The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 5

The People's Songbag

Cocaine Sniffers

(Specially written for "The Press" by

DERRICK ROONEY)

"Yonder comes mt> baby all dressed in blue. Baby, baby, what you gonna do, Cocaine, all around my brain." THE “white show” cocaine appears with surprising frequency among American folk songs, especially those collected in the southern States.

Exactly why the cocaine “sniffers” should have created a body of songs while users of other drugs have not, in general, done so has always been a mystery to me.

A number of “reefer” songs were recorded in the twenties and thirties—marijuana was not brought under Federal law until the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937—but these were mainly “race” records that had limited circulation and did not achieve the widespread usage that would enable one to call them folk songs.

But cocaine songs do exist, and in abundance. A proportion of them is unprintable, and others end in flatulent moralising, but the best of them—such as “Bad Lee Brown”—have the diamondhard language and clarity of imagery that characterises all good songs. “Bad Lee Brown” was first collected, in fragmentary form, in Texas in 1890 and most variants, though collected in the Southern Appalachians, North and South Carolina, Florida and Missis-

sippi, can be traced back to that State.

A Negro song, it tells the story of a hoodlum who “took a shot of cocaine and shot his woman down.” The words are direct and dispassionate; the lack of emotion is unusual, for most American badman ballads tend to glamorise the hoodlum. Willie Lee meets a sad fate: Judge read the sentence and he read it with a grin; Ninety-nine years in that San Quentin pen. Ninety-nine years underneath that ground.”

The last line refers, it is said, not to San Quentin, the California State prison, but to the old Federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, where the Texan authorities sent many Negro soldiers convicted of armed rebellion after the Houston riot during the First World War. Leavenworth prison was built over a coalmine, to which convicts were leased as e labour and actually put to’work under the ground. Another cocaine song is “Take A Whiff On Me,” a nonsense song which would, with slight amendments, make a rollicking drinking song. Its origin has never been traced. Woody Guthrie’s version omitted reference to cocaine, but Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) ended his recording optimistically with:

Cocaine’s for horses and not for men. Doctors say it’ll kill you but they don't say when.