Ah, Prohibition: that 13-year experiment in teetotaltarianism that proved you can’t keep a man from his true love. Take my great-uncle Brooks. He couldn’t afford the bootleg hooch that was readily available, so he took to making that abominable-tasting home brew known as bathtub gin. Where his poor family bathed, I haven’t the faintest.
One day Brooks returned home to discover his bathtub was drier than a county in Kansas. He howled, full of the grapes of wrath, and out the front door he charged. Sure enough, a neighbor recalled seeing an elderly scoundrel slip out the back door of Brooks’ house, a half-dozen newly filled bottles in his arms. Whistling. Who was the dirty palooka as would purloin a souse’s precious store of shine? Why, none other than Brooks’ own father, whose thirst was the stuff of legend. Prohibition turned brother against brother and father against son, just like the Civil War.
1919’s Volstead Act put the kibosh on the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States, making social reformers and Christian fundamentalists gladsome indeed. But the new prohibition left an ombibulous populace to fret over how to finagle it next fifth. The stewed and the snooted need not have sweated it. The ink was hardly dry on the Volstead Act before bootleggers and moonshiners took on the philanthropic task of ensuring no wet need ever go dry, while crime—organized, disorganized, and otherwise—skyrocketed. From 1920 until 1933, when prohibition was finally repealed, America was one ripped and roaring Republic.
And I can think of no better way to recapture the spirit of that Dark Age than to listen to The New Lost City Ramblers’ 1962 LP American Moonshine and Prohibition Songs, one great collection of tunes about the 18th Amendment’s impact on America’s alcohol-loving Southern mountain populace. Originally released by Folkways, the LP includes 17 songs from the Prohibition era, although several songs feature new lyrics.
The New Lost City Ramblers were an old-timey string band formed in New York City in 1958, during America’s Folk Revival. The Ramblers’ original members were Mike Seeger (a multi-instrumentalist and Pete Seeger’s half-brother), John Cohen (who is believed to be the Uncle John of “Uncle John’s Band” fame), and Tom Paley (who quit the Ramblers in 1962 upon being asked—and refusing—to sign statements about his political allegiances).
The New Lost City Ramblers set themselves apart by opting for authenticity; they played the songs they heard on dusty 78s in the rough, rather than polishing ‘em up for mass consumption like such commercially successful folk troupes as The Kingston Trio and the Weavers. That said, the trio never succumbed to slavish imitation; they captured the spirit of those 1920s and 1930s recordings, while remaking them in their own image.
But on to Prohibition! Everybody grab a jug, dip your bill, and lend an inebriated ear, for The New Lost City Ramblers have tales to tell!
American Moonshine and Prohibition Songs includes a slew of bootlegger and moonshiner odes, including “Virginia Bootlegger,” a sprightly song played on banjo and guitar, with the bootlegger recounting his travels to find new sources of shine. “I’m going to buy me a barrel of whiskey some of these days,” he sings, and insouciantly adds, “I can make bail if the officers catch me, some of these days.” “Kentucky Bootlegger” features a great jaw harp by Seeger, banjo, and guitar, and a narrator who touts the miraculous properties of his product, singing, “One drop will make a rabbit whip a bulldog” and “make a hard-shell preacher fall from grace.” So, he sings, “Throw back your head and take a little drink/And for a week you won’t be able to think.” “Bootlegger’s Story” features a couple of guitars, a great group chorus (“So it’s meet me tonight/Oh pal, meet me/Meet me out in the moonlight alone/For I have 10 good gallons of whiskey/Must be sold by the light of the moon”) and a vocalist who defiantly sings, “If I knew when the officers were coming/I would be standing in my cabin door/With my pockets full of steel jackets/And a Colt ivory-handled forty-four.”
One of the leitmotifs of the Prohibition song is drinking’s baleful effect on innocent children. “The Drunken Driver” is a fast-paced guitar and banjo number that tells the graphic tale about an accident “that would charm the heart of men/And teach them not to drink and drive.” To wit, a drunk runs over two children on the highway, and the children turn to be his own. (The LP’s other driver’s ed film of a song, “Wreck on the Highway,” is a sad but pretty number that features the great line, “When whiskey and blood run together,” and the Ramblers singing in unison on the refrain, “I heard a crash on the highway/But I didn’t hear nobody pray.”)
