Smoke Signals & Wagon Tracks by Robert D. Bolen.
Table of contents
Some wore garments ornamented with ribbons, feathers, little bells, and shells. This rite was reenacted on a regular basis until slave-owners began to suspect that the complex percussive beats were sending secret, subversive messages to restive blacks. Several years before the Civil War, African drumming was prohibited throughout the South. But music persisted as an indelible aspect of the dynamic cultural legacy transmitted across the ocean and passed along to generations of slaves and their descendents. From the African dances of the old days would come the driving energy of modern jazz.
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Today Congo Square is an open area within Louis Armstrong Park, so named in honor of the jazz marvel, born and bred in New Orleans, who gained fame initially as a horn player and later as a vocalist, a musical ambassador, and a character of epic proportions. Although he lacked formal musical training, Armstrong rearranged the sonic terms of American popular culture and his innovations reverberated far and wide.
More than anyone else, he taught the world to swing. Armstrong grew up dirt poor, a shy, fatherless child who picked food out of garbage cans and ran errands for pimps and whores. Initially, he was raised by his grandmother, a former slave, in a country where black people were still considered less than fully human.
American apartheid was imposed by vigilante terrorism and Jim Crow legislation that codified racial inequality. Armstrong not only had to ride at the back of the trolley like all African Americans in pigment-conscious New Orleans, he bore the brunt of additional prejudice because his skin was very dark.
For Armstrong, music was a siren call leading him out of misery. As a young man, he joined the great exodus of African Americans from the South who migrated to Chicago and other northern industrial cities in the s, seeking jobs and a better life. Some bands in Chicago rejected Armstrong because his skin was so dark. But he was readily welcomed into the fraternity of marijuana-smoking musicians—the vipers—who gigged in the Windy City. He liked the sweet smell and taste.
It calmed his nerves and lifted his spirits.
Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
Pops swore by cannabis and often touted the benefits of the herb, telling jokes, jiving, proselytizing, and kidding endlessly with his cohorts. Showcasing solos by several musicians who passed the bluesy melody around like a burning marijuana cigarette—from piano to trombone to clarinet to soaring trumpet—this landmark instrumental signaled the transformation of jazz into an improvisatory art form with wide-open opportunities for individual expression. No one had ever made music like this before. Groucho Marx got his nickname from a so-called grouch bag he wore around his neck.
Armstrong himself appeared in some sixty films—singing, scatting, blowing his horn, and mugging for the camera. He was the first black American to be featured in A-list movies. His songs were broadcast every day on radio and listened to throughout the world. They were each convicted and sentenced to six months in prison and a thousand-dollar fine. Strings were pulled and the judge was persuaded to suspend the sentences with the proviso that Armstrong leave California. Although rattled by his close encounter with law enforcement, Armstrong continued to smoke pot for the rest of his life with little evidence of ill effect, according to Dr.
Jerry Zucker, his personal physician. What, in his case, was cannabis a remedy for? Armstrong said he used reefer to unwind, to relieve stress, to ease the chronic pain of racism. As he told record producer John Hammond: It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro. A hero of his race, he became the first African American to host a national radio broadcast in , the same year marijuana was outlawed by the U. Satchmo was one of few blacks to perform publicly with white musicians.
Onstage, he was a megastar, but offstage Armstrong remained a second-class citizen of the United States. He and his band endured the indignities of touring in the South. They were harassed by police and barred from whites-only restaurants, hotels, and bathrooms. White supremacists bombed a theater in Knoxville, Tennessee, while Armstrong was playing for a racially mixed audience.
Mob-controlled venues up north posed additional risks. To be invisible was not just to lack acknowledgment other than scorn from the pale man; it was the fundamental condition of black people in white America. Louis Armstrong, the most visible of invisible men, traveled the world over, but this trip to the Gold Coast of West Africa was special. When he saw the women of Ghana, he recognized the face of his own mother.
I came from here, way back. Pollen samples indicate the presence of cannabis in sub-Saharan Africa for at least two millennia. Introduced by overland traders from the Arab Middle East and later by Portuguese seamen traveling from India, the herb quickly spread throughout the continent. The Zulus ingested psychoactive hemp via steam baths and enemas in addition to smoking it for pleasure; they also smoked it to boost their courage before going into battle.
A Bantu tribe in the Congo dispensed cannabis as a means of punishment—miscreants were compelled to smoke a large quantity of marijuana until they either confessed to a crime or keeled over. Cannabis had a medicinal reputation in Africa that varied from region to region. Cultivated as a source of fiber as well as for its remarkable resin, the versatile herb served as a remedy for a wide range of ailments, including dysentery, malaria, diarrhea, typhus, and rheumatism.
The Hottentots, who applied it as a salve for snakebites, deemed dagga more valuable than gold. Sotho women used marijuana to facilitate childbirth, and Sotho children were fed ground-up hempseed paste while weaning. The roots of jazz and blues extend back through slavery to the collective rhythmic patterns of indigenous tribes in West Africa, where cannabis had thrived for centuries.
Thrown upon bonfires, marijuana leaves and flowers augmented nocturnal healing rituals with drum circles, dancing, and singing that invoked the spirit of the ancestors and thanked them for imparting knowledge of this botanical wonder. It was only natch that Satch, the musical savant and dagga devotee, felt right at home as soon as he set foot on West African soil.
