In today's world of digital recordkeeping, metadata, and content capture, the idea of having no idea where a piece of art came from is a foreign one, but a trip back in time, digging through his dad's song archive, Jody White found exactly that. Tony Joe White's "Goodbye L.A." stood out as a wildly good song and performance, but there's not a lot, if any, information surrounding it. "We have been unable to find out exactly when and where it was recorded," says Jody, who's in charge of the Tony Joe White estate and archives. "But the entire thing is amazing."
"'Goodbye L.A.' tells the story of a country boy who had been out in Los Angeles for too long," Jody describes. "He loved having fun in the big city, but he needed to get back to his small-town roots in the South." But in true Tony Joe White fashion, the narrator leaves a weird curveball in the song's last verse:
"Started looking like a downer-made me feel like getting high,
And the stallion was a raring and pointing to the sky.
There was seven horses tethered out beside the cabin door.
My companion said I'm sorry I don't believe we've met before."
"The last verse is perhaps the most intriguing part of the song, and we will probably never know exactly what he is talking about," says Jody. "But it is fun for the listener to guess."
"Goodbye L.A." is "pure White," wrote MAGNET, and the latest single from the upcoming Tony Joe White release, The Real Thang. Back in 1980, the beloved Louisiana singer-songwriter and guitarist recorded an album of the same name. Only released on vinyl and met with mixed reviews, the eight-song collection flew under the radar in its time, but listening to it today, White's beautifully distilled brand of swampy, funky country music was just on the cusp of blossoming on The Real Thang. White's estate, helmed by his son, Jody White, has just announced a grand unearthing of The Real Thang, with a deeper dive into what made the era so intriguing. "The original album included 8 songs from this wildly experimental time in Tony Joe's career," says Jody. "As I began to explore a re-release of this lost album, I discovered that TJW had written and recorded many more songs during this period of exploration, but most of them had never seen the light of day. They were kept locked away in his large stash of studio reel-to-reels, and nobody was able to listen.....until now."
The new version of The Real Thang is a tale of two albums. The first half is a showcase of White's singing and songwriting as a country artist and includes several songs he wrote and sang with Waylon Jennings during their time together in the '70s. The back half finds White moving into more of the "swamp funk" jam sessions, which became instrumental in his live shows. "The result," says Jody, "is eighteen songs that take the listener on a ride from the Texas countryside into the swamps of Louisiana, and a journey through a forgotten time of 'The Swamp Fox.'"
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