Artist: Tony Joe White
Album: Bad Mouthin’
Label: Yep Roc'
Release Date: 09/28/2018
The spoils of the swamp boogie king. Primeval, yet long exercised. Very promptly heady. Tony Joe White has a way with a groove that seizes the moment, and not a person could be compared to him. Well, maybe the late J.J. Cale, but with aridity displacing the mugginess. White’s singular musical juice flows freely and charismatically on Bad Mouthin’, as does his whisper-moaning of the deep, deep shit.
To these ears, at 75, Tony Joe White comes the closest a white man can to the kind of blues expression old black men rightfully own. If ever Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel” was executed broken-spirited, it’s here, at the close of around about White’s 20th studio album. Just White and his battered, shadowy, eminently melodic ’65 Strat; the epitome of a blues song. But it’s someone else’s song, and White’s best known for his own. He knew Elvis because “The king of rock ‘n’ roll” recorded “The king of the swamp boogie’s” “Polk Salad Annie” way the hell back then. Otherwise, Brook Benton’s classic hit in 1970 with “Rainy Night in Georgia” ranks among White’s key successes.
Tony Joe White can cover others, but listen to “Cool Town Woman” here. Although the boot-tappin’ aura evokes John Lee Hooker, that vivid scene of dangerous infatuation is all Tony Joe, sweatin’ it in the Bayou, and spikin’ it with wicked harmonica.
Opening the album with “Bad Mouthin’,” White’s a wronged man, laying it all bare. For “Rich Woman Blues,” he’s dark and downtrodden, the results a pained delta-styled blues performance of repression like no other. In “Sundown Blues,” he shuffles slowly through the dust and the dusk, dragging his heart behind him. But back to interpretation. White tears several classics down to their core throughout the album. Big Joe Williams’ “Baby Please Don’t Go” and John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” especially benefit from the spare White-washing, the former delivered solo, the latter with touring drummer Bryan Owings banging up the backbeat. Cut live in one or two takes on the cement floor of a horse stall out in his barn, this is Tony Joe White’s testament to the force of the blues. Barbed as a rocky crest, but enveloped in clouds of steamy emotion.
—Tom Clarke
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