Public Domain Theatre: Dope Head Blues

There's been some moral outrage in the press recently about whether today's rock stars are glamorising drug culture. Given that this has been sparked by press coverage of people like Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse, and that one glance at either of those people should be more effective than any possible anti-drugs public service film, this seems a little strange.

Anyway, it's certainly something that the press can get their teeth into, and it's definitely a good excuse for certain types of journalist to decry today's culture and long for a return to the good old days, when men were men, truth was truth, films were black and white, women were expected to stay in the kitchen and black people couldn't vote. Ah, what a golden age that was.

Even if we ignore the fact that the time nostalgically longed for was pretty rubbish in a number of ways, that still wilfully ignores the content of the music that was around. And this brings us to today's Public Domain Theatre, brought to you by the amazing resources of archive.org. I don't know how they manage to keep running, but the archive.org people are doing a fantastic job of keeping vast quantities of our culture accessible. The song that I'll be serving up from their vaults is "Dope Head Blues", by Victoria Spivey.


Awesome though archive.org are, their servers can be a touch slow. You may want to click Play and then immediately pause the track to let it load, so that it doesn't stop all the time.

Spivey was one of the classic female blues singers, and worked with some extremely famous people, including Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan and Lonnie Johnson, who plays guitar on this recording. Her fame certainly gave her the opportunity to indulge in the kind of excesses that this song mentions, although whether or not she actually did is unknown. Either way, this song neither actively promotes nor condemns cocaine use. It simply presents, unvarnished, the damage that the drug does while still conveying the mindless enjoyment of its users. Look at the third verse, for example.

Feel like a fightin' rooster
Feel better than I ever felt
Got double pneumonia
And still I think I got the best health

In just a couple of lines, we find out that the singer feels invincible, but is actually on the verge of death. That's some serious economy of words going on, and it has the added bonus of being utterly chilling. Of course, you can't keep on being gloomy throughout an entire song without your listeners getting bored, which probably explains the inclusion of the gloriously surreal lines "The president sent for me / The Prince of Wales is on my trail." Even then, the comedy comes from the ludicrous extremes of the singer's paranoia - she's clearly breaking down mentally as well as physically.

Obviously, this is an immensely depressing song. I think it's an important one, though, because it tells nothing but the truth. Anyone who wants the art they make to have a message can't do better than simply making it describe the world accurately, and letting the artwork's viewers or listeners draw their own conclusions. Spivey does this superbly. Forget Doherty and Winehouse, frankly...I think I'll stick with this.