Joe South died this past week at the age of 72. Songwriter, producer, session man, pop star, Grammy winner — the man born Joseph Souter in Atlanta, Georgia was all of those things, though his greatness was long obscured by decades of self-imposed solitude.
I knew the songs of Joe South long before I ever knew who Joe South was. I heard Lynn Anderson sing "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" countless times during car rides to and from nursery school and kindergarten, when my mom would have the local country music radio station dialed in. I remember hearing Billy Joe Royal sing "Down in the Boondocks" on LA oldies station KRLA, shortly before beginning my first day of 7th grade at John Burroughs Junior High, the song's twin messages of alienation and perserverance somehow meshing perfectly with the dread I felt about starting a new life at a new school in a new city. There was "Hush," the hard-grooving Hammond workout that put Deep Purple on the charts for the first time in 1968, but which confused me in my youth because it sounded nothing like "Smoke On the Water." And I'm sure I heard "Games People Play" at least dozens of times as a kid, though I never connected it to the aforementioned songs — and, at the time, I didn't connect much with the song itself; the tune was catchy enough, but the lyrics and production were too subtle, too adult to resonate with me.
It wasn't until my senior year of college, when I stumbled across a thrift store 45 of Billy Joe Royal's rendition of "Hush," that I became curious about who this Joe South cat — who got both the songwriting and production credit on the 45 — actually was. Digging through the stacks at WVKR before my Friday evening radio show, I came across a copy of Joe South's Greatest Hits, which (along with "Games People Play" and "Down in the Boondocks") contained his version of "Hush". I played it on my show that night, and it completely blew me away... Still does, in fact.
A year or two later, I picked up Rhino's Best of Joe South CD compilation. The CD booklet featured wonderfully informative liner notes by Ben Vaughn, which shed plenty of new light (for me, at least) on this enigmatic gentleman. A budding guitarist and electronics whiz, South had scored a minor novelty hit with the vari-speeded goof "The Purple People Eater Meets The Witch Doctor" in 1958, when he was just 18. In 1962, Georgia R&B group The Tams enjoyed their first hit with the South-penned "Untie Me," and South further bolstered his resume in the years that followed by recording with Eddy Arnold, Tommy Roe, Solomon Burke, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, to name a few. Hell, the guy played bass on Blonde On Blonde's "Visions of Johanna" and came up with the shuddering down-tuned guitar intro for "Chain of Fools" — that's some serious record geek cred, right there!
But what struck me most — both in Vaughn's liners and the music itself — was the sense that South was a troubled soul, a talented musician who could have made a lucrative career as a full-time session cat, but who could only find spiritual solace in the songs he wrote and recorded himself. The title of Introspect, South's brilliant first LP, pretty much sums up its contents. A largely homebrew affair, soaked in slapback echo, hard-earned wisdom and the tangled twang of fuzz guitars and electric sitars, Introspect is a country-psych-soul masterpiece. It's the work of a guy who has seen some bad shit, experienced some serious pain on the personal and professional fronts, and possibly dropped a tab or three of Sandoz LSD-25 while trying to sort it all out. He wants to turn humanity's attention to some harsh truths (see "Games People Play"), but he doesn't spare the self-scrutiny, either; as South sings in "All My Hard Times" (a song which would practically become my mantra during a particularly lousy stretch in my own life), "I blamed the whole world for the shape I was in/I was too blind to see/My worst enemy was under my skin/It was me."
As the fates would have it, "Games People Play," the opening track of Introspect's second side — and a song which may or may not have been inspired by psychiatrist Eric Berne's best-selling 1964 book about transactional analysis — only compounded South's inner struggles by making him a star. "God grant me the serenity/To just remember who I am," he prayed in the song's penultimate verse, and the surprise success of "Games People Play" would give him ample cause to repeat that entreaty. "The Grammy Awards are a very nice gesture by the record industry, but they can really mess up your head," South told the L.A. Times in 1970, months after "Games People Play" won him Grammys for Song Of The Year and Best Contemporary Song. "The Grammy is a little like a crown. After you win it, you feel like you have to defend it. In a sense, I froze. I found it hard to go back in to the recording studio because I was afraid the next song wouldn't be perfect."
As other artists — including King Curtis ("Games People Play"), Paul Revere & The Raiders ("Birds of a Feather") and Elvis Presley ("Walk a Mile in My Shoes) — flocked to cover his songs, South seemed to struggle to find his own voice again. He numbed his anxiety with booze and drugs, retreating even further into himself after the 1971 suicide of his brother Tommy, who'd played drums on South's albums. After several years of self-imposed exile from the music business, he made a brief comeback attempt in the mid-70s, before the demons and drugs pulled him back down again. South reportedly got clean for good in the 80s, and continued to perform on occasion well into the last decade; but like Tony Joe White, another soulful Southern cat who emerged in the late 60s with a similar (if funkier and bluesier) brand of cosmic backwoods ruminations, he was largely forgotten in his homeland. Which is a damn shame, of course; on the other hand, it's probably a good thing that his substantial song royalties allowed him to step away from the toxic environment of the music business, and take refuge in the relative safety of anonymity.
I take comfort in that thought because, while I certainly didn't know the man, the overriding impressions I've always taken away from Joe South's songs are ones of a man capable of extreme decency and empathy, qualities that — much like electric sitars — are in woefully short supply these days. Even on "These Are Not My People," a song where he parts ways with a hard-partying girl in the interests of self-preservation, his attitude is one of reluctant detachment ("It's been a gas/But I'm gonna have to pass") rather than Stonesy misogyny. Ditto for "I Knew You When," later covered by Linda Ronstadt, which has the opportunity to take some brutal pot-shots at a past love, but respectfully chooses to take the high road instead. And as unflinchingly clear-eyed as songs like "Games People Play" and "Mirror of Your Mind" could be about the foibles of humanity, South was always happy to make room for the listener in his idyllic reveries like "Shelter" and "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home," the country lullaby that provided the title for his third album. Since the clip of him singing the latter track on The Johnny Cash Show is about the best live non-"Games" Joe South footage I can find on the interwebs these days, I think we'll end there...
Rest in peace, Joe. Now the grass don't grow and the rivers don't flow like they did in our childhood days... but may your journey home be an easy one.
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