Debut: Tony Joe White's 'Holed Up'

• %22Holed Up%22 appears on the swamp-rocker%27s %22Hoodoo%22 album%2C out Sept. 17
• White had a Top 10 hit in 1968 with %22Polk Salad Annie%22
• He also wrote Brook Benton%27s %22Rainy Night in Georgia%22 and Tina Turner%27s %22Steamy Windows%22

The guy in Tony Joe White's Holed Up lives in an Airstream trailer, with dishes in the sink and chicken bones on the floor. He's ignoring the rest of the world, hiding under the covers long enough that the grass around the trailer's overgrown.

He's the kind of guy White can identify with.

"This guy's a wannabe swamper — could be me," says White, who turned 70 in July. "He's fed up with telephones, the corporate world, the making money. He just gets holed up, man, and locks everything up and stay in and eats peanut butter and crackers for months."

The song's opening line about an Airstream trailer, White says, might have been inspired by the late J.J. Cale, who once lived in an Airstream in Los Angeles. "J.J. was the perfect example of someone who would hole up. I wouldn't hear from him for months and months, then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, I'd get a phone call."

Holed Up, which premieres at USA TODAY, has the vintage swamp-rock sound that White made famous in the '60s and '70s with songs like Polk Salad Annie, Soul Francisco and Willie and Laura Mae Jones.

"The wah is from the Polk Salad Annie days, the old Boomerang, they used to call it," says White, who favors a 1965 Fender Stratocaster guitar. "Then the fuzz was an old Tonebender I bought in England in '65. It's all old equipment, you know, and it goes perfect with analog tape and the way the guys play with me."

Holed Up appears on White's new album Hoodoo, out Sept. 17.

"These songs have been kindly simmering and brewing for a while there, and I was just waiting for a time to get in the studio," White says. "We got the tape machine all oiled up and got in and laid it down."

White, a native of Oak Grove, La., released his first album, Black and White, for Monument Records in 1968 and had a Top 10 hit with Polk Salad Annie the following year. Elvis Presley recorded a popular version of Polk Salad Annie, and White also penned R&B star Brook Benton's 1970 crossover smash Rainy Night in Georgia and Tina Turner's 1989 hit Steamy Windows.