Joe South's songs were very popular for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was born in 1940 in Atlanta, Georgia, and his music has an obvious southern influence. He began a career as both a performer and a songwriter in the late 1950s, when he was in his late teens. For many years, he only had minor success with both of those pursuits. The first song here is from 1962, and the second is from 1965. But then he hit his stride in 1968, when more people started covering his songs, and sometimes having big hits with them. For instance, Deep Purple had a big hit with "Hush" in 1968 (which was pretty atypical for them compared to their usual hard rock sound).
Then, in 1969, he had a big hit of his own, "Games People Play." It just missed the Top Ten in the U.S. singles chart, and since then is probably considered his signature song. Then he had another in 1970, with "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," which also just missed the Top Ten. I've chosen to include the Joe South version of "Games People Play." But the main point of this series is to focus on cover versions, so that's the only song I've included that's performed by him.
In 1970, he also had his biggest success as a songwriter with "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden." It was first released by Billy Joe Royal in 1967, and there were a couple more covers after that. But when Lynn Anderson released her version in 1970, it went all the way to Number One in the country chart, and Number Three in the main U.S. singles chart, and became one of the best selling songs of the year.
After all this success in just a couple of years, his future looked very promising. But then tragedy struck. Tommy South, his brother, committed suicide. Tommy had been in Joe's backing band, and they two of them were very close. Joe irrationally blamed himself for the suicide. He sank into a deep depression that lasted for years, and started taking heavy drugs to cope. His time as a promising songwriter basically ended at that point, as he lost his inspiration for many years. He later said, "I really kicked myself around for years... one of the main hang-ups was I just refused to forgive myself. You know, you can go through drug treatment centers, and it's not a permanent healing until it's a spiritual healing." He finally turned his life around in the late 1980s, but musical trends had largely passed him by, and he never released any new albums after 1975. All the songs here were written before that 1971 tragedy, though some of them were covered many years later.
He died of a heart attack in 2012, at the age of 72. Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more:
This album is 50 minutes long.
01 You're the Reason (Arthur Alexander)
02 I've Got to Be Somebody (Billy Joe Royal)
03 Hush (Deep Purple)
04 Games People Play (Joe South)
05 Down in the Boondocks (Billy Joe Royal)
06 These Are Not My People (Johnny Rivers)
07 Don't It Make You Want to Go Home (Brook Benton)
08 Walk a Mile in My Shoes (Elvis Presley)
09 [I Never Promised You A] Rose Garden (Lynn Anderson)
10 Redneck (Swamp Dogg)
11 Yo-Yo (Osmonds)
12 Don't Throw Your Love to the Wind (Jody Miller)
13 Birds of a Feather (Johnny Nash)
14 I Knew You When (Linda Ronstadt)
15 Children (Stephanie Finch)
16 The Greatest Love (Kelly Hogan)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/Cs7VpEZz
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/SgxQeTnbykRnLm9/file
I took the cover photo from the cover of an album called "The Joe South Story." I don't know the details. But it was one of very few I could find that was in color and showed him when he was young.
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