John D. Loudermilk wrote this song and in 1960. He was born and raised in the old tobacco warehouse city of Durham, North Carolina, and this is a somewhat autobiographical song about the city. Loudermilk (from American Songwriter Magazine January/February 1988): "I got the idea for writing that song from a road in our town that was called Tobacco Road because it was where they rolled the hogsheads full of Tobacco down to the river to be loaded onto barges. Along that road were a lot of real tough, seedy-type people, and your folks would have just died if they thought you ever went down there."
The Nashville Teens were most certainly not from Nashville: they were part of the British Invasion and gave themselves an American name so it would be less obvious that they were from England. It worked, at least for this song, as they had a hit with it four years after Loudermilk originally recorded it.
"Tobacco Road" has been performed by a great number of other artists, often with slightly altered lyrics. Notable renderings include a soul one from Lou Rawls, a folk rock one from Jefferson Airplane on their debut album Takes Off, a lengthy 17-minute version by Edgar Winter's White Trash, a sample on dead prez's Psychology, and others from Eric Burdon & War, Spooky Tooth, Status Quo, Bill Wyman and the Rhythm Kings, Steve Young, Love Affair, Shocking Blue, David Lee Roth, Aum, Tommy Cash, Blues Magoos, Blues Creation, Bobbie Gentry, Rare Earth, Jean-Jacques Goldman, Mud, Mind Garage, an unreleased version by Jimi Hendrix, Southern Culture on the Skids, Serbian rock bands Smak and Discipline A Kitschme.
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