I must have heard Billy Joe Royal’s hit version of “Down in the Boondocks” in the 1970s, when I was often listening to my local oldies station, WROR — “the golden great 98” — but I don’t remember taking much notice of it, since I was mostly listening for when they played classic doo-wop, or  the Coasters, Chuck Berry… I was more into the ’50s stuff. Then in the 1980s, while I was wandering around Europe and had lots of time to experiment with guitar techniques while waiting for hitchhiking rides and walking down country roads, I began fooling around with this arrangement and found that although I’d never tried to learn it, I knew all the words — one sure sign of a well-written song.

Good as it is, I thought of it more as a guitar exercise than anything else — I’d worked out my Congolese-flavored version of “Iko Iko” and was trying to come up with other ways to play Caribbean and Latin-flavored rhythms, and I guess this was my attempt at a kind of half-assed reggae feel. Anyway, I never performed it but always enjoyed playing it, without knowing anything more about it.

So I only just found out that it was written by Joe South, a southern guitar and songwriting maverick who’s probably best known for his hit, “The Games People Play,” but also wrote this one and lots of others, and produced Royal’s record, and played guitar on a bunch of sessions, including the memorable tremolo intro on Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.”

Other than that, the song pretty much speaks for itself: it’s a classic poor-boy-in-love-with-rich-girl story, somewhat more optimistic than Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill,” and it’s fun to dig into the lyric… but I still mostly play it because it took a long time to get the guitar technique so it felt moderately comfortable, and I love the way the slapping/picking feels under my hands and haven’t found another song that fits as well with this style.