Swamp Dogg’s The White Man Made Me Do It Coming January 13th

LEGENDARY SOUL ICONOCLAST SWAMP DOGG  DELIVERS A LANDMARK NEW ALBUM
WITH THE WHITE MAN MADE ME DO IT

Due out January 13, 2015, on Alive Naturalsound, long-player
is belated successor to groundbreaking 1970 album
Total Destruction of Your Mind.

“I’m just watching the world go by and reacting to it,” Swamp Dogg says of his new Alive Naturalsound release The White Man Made Me Do It, his first new album since the recent career resurgence that’s won the veteran R&B visionary an influx of new, young fans.

The 14-song collection, which will hit stores on January 13, 2015, maintains the edgy mix of sociopolitical commentary, slice-of-life comedy and sly storytelling that are the hallmarks of the artist’s large and beloved body of work. The typically uncompromising set encompasses the provocative racial insights of the title track and “Prejudice Is Alive and Well,” the earthy interpersonal observations of “Renae” and “Let Me Be Wrong,” the soulful uplift of “I’m So Happy” and “Light A Candle Ring A Bell.” Other highlights include the cautionary Sly Stone tribute “Can Anybody Tell Me Where Is Sly,” along with a trio of cover tunes — Sam Cooke’s romantic “You Send Me,” the Clovers’ wry “Your Cash Ain’t Nothing But Trash” and the Robins’ Leiber-and-Stoller-penned “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” — that continue Swamp’s long history of putting his unmistakable stamp on classic R&B numbers.

Swamp sees The White Man Made Me Do It as the natural, if belated, successor to his seminal 1970 album Total Destruction to Your Mind, the cult classic that first introduced Swamp Dogg to a waiting, if sometimes uncomprehending, world.

“I think that this one comes closer to the Total Destruction album than anything else I’ve done,” Swamp asserts, explaining, “When I went in and cut Total Destruction, I was like the little old lady that goes into the casino and puts a dollar into the slot and wins $900,000, because I didn’t know what I was doing. It took a long time for me to get to the point, craftsmanship-wise, where I could do it again intentionally.”

The veteran singer/songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist — born Jerry Williams Jr. — is the creator of a singular body of music that stretches back six decades, and which hit its stride with his late-’60s self-reinvention as Swamp Dogg. Since then, he’s released more than 30 albums showcasing his brutally honest, often howlingly funny songs, which mix classic Southern soul grooves with pointed, poignant lyrics that are both profound and profane, reflecting vividly and insightfully upon politics, war, race and the abiding mysteries of love and sex, and demonstrating a savage sense of humor as well as an instinctive aversion to hypocrisy. In the ’70s, Swamp’s uncompromising attitude — and his participation in Jane Fonda’s now-legendary anti-war FTA tour — even won him a spot on then-President Richard Nixon’s infamous Enemies List.

Entertainment Weekly called Swamp Dogg “a one of a kind musical genius.” England’s The Guardian dubbed him “the soul genius that time forgot.” AllMusic.com described him as “one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music.” Mojo magazine noted that “He’s made some of the maddest, funny, baddest, odd, angry, funkiest soul records.” And Rolling Stone observed that “he sings like some unfrozen Atlantic soul man of the ’60s — his voice clarion pure, his phrasing a model of smoldering restraint.”

In addition to his own releases, Swamp has also produced records and/or written songs for more artists than anyone can count, including Gary U.S. Bonds, Ruth Brown, Solomon Burke, Patti Labelle, the Drifters, Inez and Charlie Foxx, Dee Dee Warwick, Tommy Hunt, the Commodores, Freddie North, Guitar Shorty, Brooks O’Dell and Arthur Conley.

The Swamp-penned standard “(Don’t Take Her) She’s All I Got” has been a Top Five country hit twice, first for Johnny Paycheck in 1971 and again 25 years later for Tracy Byrd. Swamp also wrote and produced Gene Pitney’s 1968 smash “She’s A Heartbreaker.” And Bob Dylan’s unreleased version of his composition “Sidewalks, Fences and Walls” has been offered on eBay for $12,500.

Despite the quality of his work, Swamp Dogg remains largely underappreciated and misunderstood, having hovered around the margins of the mainstream music biz since his teens. And if his stubbornly idiosyncratic body of work has made him difficult to market, it’s also permanently endeared him to a rabidly devoted audience of admirers around the world.

