Album Review: Hoodoo by Tony Joe White

Very few musicians have a sound so distinctive that you recognize it three seconds in. Tony Joe White is one such artist, and his signature swamp funk sound is reprised superbly on Hoodoo. His best known numbers — "Polk Salad Annie" and "Rainy Night in Georgia" — came way back in 1969, but, at 70, that signature down'n'dirty voice and bayou guitar groove remain in top shape.

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There's no mistaking Tony Joe White's signature swamp boogie. Patented in the late '60s, White has been working that same low-down blues grind ever since, taking a long sojourn from recording in the '80s before settling into a regular groove sometime around the time of the new millennium. Usually, these collections of new songs were on tiny labels -- including his aptly named Swamp imprint -- but 2013's Hoodoo appeared on Yep Roc and received an appropriately larger push than its recent predecessors.

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It’s the nature of the music biz that any artist that boasts only a handful of hits generally has a hard time sustaining a career for any more than a year or two, much less for four decades. So credit Tony Joe White for doing the unimaginable, maximizing the success he scored early on with songs like Polk Salad Annie, Rainy Night in Georgia and Steamy Windows (the latter two written for Brook Benton and Tina Turner, respectively), and using them to spur a trajectory that’s still going strong. Not surprisingly then, “Hoodoo” maintains that same swampy m.o.

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