ever wrote? Yeah, it seems like I wrote a song called “Some-


day.” After I left Louisiana, I was down playing in clubs in Kingsville, Texas. I remember a song called “Someday” that I had written then.


Your biggest claim to fame was “Poke Salad Annie.” How high did that chart in the States? It was number 3 in America and then world-


wide, into Europe and Australia. I had a record right before “Poke” that happened and it made number 2 in Paris, France. At that time I was playing in a night club in Texas but had this huge record going overseas. I had never been any- where. I went over there and did some interviews and toured with a guitar.


What was that song? It was called “Soul Francisco” and it was about


the hippie movement at that time. It was on my first album. It was during the flower children days. All of a sudden the guitar and voice clicked and people were buying my records. When I got home from touring at that time “Poke” had kicked in here in America. It was out for about 7-8 months and it looked like it wasn’t going to hap- pen with a record company. So I was back playing at the nightclub in Texas because you are always playing somewhere and you can’t sit around and watch a record. We must have been selling 1000 records a week in that nightclub of “Poke.” The record company would mail them to us and we would buy them and try to sell them at that club. They said that they thought they would try to go with something else. I told them that they could do that but that we were selling lots of those records at that small club. Then a station picked it up in L.A. and put it on the big list, you know what I mean. Then it made it to finally #3 in America and then it got followed up with “Rainy Night in Georgia”. All of the sudden I was mov- ing.


That was a good one-two punch. Yeah, I think both of those songs had been writ-


ten in one week. I had moved to Corpus Cristi by then and I had heard Bobbie Gentry sing “Ode To Billy Joe” and I thought, I am Billy Joe man, and


I know that life. I wanted to write about some- thing that I knew about and that was real. “Poke” was real because I had eaten a bunch of it when I was growing up; and rainy nights were real be- cause I had driven a truck when I got right out of high school. That’s how those two songs came about and it is pretty amazing that they have stuck around.


Didn’t Elvis sing “Poke Salad Annie?” Yeah, he did come out with it in ‘72, ‘73 some-


where around there. His producer called me and I was living in Memphis by then. He phoned me and said he wanted to fly me and my wife to Las Vegas and watch him do it and record it live on- stage. Elvis had been right in that little scene too, with Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker and all of us kids down on the river. Then we had all that blues going. Elvis had been a big hero of ours. We combed our hair like him and I did his songs onstage and the whole thing was just hap- pening. Then they were flying us to Las Vegas- it was like a dream.


Did you get to spend some time with him and get to know him? Yeah, we hung out for about 3-4 days out there


in the dressing rooms and stuff. And then we hung out in Memphis and saw him down there at Stax and he treated me real good. He liked guitar and he would get me to show him some of the blues licks and stuff like that. He always seemed to really want to play. He could bang and make a few chords, but he really liked those bluesy things.


You were talking about “Rainy Night in Georgia.” One of my favorite versions of that was Sam Moore and Conway Twitty on that country / blues album. Oh, yeah, it was chill bump time again, with


Conway’s voice and Sam and everything just killed me on that album.


I remember playing that one song over and over. Yeah, they did it up.


I know that you have toured with all sorts 18


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