Tony Joe White has made a career out of being laconic, and his matter-of-fact delivery lent a homespun truthfulness to race relations in “Willie and Laura Mae Jones,” a subtle wink to “Polk Salad Annie” and a mournful quality to “Rainy Night in Georgia.” When he dueted with Shelby Lynne on “Can’t Go Back Home,” each sang with the hushed awareness that they’d crossed lines they couldn’t come back from.

The memory of that Tony Joe White makes That on the Road Look Live a revelation. This live album from 1971 featuring MG Duck Dunn on bass presents White in a context closer to the blues bands he musically grew up in, singing with ferocity and raving up many songs past the five minute mark and “Polk Salad Annie” for more than ten.

According to White’s liner notes, the recording came from a Creedence Clearwater Revival tour, where John Fogerty’s swamp imagery collided with a real, live Louisianan. “They tried to burn us down and we tried to burn them down,” White says, and the show is as hot as that suggests without being showy. “A Night in the Life of a Swamp Fox”—White’s “Ballad of John and Yoko”—moves with the drive of a song that knows it’s running late and will do so again tomorrow, even as it documents the indignities of the road. The live version of “Polk Salad Annie” was clearly the blueprint for Elvis’ treatment.

As powerful as the band is, White plays a number of songs on his own with just his acoustic guitar, and the effect is sufficiently entrancing that when someone unplugs him near the end of a song, he announces he was unplugged, finishes the song and the audience loved it as if nothing happened. He plays “Willie and Laura Mae Jones” on the acoustic, letting the story’s drama play out on its own terms. Those moments serve as a reminder that Tony Joe White not only has one of rock’s most singular voices and grooves, but songs that hold up, despite being from “another place and another time.”