Fats Waller: Piano virtuoso and self-confessed "viper."

For your enjoyment (or total indifference), Audiogalaxy is proud to introduce a new (semi-)regular feature on old-time folk, blues, jazz, country, and vaudeville, exploring their darker themes. Hell, someone's got to give this stuff some exposure.

Folk music is big on the primal things. Sex. Death. Love. Emotions: both real and chemically self-administered. Hardship. Heaven. When the Harry Smith anthology was re-released it came with a sticker that read "This is Gangsta Folk." A little bit awkward, sure, but worth stressing nonetheless: folk music is alive. It's high-stakes. It's not polite. Most of all, it's full of observations about the world as it has always been and as it is right now. To explore these qualities, and to spread the word about some great songs you might not have heard, we've started "The Dark Side of Folk." We've already done "Songs about Murder", look in the future for lists of songs about Sex, Hard Times and the Devil in this spot, and keep an eye out also for "The Dark Side of Folk"'s snot-nosed little goody-goody cousin "The Light Side of Folk" for songs about Love, Heaven, and other boring topics.

This week's entry lists our favorite old-time songs about drugs. If you thought drugs like pot, cocaine, and opiates like heroin didn't exist before the 60's, here's a history lesson: not only did they exist, most of them were legal. Drugs, in fact, have pretty much followed humankind everywhere we've been, variously giving people cheap thrills and ruining lives all throughout human history. But, as Levar Burton says, you don't have to take my word for it: here's a small list (in no particular order) of ten old songs about drugs, displaying attitudes running the gamut from celebration to condemnation.

"Cocaine Habit Blues," performed by the Memphis Jug Band:
With their jaunty rhythm, jauntier delivery, jug and washboard, and herky-jerky dueling kazoo and harmonica breakdowns, the Memphis Jug Band offer up the silliest and most thoroughly enjoyable ode to coke-generosity imaginable. Lead Belly's exuberantly unhinged version of this song, entitled "Take a Whiff on Me," is also to be recommended, but the Memphis Jug Band's version is ten times more fun - even though the lyrics aren't quite as witty - due to their contagious muppets-on-dope enthusiasm.

"The Reefer Song," performed by Fats Waller:
Fats Waller opens his "Reefer Song" exquisitely, taking the listener into his confidence as he excitedly sets the scene in a hushed tone: "Hey cats, it's four o'clock in the morning…Here we are in Harlem! Everybody's here but the police, and they'll be here any minute!" The rapturous ode to getting high, getting the munchies, and the quest for a mythical "reefer five feet long" that ensues is Waller in typically charming form - he even takes a kind of skewed vocal solo consisting solely of stoned blather. When Waller admits that his only real problem is that his wife "don't vipe," one wonders if he would have been better off with Trixie Smith, who, on her wonderfully breezy "Jack I'm Mellow," sings "Just smoked some gage, I'm a rampage…I'm gonna strut like a Suzy-Q 'cause I'm on a bender!"

"Kickin' the Gong Around," performed by Cab Calloway:
Another thoroughly hip cat from Harlem, Cab Calloway fully embodies the freewheeling decadence of the 20's and 30's; "Kickin' the Gong Around" refers to smoking opium (with the gong" being the opium pipe). But despite this song's shouted chorus, freewheeling scat, and blaring horns, the lyrics are actually downbeat and even depressing - describing a man whose wild search for his drug-addled girlfriend is greeted with almost cartoonish indifference by an opium den's "cokie" regulars, who are concealing his girlfriend perhaps without even knowing it.

"Cocaine Blues," performed by Luke Jordan:
There are many, many versions of "Cocaine Blues" - in part because the drug was so popular with the lower classes of the 20's and 30's (having fallen far out of fashion in high society decades before) - but a great deal of them resemble in form this catchy tune (a notable example being Charley Patton's kaleidoscopic schizo masterpiece "A Spoonful Blues"). My favorite quality about Jordan's friendly rendition is the way its lyrics roam crazily from topic to topic, sometimes in mid-sentence, with disconnected phrases occasionally clustering into vivid, almost surreal tableaux.

"Cocaine Blues," performed by Johnny Cash:
Another "Cocaine Blues," this one couldn't possibly be any more different from Jordan's. Where Jordan's was freewheeling, slightly surreal, and morally nonjudgemental, Cash ends his linear and structured cocaine story with a heartfelt exhortation to "lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be," though not before dragging the listener through a seamy and exhilarating tale of murder, escape, and imprisonment. Cash's recording of this song at Folsom Prison gets added scary points for the inmates' riotous cheering at the narrator's every transgression.

"Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?", performed by Harry "The Hipster" Gibson:
This superbly-titled song by this superbly-named early jazz musician is a definite classic of the genre, embodying a kind of comic whodunit about a little old lady whose new lease on life stems from a speed-spiked jar of drink mix. Her husband, meanwhile, has a little mystery of his own, as Gibson poses the additional question "who put the Nembutol in Mr. Murphy's overalls?"

"Canned Heat Blues," performed by Tommy Johnson:
Talk about your cheap thrills. This song by the original bluesman to sell his soul to the devil is an utterly harrowing first-person testimonial of addiction - poor and broke, Johnson had become addicted to canned heat (aka Sterno), and, in his words, "[it's] killing me." 60's blues-rock band Canned Heat took their name from Johnson's haunting song about losing your mind, body and soul in the blackest depths of addiction. An interesting counterpoint to this song, by the way, can be found in Lil Green's "Knockin' Myself Out," where the singer blithely states "I'm gonna knock myself out, yes I'm gonna kill myself…gradually by degrees" and, unlike Tommy Johnson, sounds like she's pretty excited about it.

"The Weed Smoker's Dream," performed by The Harlem Hamfats:
This sizzling cauldron of early jazz bears a serious social and economical message, exhorting pot-smokers everywhere to grow and sell their own. The Hamfats twist the hardly risqué and overly-impressed-with-itself torch song "Why Don't You Do Right?" into a song about really doing right: "Why don't you do, now, like the millionaires do," they suggest: "put your stuff on the market and make a million too?"

"Moonshiner," performed by Roscoe Holcomb:
Another very popular and often-covered song about "put[ting] your stuff on the market." I've never heard a version of "Moonshiner" that can even touch that of the great Roscoe Holcomb, whose experience of bootlegging was firsthand. Roscoe's soulful performance of this evocative and bottomlessly lonely song is delivered entirely a cappella and sounds like it's being sung half to himself. When, in his mind, the singer lines up and addresses all the world's moonshiners, telling them "You look so sad and lonesome. You're lonesome, yes, I know," you know too. One of the plainest and most powerful performances ever committed to tape.

"Way Down the Old Plank Road," performed by Uncle Dave Macon:
Another song about drinking, but with none of the mournfulness of Holcomb. To listen to this joyful and endlessly fun banjo tune by Macon, the Grand Ol' Opry's first star, you'd think that the biggest problem with alcohol is that you might not notice what you're getting yourself into. To wit: every time the narrator drinks a bit too much he wakes up in a different horrifying predicament, whether on a chain gang or (gasp!) married.

Wow - I thought folk music was all about sipping espresso! What about "Reefer Man," "When I Get Low I Get High," and Julia Lee's mysterious "Lotus Blossom?" Express how your life has been changed (and how you'll never listen to Phish again) on our message board: