Cocaine habit mighty bad
It's the worst old habit that I ever had
Hey, hey, Honey take a whiff on me
I went to Mr Beaman's in a lope
Saw a sign on the window said no more dope
Hey, hey, Honey take a whiff on me
If you don't believe cocaine is good
Ask Alma Rose at Minglewood
Hey, hey, Honey take a whiff on me
I love my whiskey, and I love my gin
But the way I love my coke is a doggone sin
Hey, hey, Honey take a whiff on me
Since cocaine went out of style
You can catch them shooting needles all the while
Hey, hey, honey take a whiff on me
It takes a little coke to give me ease
Strut my stuff long as you please
Hey, hey, honey take a whiff on me
Hey, hey
Songwriters: Jennie Mae Clayton
The road that brought Bland to this place of perpetual emotion began in the South and crisscrossed the country, six nights a week. The singer was born Robert Calvin Bland on Jan. 27, 1930, in the little town of Rosemark, Tenn., just outside of Memphis. He quit school in the third grade and remains practically illiterate today. He speaks in a garbled syntax at times, and is suspicious of talk he doesn't understand.
"I didn't like to work much, but I got a job at Bender's Garage, which was $27 a week," Bland told Guralnick in what remains the definitive piece about the singer (collected in "Lost Highway"). "And I started to sing on weekends. Spirituals. Just a small amount of it. We called ourselves the Pilgrim Travelers after a group that was big at the time. Then I started hanging around Beale Street with a bunch of guys. They used to give an amateur show down by the park at the Palace Theater every Wednesday night. Naturally we came to call ourselves the Beale Streeters."
Those guys -- Johnny Ace, B.B. King, Roscoe Gordon, Earl Forrest -- were playing for free in the late '40s. Heavily influenced by guitarist T-Bone Walker, they were forging a blues style that would define the next couple of decades. And what they were doing did not go unnoticed. Bland's first recording (backed by Gordon) was produced by Sam Phillips and later released on Chess records. In 1952, four songs produced by Ike Turner appeared on the Los Angeles-based Modern label. The man had something -- these blues mavens could smell it -- and in 1953 he signed to the Duke label, then owned by Memphis DJ David James Mattis.