The JJ Cale Okie album review consensus is in, and it lands somewhere between warm appreciation and mild frustration, mostly because the record is over before you’ve quite decided how you feel about it. Released in April 1974, Okie is Cale’s third studio album: twelve tracks, roughly 28 minutes, and a blueprint for a strain of American music that countless other artists would mine for decades.
What JJ Cale Was Building on Okie
Produced by Audie Ashworth, the record was assembled across multiple locations, Bradley’s Barn, Columbia Studio B and Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, plus Cale’s own home setup in Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to the JJ Cale Official Site, the album was originally released on the Shelter label before appearing on Mercury, a detail that situates it squarely in the independent-leaning, Nashville-adjacent world Cale inhabited throughout this period. The site also confirms that not everything here is original material: ‘I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)’ is a cover, written by Rusty Gabbard and Ray Price, which makes its inclusion alongside Cale’s own songs feel like a deliberate statement about the continuum of country and blues tradition he was drawing from.
The album marks the first time Cale used vocal layering, double-tracking his voice to compensate for what he considered weaknesses as a singer, pushing the pitch into something more fixed and controlled. Ashworth leaned into this, bringing the vocals up in the mix on certain tracks. As AllMusic noted in its assessment, the overall effect was still ‘low-key and bluesy in what was becoming Cale’s patented style’.
The Songs That Outlived the Album
Whatever you think of Okie as a listening experience, its long-term influence is hard to argue with. ‘I Got the Same Old Blues’ alone was covered by Eric Clapton, Freddie King, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bobby Bland, Bryan Ferry and Captain Beefheart. ‘Cajun Moon’ found its way to Poco, Herbie Mann and Randy Crawford. This was the Cale dynamic in concentrated form: low commercial profile, enormous creative reach.
Philip Qvist, one of the Album of the Week Club members who reviewed the record this week, put it plainly: ‘I would say that JJ Cale was in the enviable position of being able to record and perform in near anonymity, while writing songs that were picked up by artists who turned them into big hits, which not only secured a comfortable life for himself, but also gave him the financial freedom to do his own thing in the studio.’ That freedom is audible throughout Okie. There’s no reaching for a crossover, no concession to the AM radio sound that dominated 1974.
JJ Cale Okie Album Review Scores: What the Club Made of It
The Album of the Week Club’s final score settled at 7.27 from 33 votes. That’s a respectable number for a record several members admitted they’d never previously encountered. Evan Sanders noted that hearing Okie sent him deeper into Cale’s catalogue: ‘I feel like I am hearing the blueprints for many blues rock and Southern rock numbers.’ Greg Schwepe called Cale’s style ‘basic, laid-back, easygoing grooves that come at you with no frills’, adding that the songs reward repeat listening on a long drive in a way that slicker productions rarely do.
The brevity question came up repeatedly. Mike Canoe felt that ‘with twelve songs crammed into 28 minutes, most of the songs are over just as I’m getting into the groove’. Gary Claydon was more forgiving: ‘brevity is also a friend to the casual listener at times, and Okie certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome.’ Philip Qvist landed on a verdict many seemed to share, that at just 28 minutes, ‘there is no chance of you getting bored here’, giving the record a 7. Ken Doyle went higher, calling it his favourite JJ Cale album and awarding it 9 out of 10, drawn to what he described as its exquisite, decades-proof chill.
Robert Christgau, reviewing at the time, was more sardonic: ‘For J.J., this is adventurous stuff.’ The backhanded compliment still rings true. Within Cale’s own narrow parameters, a song like ‘Starbound’ pushing toward space pop was a genuine stretch. It didn’t always work. But the core of Okie, the blues shuffle of ‘I Got the Same Old Blues’, the soft country lilt of ‘Cajun Moon’, the understated guitar picking throughout, holds up as a document of an artist entirely at ease with his own limitations and all the more compelling for it. The Louder Album of the Week Club runs every week; you can join via Facebook to take part in future votes.
