No original songs and I hadn’t really thought about it. At that time I was doing a lot of Elvis and John Lee Hooker onstage with my drummer. So I thought if I ever tried to write, I’m going to write about something I know about. I heard ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ on the radio and I thought, man, how real, because I am Billie Joe, I know that life. So those thoughts came back to me when I moved on to Texas about three months later. You could stay home and play your guitar and hangout all night. I drove a dump truck for the highway department and when it would rain you didn’t have to go to work. I went down there to get a job and I was playing guitar too at the house and stuff. “When I got out of high school I went to Marietta, Georgia, I had a sister living there.
