Songfacts®:

• John D. Loudermilk wrote this song and originally recorded it in 1960. He was born and raised in the old tobacco warehouse city of Durham, North Carolina, and this is a somewhat autobiographical song about the city. Loudermilk was a prolific composer of many styles, and his songs ("Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye," "Big Daddy," "Paper Tiger," "Break My Mind," "Indian Reservation") have been covered by many different artists. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mark - Mayberry, NC
• Loudermilk (from American Songwriter Magazine January/February 1988): "I got the idea for writing that song from a road in our town that was called Tobacco Road because it was where they rolled the hogsheads full of Tobacco down to the river to be loaded onto barges. Along that road were a lot of real tough, seedy-type people, and your folks would have just died if they thought you ever went down there."
• The Nashville Teens were most certainly not from Nashville: they were part of the British Invasion and gave themselves an American name so it would be less obvious that they were from England. It worked, at least for this song, as they had a hit with it four years after Loudermilk originally recorded it.
  
  One member of The Nashville Teens, Michael Dunford, became a mainstay with the classical rock band Renaissance as a guitarist and primary songwriter. Dunford died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 2012 at age 68.
• This was one of the first songs produced by Mickie Most for another artist. Most was born and raised in England, but went to South Africa in 1959, where he formed a band called Mickie Most and his Playboys. Rock music hadn't yet come to the country, so Most introduced songs like "The Twist" and "Johnny B. Goode" to the country with his cover versions. (Hey! Isn't that the plot of Back To The Future?)
  
  When Most returned to England, he turned to production work and began doing sessions with The Animals. Soon after, he produced this track; by the end of the '60s he was the top producer in the UK, with hits by Lulu, Herman's Hermits and Donovan to his credit.
• When Johnny Winter's career took off in the late '60s, he had his younger brother, Edgar Winter, play keyboards and saxophone in his band. Johnny wanted to showcase Edgar, so he had him sing "Tobacco Road," which they included in Johnny's set at Woodstock in 1969. Edgar included the song on his first solo album in 1970 and released it as a single.
  
  Other artists to record the song include Bobbie Gentry, David Lee Roth and Lou Rawls.
• This was used in the season 3 opener of the TV show Mad Men. In the show, the character Don Draper takes the identity of another man, similar to how the Nashville Teens, a British group, posed as Americans.