“I Saw a Man at the Close of Day” is a fiddle-fueled tearjerker about a father standing outside a speakeasy with his pleading son (“Mother is sick at home/And sister cries for bread”). But the boy’s pleas are in vain, for the father “turned around and went into the door/And staggered up to the bar/And faltering unto to the landlord said/’Just give me one glass more.’” As for “Whiskey Seller,” it features a great banjo and opens with the lines, “Of all the crimes that ever have been/Selling whiskey is the greatest sin.” Whiskey “causes the children’s bitter cries/And the tears to gush from the mother’s eye/It causes them to cry for bread/And hungry then they are to bed.” And the song boasts the great refrain, “So get out of the way you whiskey seller/For you have ruined many a clever feller.”
I love the prohibitionists’ a cappella anthem “The Teetotals,” which features the Ramblers repeating, “We are bands of freemen,” and sing threateningly, “The teetotals are a’coming in the cold water pledge.” “We will drink no more brandy whiskey,” they sing, and it gives me the shivers, even if myself climbed, unhappily, aboard the water wagon decades ago. I don’t recommend it to anyone. On the opposing side of the great whiskey debate is “Al Smith for President.” Many an unhappy sot supported Smith, a vehement opponent of the Volstead Act, in his 1928 run for America’s highest office, and in “Al Smith for President” the singer, backed by a great banjo, sings “Moonshine been here long enough/Let’s all vote right and get rid of such stuff.” And of the bad whiskey that blinded and killed he sings, “Many a good man been poisoned to death/And with a real drink he never was blessed.”
“Prohibition Is a Failure” is more direct, and includes some great satire; sounding like he’s returning to Heaven on Earth, the singer announces, “I’m going back to Georgia to join the drinking clan/Where whiskey is made of Red Seal Lye and sold in old tin cans/Where the men they drink and gamble/And the women quarrel and fight/And the saloons they run wide open/And a man’s killed every night.”
My personal favorites include “Down to the Stillhouse to Get a Little Cider,” a delightful Irish-flavored romp that’s over in the blink of an eye, and features one simple lyric: “Saddle up the grey horse/Hoop be the rider/Down to the stillhouse/To get a little cider.” I also love the humorously doleful “Goodbye Old Booze,” which features fiddle, banjo, and one sad-sounding fella singing, “Oh goodbye booze/Forever more/My foolish days will soon be o’er/I had a good time/And I couldn’t agree/You see why booze has done for me.” Bootleg liquor has torn his clothes, swelled his head, and broke his heart, “so goodbye booze/We now shall part.” And so he avows until the end, when the love of his life “Whispered low/How sweet it sounds/We’ll take another ride on the merry-go-round.”
But the LP’s standout track and most brilliant offering is “Intoxicated Rat,” a wonderful tale about one very inebriated fella’s encounter with one very thirsty rodent. The singer comes home late one night, “so drunk I couldn’t see/I hooked my toe in the old doormat and fell/As flat as I could be.” And damn if the cork doesn’t fly out of his last bottle of rum, spilling its precious contents all over the floor. At which point a rat “come out from his hiding place/And he got that whiskey scent/And he ran right up and he got a little shot/And back to his hole he went.” The rat then comes out again, and sidles “up to the gin on the floor/He was a little bit shy/But he winked one eye/And he got a little bit more.” Filled with Dutch courage, this time he stays by his favorite new watering hole and says, ‘Doggone my pop-eyed soul/I’m gonna get drunk again.” He’s aware there’s a cat somewhere, but he’s drunk beyond the point of fear by this point; he just sits there drinking, and has just finished lapping up the last of the booze when the cat finally makes his fateful appearance. You think the gig’s up, but unlike “Wreck on the Highway” this is one booze ballad with a happy ending: “The cat jumped over/But the rat got sober/Ran back to his hole again.”
The New Lost City Ramblers influenced a whole bunch of folks who came after them, including The Grateful Dead—I’ll never be able to listen to Workingman’s Dead again without hearing the echo of The New Lost City Ramblers—and one Bob Dylan. And maybe I’m crazy, but I hear them in such disparate artists as Randy Newman (particularly in his 1974 masterpiece, Good Old Boys) and, no, I’m not joshing, Killdozer.
All three Ramblers continued making old-timey string music long after the Ramblers broke up, Paley in Europe (he took his radicalism seriously, said ‘fuck the U.S. of A.,’ and never came back), and Seeger and Cohen with a succession of string bands. Seeger ultimately went on to play on LPs by a couple of folks also influenced by the New Lost City Ramblers, namely Ry Cooder and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
As for my Uncle Brooks, I don’t think he held a grudge against his old man, even if the coot did make off with his entire bathtub of gin. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and besides, family is family. Which is my own brother has forgiven me for the time in the late seventies I somehow managed to squeeze through his cat door (like I say, desperate times call for desperate measures) and made off with his supply of pot. Like they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My brother and I laugh about it now. But he nailed up that cat door the next day, and he hasn’t had one since.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
(for Alcohol!)
