While "Polk Salad Annie" reached the coveted top ten/hit single status for Tony Joe White in 1969, it's the country funk pearl "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" from the same album (Black and White, Monument Records) that makes a deeper impression. With its inspired chorus ("the cotton was high and the corn was growin' fine/but that was another place and another time"), the song details an integrated farming community that survived via plain old cooperation in a turbulent era for race relations--have we ever had an easy one?--as Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated only the previous year.
We worked in the fields together and we learned to count on each other
When you live off the land, you don't have time to think about another man's color
"Willie and Laura Mae Jones" reeled in an array of cover versions from Dusty Springfield to Mel Torme to Brook Benton (who would later score big with White's "Rainy Night In Georgia"). But it's intrigued me for a long time that virtually every take on the song brings an altruistic view to this difficult section of American History, with the exception being White's unflinching recording. For by the time the narrator in the original tale runs into Willie many years later--both characters and their kin moved elsewhere when the land was exhausted--and asks him to bring Laura Mae and their children over for supper, the reply is disappointing:
He shook his head real slow, with eyes so kind
This is another place and another time
Something has happened and a human connection has been ravaged, although the phrase "with eyes so kind" suggests that Willie wasn't bitter when he turned down the offer for a chance to catch up with his old friend. Are the men now in a different geographical area where tolerance between races is nonexistent? Has white entitlement reared its ugly head or has a new surge of black pride changed Willie's tune? It's something I've only seen Tony Joe White (1943-2018) mention once in an interview, where he gave the impression that he was trying to truthfully depict a situation rather than being blindly hopeful about it.
Complimenting the 1969 Black and White version is an excellent performance White did with two other musicians on TV's "Austin City Limits" in December 1980--the complete lyrics remain intact. It's on the CD or DVD package Live from Austin, TX (New West, 2006).
Ultimately, the mystery isn't in the song itself as much as the way it's interpreted in the other versions. The a cappella group the Persuasions covered "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" on 1977's Chirpin' (Elektra) and rewrote the troublesome verse; they add a phrase saying that Willie was spotted in "the welfare line."
And on what is still the greatest remake, while flawed, Shelby Lynne starts singing the end verse but the track immediately starts fading out. Although her release Just a Little Lovin' (Lost Highway) is the best album I heard in 2008, the edit here is really frustrating, particularly because Lynne and White were friends who played and sang on each other's albums, so she had to have discussed the song with him.
All I can hope for is that Lynne's version will appear in its entirety one day. And despite all my unanswered questions, the rural tale of "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" is a striking, raw, timeless song, still capturing the racial fork in the road America is undecided upon.