Tony Joe White was born one of seven children and raised on a cotton farm near the small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana. When Tony Joe was 16, Charles, the oldest of the White children, brought home a Lightnin' Hopkins album and started teaching blues guitar to his younger brother.

As a child he listened to not only local bluesmen and country singers but also to the distinctive cajun music of Louisiana, a hybrid of traditional musical styles introduced by French-Canadian settlers at the turn of the nineteenth century.

White began performing at school dances, and after graduating, started playing in nightclubs in Louisiana and Texas.

He formed his first band, Tony White & His Combo, while still in his teens. The three youngsters (White, 20, bassist Robert McGuffie, 19 and Jim Griffith, 22) played a nightclub in Kingsville, Texas for an uninterrupted engagement of eight months (six nights a week) in 1964.

That band was followed by Tony Joe And The Mojos and Tony's Twilights, and for the next seven years White worked the small clubs of the South before deciding to embark on a solo career singing his own compositions.

In 1967, White signed to Monument Records which operated from a recording studio in the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, Tennessee, and produced a variety of sounds, including Rock and Roll, Country and Western, and Rhythm and Blues. Billy Swan was his producer.

Over the next three years White released four singles with no commercial success stateside (although "Soul Francisco" was a hit in France). "Polk Salad Annie" had been released for nine months and written off as a failure by his record label when it finally entered the U.S. charts in July 1969. It climbed into the Top Ten by early August eventually reaching No. 8. It was the biggest hit Tony Joe White ever had.

White's first album, 1969's Black and White, was recorded with Muscle Shoals musicians David Briggs, Norbert Putnam, and Jerry Carrigan, and featured "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" and "Polk Salad Annie", along with covers of Jimmy Webb's "Wichita Lineman".

Three more singles quickly followed, all minor hits, and White toured with Steppenwolf, Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival and other big rock acts of the 1970s, playing in France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and England.

In 1973, White appeared in the film Catch My Soul, a rock-opera adaption of Shakespeare's Othello. It was directed by Patrick McGoohan and produced in the UK by Richard Rosenbloom and Jack Good. The cast included Richie Havens, Season Hubley, Susan Tyrrell, Bonnie Bramlett, Lance LeGault, Delaney Bramlett, and Family Lotus. White played and sang four and composed seven songs for the musical.