STORY OF A SONG: RAINY NIGHT IN GEORGIA
AND IN LONDON, BELFAST, BARCELONA... AS THE SONG GOES, IT FEELS LIKE ITS RAINING ALL OVER THE WORLD
Tony Joe White in black & white: what a talent!
For much of Europe (and some of north America) its been an exceptionally wet winter. Outside of spending NYE in Deal, Kent, I’ve been in London and, while British winters are never enjoyable, this one has been trying ie its been bloody wet!
Inevitably, as a cyclist I’ve got soaked several times.
Public transport doesn’t make things much better - waiting at bus stops on the Old Kent Road in the rain (and then tramping through sodden streets) has tested my enthusiasm for exploring all the Smoke has to offer.
Thus for February’s Story Of A Song I’ve decided to celebrate one of the great songs about rain. And Rainy Night In Georgia might just be the finest song ever sung about the heavens opening (so ensuring you want stay dry and warm inside).
Rainy Night In Georgia was originally written and recorded by Tony Joe White (1943-2018), a maverick talent who managed to blend R&B, country and rock.
White was tall, dark and handsome and enjoyed success pretty much straight out of the box with his 1969 single Polk Salad Annie reaching No 8 in the US charts. Which might suggest White went on to major US fame. Not quite.
Polk Salad Annie is a great slice of funky swamp rock with White telling a comic tale of a poor girl who was so tough she “made the alligators look tame”. This evocative slice of Southern gothic fitted in alongside the Bayou-themed hits Creedence Clearwater Revival were then enjoying and TJW often opened for CCR.
Tony Joe White and Johnny Cash sing of tough girls - what fun!
Yet White never enjoyed another major hit record.
Which isn’t to say he was a one-hit wonder. Not at all. Instead White enjoyed a long, illustrious career both as a singer and a songwriter - many household names cut White tunes, leading to very tasty royalties.
But it was Rainy Night In Georgia that not only became White’s most famous song - even though he never released it as a single - but provided him (and subsequently his estate) with a lucrative income stream. Because Rainy Night In Georgia has become a contemporary standard, sung by dozens of noted singers across the decades.
Its a beautiful song and, possibly because most of us endure a wet winter, one which appears timely every year.
And with the climate crisis underway - so ensuring our planet is both hotter and wetter - it now exists as something of a theme tune for our damp lands.
Born in West Carroll Parish in rural, northeast Louisiana, Tony Joe White grew up working his family’s fields alongside their African Americans neighbours.
From what I can discern, this wasn’t the exploitative sharecropping then still prevalent across much of the US South - where families (predominantly Black) lived and worked on large plantations (cotton and other crops were grown) and, at the end of each season, were allowed to keep a percentage of their harvest (while the landowners took the bulk and charge them for everything from shanty housing to fertiliser - indentured labour by another name).
No, I think the White family were farmers who owned a small holding ie several acres and grew produce to sell. Here young Tony Joe was put to work alongside his siblings harvesting cotton, corn and tobacco. While Louisiana was still strictly segregated, the Whites never carried hate in their hearts and young TJ absorbed the blues he heard his neighbours playing and singing.
So much so, White determined he wanted to be such. While he was a Louisiana native, young Tony Joe didn’t head to the state’s music cities of Lafayette (Cajun, swamp pop, zydeco) or New Orleans (jazz, R&B, funk), instead relocating to Houston, Texas, where the likes of the 13th Floor Elevators and Janis Joplin had already made their mark and the young Billy Gibbons was cutting his teeth in the Moving Sidewalks.
Houston is an underrated music city - perhaps because its most famous artists tend to move on and its independent labels have never managed to build extensive artist repertoires - and White worked the bars and clubs, seemingly singing blues and R&B standards.
He was 19 when he arrived in Houston and far older by the time he decided to head to Memphis in 1967 - singing for rowdy drunks in Texan bars is a difficult way to earn a living and, at one point, White shifted to Marietta, Georgia, to live with his older sister. Here he drove a dump truck for the highway department and, when it would rain, he didn’t have to work. A few years later those rainy Georgia nights inspired his most famous song.
I mentioned that White decided to shift to Memphis, Tennessee. This is due to the R&B and pop soul exploding out of Stax, Goldwax and American at the time - Memphis then was to Southern soul what Detroit was to northern. And hearing The Boxtops scoring huge hits led by a white teenager who had a penchant for sounding Black, well, you can see why White thought he might succeed there.
Anyway, White didn’t make it to Memphis; the way he tells it he was driving there but missed the turn off so kept on going until he hit Nashville. I know, this makes him sound a bit dim but that’s the way he told his story. Tony Joe liked to play up his downhome, laidback image so this could be mere myth making.
Anyway, as soon as he got to Nashville, White started presenting his songs to publishers. When they asked him what kind of music he made, White replied, “well, it’s kind of swampy.”
“Swampy” effectively describes White’s Polk Salad Annie and his debut album, Black & White (surely titled because White felt his music mixed both communities music) placed originals alongside standards like Little Green Apples. As debut album’s go, its tasty rather than the main course.
Here’s the original. But is it the best? A selection of versions follow so listen and choose!
Rainy Night In Georgia featured on White’s 1969 sophomore album …Continued as the fourth song on Side 1. …Continued is a strong album - all 10 songs are originals - and finds White telling his Southern tales with the same relaxed confidence as his debut, just with greater focus.
Both his debut and …Continued were produced by Billy Swan, a jobbing musician whose taste for rockabilly made him at odds with the Nashville mainstream, and thus a kindred spirit to Tony Joe. Swan would have his own one big hit in 1974 with I Can Help, a peach of a tune.
For Rainy Night In Georgia White speak-sings the lyrics - the song’s narrator seemingly a homeless man reflecting on a lost lover as he shelters from the rain – over a moody, bluesy organ refrain. Its a striking song but not one that the people who ran Monument Records - TJW’s label - determined should be released as a single.
Monument might have overlooked a potential hit but Jerry Wexler, head honcho at Atlantic Records and then on a hot streak as producer of Aretha Franklin’s hits, didn’t. He immediately saw the song’s potential and insisted Brook Benton - a silky smooth baritone who, earlier in the decade, topped the R&B charts several times and had recently signed to Atlantic – record it.
Produced by Arif Mardin, Benton’s version captures the song’s pathos as he croons