The White Man Made Me Do It arrives in the midst of a major revival of interest in Swamp Dogg’s work, spurred by Alive Naturalsound’s ongoing series of remastered CD and vinyl reissues of his vintage albums, along with a selection of some of his most noteworthy production projects, including notable releases by Irma Thomas, Charlie Whitehead (a.k.a. Raw Spitt), Doris Duke, Z.Z. Hill, Lightnin’ Slim, Wolfmoon and Sandra Phillips.

The iconoclastic streak that runs through Swamp Dogg’s catalogue has been present since the beginning Born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1942, he developed an early affinity for country music before discovering rhythm and blues. He sang in clubs around his hometown as a child, and was just 12 years old in 1954, when, as Little Jerry, he made his recording debut with the jump blues single “HTD Blues.”
He continued to record prolifically through the ’50s and ’60s, often as Little Jerry Williams and later just Jerry Williams, releasing a long string of R&B and soul singles and achieving a modicum of commercial success with such numbers as “Baby, You’re My Everything” and “I’m the Lover Man.” He also built a lengthy resume as producer, writer and A&R man for a series of small labels, eventually leading to his becoming Atlantic Records’ first African-American staff producer in 1968.

By the end of the decade, disillusioned by record-company politics, angered by sociopolitical injustice and psychedelicized by his first LSD trip, Jerry Williams adopted the persona of Swamp Dogg.
“Jerry Williams the performer was not prepared to say and do the things that I wanted to do,” he later explained. “I’d gone as far as I could go singing love songs. There were other artists that was better looking, taller, had more sex appeal than me. I had to try something else … Now I had my own category. Now motherfuckers had to compare themselves to me.”

Swamp Dogg was officially born with 1970’s Total Destruction to Your Mind, recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama with that town’s legendary studio musicians and originally released on the small, soon-to-be-defunct Canyon label. The album established Swamp’s explicitly political, cheerfully vulgar new musical path with such message-driven future Swamp standards as the protest-funk title anthem, the anti-consumerist lament “Synthetic World” and the risqué “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.”

Total Destruction to Your Mind achieved sufficient notoriety to win Swamp a higher-profile deal with Elektra Records. The result was 1971’s Rat On!, boasting such trenchant tunes as “Remember I Said Tomorrow” and “God Bless America for What,” and for its iconic cover shot of the artist astride a giant white rat. Not surprisingly, Rat On! showed Swamp Dogg to be too outspoken for major-label consumption.

More memorable Swamp Dogg albums followed through the ’70s and ’80s, on a dizzying series of record labels large and small: Cuffed Collared and Tagged, Gag a Maggot, Have You Heard This Story??, Swamp Dogg’s Greatest Hits???, You Ain’t Never Too Old to Boogie, An Opportunity… Not a Bargain!!!, Finally Caught Up with Myself, Doing a Party Tonite, I’m Not Selling Out I’m Buying In!, I Called for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock, Surfin’ in Harlem, and even a country set that Mercury Records’ Nashville division financed but declined to release, along with numerous reissues and compilations.

In the 1990s, having grown weary of his long-running record-label travails, Swamp seized the means of production and launched SDEG (Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group) as an outlet for his own new releases, as well as reissues of his album catalogue, his productions of other artists, and the massive library of master recordings that he’d built over the years.

The ’90s and ’00s saw more new Swamp Dogg releases on SDEG, including The Re-Invention of Swamp Dogg, If I Ever Kiss It … He Can Kiss It Goodbye, Resurrection, the covers collection Give ’Em as Little as You Can … As Often as You Have To and the holiday offering An Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year.

Meanwhile, Swamp’s grooves reached a multitude of new ears via sampling of his vintage work by numerous hip-hop artists, including Kid Rock, DMX and Talib Kweli.

Now well into his sixth decade of making music, Swamp Dogg is busier than ever, continuing to generate new recording projects while performing frequently overseas and playing shows at such prestigious American venues as New York’s Lincoln Center and the New Orleans-based Ponderosa Stomp festival, while enjoying the influx of new fans that he’s expanded his audience in recent years.

“I’ll walk into the club and think, ‘There’s no way these people know who I am, they’re too young,’” he notes.

“But they know the songs and they know all about me. I think that this generation is more open-minded, about music and about a lot of things.”

But his current career upswing hasn’t altered Swamp’s scrappy underdog sensibility, and that attitude is reflected throughout The White Man Made Me Do It.

“They can’t find a hole for this pigeon,” he says. “But I don’t feel rained on. I don’t feel bad. I still consider myself the most successful failure in the United States, and that’s really not bad at all.”