Call Me the Breeze

J.J. Cale built "Call Me the Breeze" around a 12-bar blues guitar shuffle he played himself, and he set a drum machine underneath it, an early use of such equipment on a rock recording. The track opened his debut album, Naturally, released in 1971. Cale, an Oklahoma musician associated with the Tulsa sound, kept to his laid-back, shuffling style here, a manner he rarely abandoned across his career.

The song attracted a long line of cover versions. Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded it for Second Helping in 1974 and again on the live disc One More from the Road in 1976, and many later covers were performed as tributes to that band, including one by Les Claypool. Mason Proffit, Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash with his son John Carter Cash, John Mayer, Izzy Stradlin', and Alan Price with Rob Hoeke all recorded it as well. In 1992 Spiritualized reworked it as "Run", keeping Cale's lyrics while Jason Pierce wrote entirely new music for it.

Eric Clapton, Cale's longtime friend, returned to the song late in Cale's life and after it. The two performed it together at the 2004 Crossroads Guitar Festival, where Clapton took an extended solo, and the performance appeared on the official DVD that year. After Cale died in July 2013, Clapton covered it again for the 2014 tribute album The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale, releasing his version as "They Call Me the Breeze" with the original drum machine sound intact at the beginning.