Rainy Night in Georgia

A true icon of swamp rock, Tony Joe White parlayed his songwriting talent and idiosyncratic vocals into a modestly successful country and rock career in Europe as well as America. Born July 23, 1943, in Goodwill, Louisiana, White was born into a part-Cherokee family. He began working clubs in Texas during the mid-'60s and moved to Nashville by 1968.

His second album released In 1969 originally on the Monument Label. Produced by the acclaimed Billy Swan. Includes his original version of 'Rainy Night In Georgia', a huge hit for Brook Benton & covered by many including Hank Williams Jr., Shelby Lynne & Randy Crawford.

Tony Joe White says he always saw the friends he invited to play on this album–Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, J.J. Cale, Michael McDonald, and the late Waylon Jennings–as "keepers of the fire." They're also premier custodians of loneliness and despair, the two emotions that lie at the heart of this hypnotic submersion into country/swamp blues. From the kickoff track, "Run for Cover," with Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns, these meditations on mourning–lost lovers, spiritual struggles, anxiety that knows no name and no bottom–grab the listener fast and pull him down into swirling dark waters.

This is a boxset of re-recordings and live performances and will be of interest to those interested in hearing alternate recordings of classic soul tracks. Some of these tracks are quite good. Others don't compare to the original in my opinion. Some of the songs are by well known performers that are not the same performer that had the hit originally. All in all this makes an interesting set.

As soul music moved into the early '70s, it became dominated by smoother sounds and polished productions, picking up its cues from Motown, Chicago soul, and uptown soul. By the beginning of the decade, soul was fracturing in a manner similar to pop/rock, as pop-soul, funk, vocal groups, string-laden Philly soul, and sexy Memphis soul became just a few of the many different subgenres to surface. Often, the productions on these records were much more polished than '60s productions, boasting sound effects, synthesizers, electric keyboards, echoes, horn sections, acoustic guitars, and strings.

Sounds of the Seventies was a 38-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band. Each volume was issued on either compact disc, cassette or (with volumes issued prior to 1991) vinyl record.

Twenty tracks from 1969-1973, the period of Tony Joe White's greatest success, including "Polk Salad Annie" and White's own version of his composition "Rainy Night in Georgia." Most of this is quality swamp rock with pop-soul-conscious production; on cuts like "High Sheriff of Calhoun Parrish," it sounds very much like he was trying to achieve a groove in the mold of Bobbie Joe Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe." Sometimes he gets real down-home in a stomping backwoods blues style that makes him sound a little like a White counterpart to John Lee Hooker, as on "Stockholm Blues."