"Polk Salad Annie" - Elvis Presley in Full Dimensional Stereo

Polk Salad Annie by Elvis Presley was written by Tony Joe White and was first released by Tony Joe White in 1968. Elvis Presley released it on the audio album On Stage - February, 1970

The composer, Joe White, does enjoy a good polk salad. "I ate a bunch of it growing up on the cotton farm," he told us. "It grows wild, and you pick it a certain time during the year, and you boil it and cook it like greens. My mother said it had a lot of iron in it and stuff for us kids, so it was something that tasted real good to me back then. I still eat some every spring."

This being the late '60s, many listeners thought that "polk salad" was code for marijuana. White explained: "The early days on the tour we was out and it was a big hit, a lot of the hippie festivals, flower children and everybody, they would bring deep bags of grass back to the dressing room or back in my tent. And they said, 'We brought you a little polk.' They all thought polk salad was marijuana. And I was, like, 'That's not the kind I'm talking about.' Anyway, everybody got it after a while."

Elvis Presley played this at many of his concerts, including a performance on February 18, 1970 at the International Hotel in Las Vegas that was included on his live album On Stage. For Tony Joe White, this was a thrill, since he performed a lot of Elvis songs when he first started out.

Elvis arranged for White, who was living in Memphis at the time, to fly to Vegas so he could be in the audience for the concerts that were compiled into On Stage. "They recorded it, like, six, seven nights in a row, so every night after the show, we would sit back in the dressing room and talk and hang out," White told us. "He had an old acoustic guitar back there and he would always get me to play him an old blues lick or something. And then he would try and learn it. He loved guitar but he really didn't play it a lot. He treated me really good, though, every time I was around him."