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"Billy" If you've ever lost someone close to you, had the experience of going through their things and uncovering parts of their life you didn't know about or discovered unfinished projects they were working on, you might find an inkling of your experience in Jody White's. His father — singer-songwriter Tony Joe White — passed away in 2018. After, he found a bunch of Tony Joe's unreleased, unfinished songs. We talked to the younger White and his collaborator Dan Auerbach on how they brought new life to the songs that compose Tony Joe White's post-humous album, Smoke From The Chimney.

7 May 2021 Tony Joe White has always sung in a low growl that made him sound like an older man. Even as a 20-something-year old back in the 1960s when he crooned classic self-penned tunes like “Polk Salad Annie” (with the immortal line, “Gator’s got your granny, chomp chomp”) and “Rainy Night in Georgia”, White sounded like a grizzled musical veteran. His voice never changed much. It got a bit deeper, darker, and murkier as he aged, but his distinctive style remained easily recognizable. White died of a heart attack at the age of 75 back in October 2018. He left nine unfinished ...

"I was blown away," Auerbach told The Tennessean. "There's so much variation. It wasn't just one thing. That's obvious because it's Tony Joe. But when you're faced with this whole little bundle of brand new songs and they all fit together like some strange puzzle, even though they're not the same genre, I just love that so much.  "[It's] stuff that makes you feel good. I connected to that."  Tony Joe White recorded the backbone of "Smoke From The Chimney" roughly three to five years before death, per his son. But the songs time-travel through decades and genres impacted by the singer. 

After Tony Joe White died, his son took to the archives.  He dug through a Franklin storage unit, finding boxes of reel-to-reel tapes with hundreds of demos from White's five-decade career as an enigmatic swamp-rock singer-songwriter.  "My dad didn't have a record deal from '78 until the '90s, but he had a home studio — which was a dangerous combination," said son-manager Jody White. "He was always making music and always recording and always putting it to tape."  Jody White fired off one track in an email to Nashville producer-Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, who talked for years with...

  On May 7th, Smoke from the Chimney, a nine-song album of never-before-heard Tony Joe White tunes, will be released on Easy Eye Sound. Produced by Dan Auerbach and rounded out by Nashville’s most seasoned studio musicians, Smoke from the Chimney started out as a number of unadorned voice and guitar demos from White’s home studio before being transformed into full band arrangements harkening back to the albums he recorded in the late 60s and early 70s in Nashville and Muscle Shoals—just as he was emerging as an internationally recognized songwriter and recording artist. It takes a k...