Tony Joe White – One Hot July
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Posted On January 1, 1999
Rising up grumpily from a sticky bed made of a swirling B-3, stinging guitar and insistent, on-the-one tub-thumping, the too-long-AWOL Polk Salad Tony thickly slurs the album’s sultry opening command: “Crack the window, baby, it’s hot in this bedroom/There may be a little breeze outside, bad hot in this bedroom/And you know when I see ya sweat, all I can think is…boom, boom…boom, boom.”
Behind laid-back, cooler than the other side of the pillow and singin’ outta the back of his neck, the Swamp Fox has resurfaced at long last on a major label, and the resulting One Hot July is (glory gee to beezus!) stronger than new rope. Talk about your roots icons: This ol’ hound dawg emerged, fully-formed, some 30 years ago, as a miraculous backwater synthesis of Elvis, Jethro Bodine, incipient J.J. Cale and, uh, Percy Sledge.
A natural storyteller, Tony Joe White’s unforgettable “Polk Salad Annie” and “Backwoods Preacher Man” were major players in the dusty, country-soul insurgence of the late ’60s, which ranged from Bobbie Gentry to Ray Charles to Dusty Springfield to Bill Withers. His landmark “Rainy Night In Georgia” was copped, arrangement and all, by Brook Benton and pile-driven irrevocably into our collective memory. Gospel, soul, 3 a.m. blues and struttin’ R&B are but clay in Tony Joe’s gifted hands.
Recorded in the swampy woods of Bogaloosa, Louisiana, One Hot July finds White at the peak of his estimable powers. That voice is even better than you remembered it, the songwriting is masterful, the skronkin’ guitar weeps, and the anonymous homeboy band just bubbles and steams (there’s even a playfully obligatory chawmp on “Gumbo John”).
It’s been so long in coming, and so welcome in getting here, that you can almost overlook the goofiness of getting The Album Of The Summer in January. Still, since it’s hotter and sweatier than Brando in Streetcar, us Northern folk can use it to knock a few dimes off our heating bill and humidify the crib, too.
