"Polk Salad Annie” is a 1968 song written and performed by Tony Joe White. It was recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Its lyrics describe the lifestyle of a poor rural Southern girl and her family. Traditionally, the term to describe the type of food highlighted in the song is polk or poke sallet, a cooked greens dish made from pokeweed. Its 1969 single release peaked at Number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. In Canada, the song made No. 10 on the RPM Magazine Hot Singles chart. Elvis Presley's version also made the song popular.
Song
The song vividly recreates the Southern roots of White's childhood and his music reflects this earthy rural background. As a child he listened not only to local bluesmen and country singers but also to the Cajun music of Louisiana, that rare hybrid of traditional musical styles introduced by French settlers at the turn of the century. His roots lie in the swamplands of Oak Grove, Louisiana, where he was born in 1943. Situated just west of the Mississippi River, it's a land of cottonfields, where pokeweed, or "poke" grows wild, and alligators lurk in moss-covered swamps. "I spent the first 18 years of my life down there", said White. "My folks raised cotton and corn. There were lotsa times when there weren't too much to eat, and I ain't ashamed to admit that we've often whipped up a mess of poke sallet. Tastes alright too — a bit like spinach." "Sallet" is an old English word that means "cooked greens", not to be mistaken for "salad"; in fact, cases of pokeweed poisoning can result from this linguistic mistake. While it may be that record companies labeled the song "salad", the dish in question was a "sallet" made of pokeweed. In a January 17, 2014, interview with music journalist Ray Shasho, White explained the thought process behind the writing of "Polk Salad Annie" and "Rainy Night in Georgia".
Background
The single, released in 1969 by Monument Records, had been out nine months before it finally charted, and had been written off by Monument as a failure. Said White: "They had done given up on it, but we kept getting all these people in Texas coming to the clubs and buying the record. So we would send up to Nashville saying, 'Send us a thousand more this week.' They would send us these 'Do Not Sell' examples, so we would have to sit down and mark out the 'Do Not Sell' and then send them to the record stores. All these stores in South Texas kept calling our house saying, 'We need more.' So we just kept hanging on. And finally a guy in L.A. picked it up and got it across. Otherwise, 'Poke' could have been lost forever."
picked up the song, and it became a staple of his live performances of the early 1970s. He recorded it, and it became the only version of "Polk Salad Annie" to chart in the UK and Ireland.
Chart history
Elvis' rendition was issued on several albums, including:
* On Stage
* '.
* ',
* Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential '70s Masters,
Richard "Groove" Holmes released a live version on his 1970 album Recorded Live at the Lighthouse
Clarence Reid released a version on his 1969 album Dancin' With Nobody But You Babe
Tom Jones released a version on his 1970 album Tom, recorded in February 1970
White performed a version in duet with Johnny Cash on the April 8, 1970 edition of The Johnny Cash Show. This performance has been released on DVD on The Best of the Johnny Cash Show.
Los Lonely Boys perform this song on their 2009 tribute EP entitled 1969.
