up with British “desert disco” duo Flying Mojito Bros on a posthumous collection of unreleased songs by the swamp rock king.
The swampy southern twang and growling vocal of this tune could only come from one man – Tony Joe White. And it does.
He was the originator of “swamp rock” who sang the original version of Polk Salad Annie, a song synonymous with his upbringing in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana.
It was a big US hit for him back in 1969 though I first heard it the following year when a live version by Elvis Presley became a UK hit.
Anyway, I was a big fan. I even saw him live once, playing in a record store in Austin, Texas, which was a rare privilege but also slightly sad as there was no one there but my friend Steve and I and a few people buying records, unaware the guy on a podium at the back was a living legend.
Sadly that’s no longer the case, because he died in 2018, but his legacy lives on, not only in his back catalogue – including an excellent three-disc anthology of his early work (inevitably titled Swamp Music) – but also a posthumous album of home-recorded demos he had pitched to other artists.
Those previously unheard and unrecorded tunes, unearthed by his son Jody, found new life thanks to Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, a serious TJW fan, on an album called smoke From The Chimney.
Now there is another “new” album, The Swamp Fox, blending more tunes dug up by Jody with the self-styled “desert disco” production of Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen, a pair of British DJs and producers who work under the name Flying Mojito Brothers.
The album was assembled from digitized reel-to-reel recordings in White’s studio vaults, reworked into a more dancefloor-friendly style by the British duo.
It could have been a bit of a disaster trying to meld the two diverse styles. But it turns out that Tony Joe’s southern-fried funk and soul combines rather well with the duo’s disco-adjacent production style, enhancing rather than diluting the spirit of its late creator.