The Sweat & The Swamp

With 2010's The Shine, Tony Joe White showed anyone who was willing to listen that he was still writing songs with both a sense of intimacy and grittiness – two trademarks that have been an enormous part of the now 69-year-old's career ever since he first made a splash as a young man playing clubs in Texas and Louisiana.

He's ready to release a new album at some stage in the next couple of months, and by the sounds of things he wants to crank everything up a little bit this time around.

“It's comin' really good,” he drawls from the backyard of his recording studio in Tennessee. “We started about eight months ago – I don't usually spend that much time but I have my own studio here. I go in and lay something down that I just wrote and then call my drummer and bass player and they come over that night and we hook up and rock it a little bit. It's a lot of first takes, you know, not a lot of rehearsing or anything, just everybody playing what comes out of their soul.

“I had written a lot of songs in the last year, I had kind of a streak of songs come to me. It's been a lot of fun. The album is going to be really good, it's real sweaty and rockin'. I think I've got one ballad on there but the rest of them are going to be real swampy and sweaty.”

As a songwriter, a vocalist and a guitarist, White has been incredibly influential on more than one generation of blues and country musicians. It's interesting, then, that he doesn't really have any influences of his own.

“No, I'm only influenced by the song I've just written and the way my guitar feels with it,” he says. “I try and get it down on tape almost like the way I wrote it around the campfire, when I'm just sitting there by myself. When I get into the studio I try to keep that same kind of mood in the air if possible. Protecting the simplicity and the rawness of the whole thing, I think that's the only way to go.”

He seems to get to Australia as often as he can, so he's over the moon to be back again this Easter.

“I'm really looking forward to getting back down because I haven't been there in maybe two years now. It's always good to get down there, man. Playing for the people down there is like playing for people in my hometown in Louisiana.”

There's a real simplicity to the way White approaches his craft and he says that Australian audiences just appear to appreciate that.

“I think the main thing… the Australian people really like realness, you know?” he says of his appeal over here. “I just come onstage with me and my drummer, it's just us two and all of a sudden the whole place will be rockin' – everybody dancin' and movin'. That's why I say it reminds me of Louisiana, because they like realness down there and you don't come out to do a little pre-planned show or nothin', you're just going by ear, going by the crowd and how they call it out.”

But it wasn't Louisiana that made him a star in the first place; White had his first big hit in France back in 1969.

“All over Europe, I've always had a lot of good happenings over there with crowds and record sales,” he says. “In fact the first hit I ever had was in Paris, France, this was back in the days before their English was too good, but they picked up on a tune called Soul Francisco and all of a sudden made it number one there. I was still playing clubs in Texas when that happened. I jumped on a fast train runnin' right there.”

White sounds proud that he was able to thrive doing what he does at a time where experimentation in music was perhaps at its highest ever point.

“I went over there [to France] and toured for about eight weeks, just me and a guitar and I think I had a Coca-Cola box under my foot so I could have my drum, you know?” he recalls. “People accepted it and stuck with me. It was real exciting times, because there was a lot of wild music going on around us with Hendrix and Joplin and all these people doing this stuff and then all of a sudden a man gets up with his guitar and his foot and just rocks.”

While he does play solo on occasion, you're usually most likely to catch White with a drummer behind him.

“I really like to play that way,” he says. “On stage that's the way I always played, back in the early days in Louisiana and Texas I used to just use drums. In the studio I will use bass and sometimes a B3 organ, but on stage I just like to get that sweat, get my guitar going and the voice, a good beat on the drums and let the audience kinda float me along in the swamps.”

For some people, the swamp blues of Tony Joe White feels as much a part of Bluesfest as the big blue tents in which the stages are situated, the Pizza Loca cart that must pump out tonnes of dough over the five days and even Byron Bay itself. The 2013 event will be the seventh year that White has appeared on the festival bill and you'd bet that it won't be the last.

“I've always liked that gig on account of the outdoors of it and I always love the idea that people will come and camp out just to hear music, man; it makes you really bust your ass when you get on stage,” he says. “You see people who are standing in the mud and living in the rain for days, because a lot of the time it's raining in Byron Bay. I've always loved the idea that everybody feels like they're all swampy now because of the rain and the mud – it's great!”

While many of us believe you can never see Tony Joe White enough times, for those who are on the fence, the promise of this new material ought to be alluring – plus, you just cannot go past those classic hits.

“We'll get up there and turn it up, crank it and see what happens. We're gonna do a lot of new tunes from this album that I'm working on now. And of course the audience will lead me along through some of those swamp tunes, Polk Salad Annie, things like that.

“I think the record may be out around the end of April, start of May, something like that. It's going to be good to show the people the new tunes, it's fun to show people what you're writing, what's going on in your mind nowadays.”

Tony Joe White will b eplaying the following dates:

Thursday 7 March – Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh VIC
Friday 8 March – Thornbury Theatre, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 9 March – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine VIC
Sunday 10 March – Substation, Newport, VIC
Wednesday 13 March - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Thursday 14 March - Coogee Diggers, Coogee NSW
Friday 15 March - Canterbury Hurlstone Park RSL, Hurlstone Park NSW
Saturday 16 March – Lizottes, Newcastle NSW
Sunday 17 March – Lizottes, Dee Why NSW
Thursday 28 March – The Gov, Adelaide SA
Friday 29 March – Boogie, Bruzzy's Farm, Tallarook VIC
Saturday 30 March – The Deni Blues & Roots Festival, Deniliquin NSW
Sunday 31 March - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW