Guest
Tony Joe White's 'Polk Salad Annie' which described the the lifestyle of a poor rural Southern girl and her family, gave Elvis the opportunity to incorporate his love of Karate into his stage show. This showmanship would contribute to the song becoming a fan favourite almost instantly. The song's first appearance on an album was in the form of the official RCA master which had been recorded at the midnight show on 18 February and subsequently released on 'On Stage - February 1970'. As the tours came and went so the song and it's arrangement would evolve. The first major change came exactly a year after this first live performance at the opening show of his fourth Vegas engagement on 26 January 1971 where with a slighter faster tempo the spoken intro was dropped. The length of the song would also be shorter going from over four minutes to around the three minute mark but the physical intensity of the song would have grown. By the middle of this engagement however, the spoken intro would be reinstated and would continue to be used until the end of the August 71 Vegas engagement but then only on a show by show basis on his November 71 tour. From Elvis' first show of 1972, in Las Vegas on 26 January the spoken intro was now dropped permanently and the faster more bass orientated arrangement akin to MSG and 'On Tour' was adopted. From this point on there was no doubt as to the driving force behind the song was the bass playing of Jerry Scheff and the song now included a short bass solo. Testimony to how important Scheff was to the song's new arrangement can be heard in 1974 shows when Jerry Scheff took his years sabbatical and his place taken by Duke Bardwell and Emory Gordy and this included the March 74 Memphis shows. As accomplished bass players as Bardwell and Gordy were, they did not appear to be able to drive the song in the same way that Scheff did, and the 1974 versions seem to lack something in that department. The final major change to the songs arrangement came in Uniondale, New York on 19 July 1975 where some brass was added to the intro. This arrangement would last until the final time Elvis would sing the song on stage at the closing show of his penultimate tour in Mobile, Alabama on 2 June 1977. Curiously despite performing the song at virtually every show in both 1972 and 1974 it was sung only twice in the whole of 1973, both time in Las Vegas, on 15 February Dinner Show and on 3 September Dinner Show which was the second last show of that engagement. This live version was performed during Elvis' opening show of his third Las Vegas engagement on 10 August 1970. The cameras of MGM were in situ and caught this admittedly shorter than usual rendition full although it was the version from the midnight show of 12 August which made it into the final edit of both That's The Way It Is movies. As with all of these videos, to get the most out of them I highly recommend you use ear /headphones and turn the volume up as much as you dare!