Black captives brought cannabis seeds and seeds of other plants with them aboard slave ships that made the perilous passage across the Atlantic. In an era when sea power was paramount, saltwater-resistant hemp fiber was a crucial, strategic substance. For hundreds of years, all the major European maritime powers—the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese—depended on a quality hemp harvest to maintain their fleets. So did an estimated eleven million to twenty million African slaves, who were transported under conditions so horrible that up to a third died en route to North and South America.
The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to enslave Africans and bring them en masse to the Western hemisphere. This is how cannabis took root in Brazil, a Portuguese colony, in the early s. Linguistic evidence in this case speaks volumes: Cannabis cultivation initially took hold on newly established sugar plantations in northeast Brazil. Black slaves seemed to handle the heat and fieldwork better when they smoked the fragrant herb, so Portuguese plantation owners allowed them to grow cannabis between rows of sugarcane. The aboriginal peoples of the New World were familiar with an array of psychoactive plants, which they used for religious rites, spirit journeys, divination, and therapeutic purposes.
Thus, it was an easy transition for Native Americans to adopt cannabis and include it in their ceremonies. It was only a matter of time before fishermen and dockworkers in the coastal cities of Brazil also were smoking pot, a practice that slowly spread through the northern half of South America, across the Panamanian isthmus, and into Mexico. As cannabis proliferated geographically, so did its medicinal applications in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Marijuana purportedly had an analgesic effect on toothaches when packed on the gums near the painful area; leaves soaked in alcohol and wrapped around swollen joints were said to help arthritis. In , King Henry VIII commanded English farmers to grow hemp for its fibrous content or risk paying a stiff fine, an edict reiterated by Queen Elizabeth thirty years later.
In , eight years after colonists first planted hemp in Jamestown, the Virginia assembly passed a law requiring every household in the colony to cultivate the plant because it had so many beneficial uses—for making fabric, paper products, cord, and other items. Some of the earliest pioneers in North America were contracted to grow fiber hemp in exchange for safe transit to the New World. It was one of the first crops cultivated by Puritan settlers in the rich soil of New England, where hemp grew twice as high as in the British Isles. Hemp farming and processing played an important role in American history.
Its legacy is evident in the names of numerous towns and hamlets from the Atlantic coast to the Midwest—Hempstead, Hempfield, Hemp Hill, and variations thereof. Early American farmers and their entire families wore garments made from hemp, wiped their hands with hemp towels and hemp handkerchiefs, inscribed words on hemp paper, and sewed with hemp yarn.
Hemp was considered so valuable that it served as a substitute for legal tender in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America. Several of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, grew hemp—or tried to—and they urged other colonial farmers to do likewise. One problem was the lack of a cultivation manual to assist colonial farmers. It was not until ten years before the American Revolution that an English-language guidebook for raising hemp became available in the colonies.
George Washington was a close friend of the Quincy-Adams clan and he surely knew of the grow guide. Ipso facto, Washington must have smoked pot. Otherwise why would he be so concerned with separating male and female plants? But seedless hemp was likely the last thing George Washington wanted. Washington made several references to hemp in his diaries, including comments to his gardener, urging him to save the seeds.
In no uncertain terms, Quincy indicated that the males were to be separated from the females after seeds had been set on the latter. This is just the opposite of what sinsemilla cultivators strive for. Washington was growing hemp for seed and fiber, not for smoke. There are no references in his diary to smoking any of that good shuzzit. Washington and other American revolutionaries were notorious boozers, not puffers. This was a national-security issue. Prior to the much-celebrated Boston Tea Party, hemp had already become a source of tension between the colonies and the mother country.
One of the first ways the Americans asserted their independence was by refusing to send raw hemp fiber back to Britain. Instead, the Americans began to process hemp themselves in defiance of the Crown, which offered a lucrative price for every bale delivered from the colonies. Thanks, but no thanks, hemp entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin told the British ever so diplomatically—the Americans needed all the hemp they could get their hands on. Franklin owned a mill that converted hemp pulp into paper that American patriots used to propagate their seditious ideas of liberty.
Thomas Paine hyped hemp in Common Sense, his influential clarion call for independence that persuaded many Americans to support the revolution. Without enough hemp, revolutionary forces would not have prevailed.
Patriotic wives and mothers organized spinning bees with hempen thread to clothe the revolutionary army. The first American flags were made from hemp cloth. Thomas Jefferson penned the original draft of the Declaration of Independence on Dutch hemp paper. British designs on securing access to hemp were also a factor in the War of The domestic hemp industry prospered during the early days of the American republic in large part because black slaves were utilized to plant, harvest, and process the crop.
It was arduous, backbreaking work—uprooting the hemp, pounding the tenacious husk, extracting the slippery raw fiber, and making it usable. So prized was hemp that some plantation owners even paid wages to slaves to encourage production. After serving two terms as president, Jefferson retired to his Virginia estate in to raise fiber hemp, among other crops, with the help of his slaves.
He eventually abandoned this project because it was too labor-intensive. The news touched off an overnight stampede in , as prospectors rushed in, manic for mineral wealth.
Wagon Wheel
Some made the journey overland to the Pacific in horse-drawn wagons covered with hemp canvas. Hemp was well established as a fiber crop in North America long before European settlers and their descendents discovered the psychoactive properties of cannabis. As new technologies, most notably the cotton gin and the steamship, eclipsed the urgency for hemp fiber, the resilient plant appeared in another guise—as a medicine for a wide range of infirmities. Elixirs and Tinctures The dual role of hemp as a healing herb and a source of fiber had deep roots in European culture. Hemp festivities were common throughout the continent long before Columbus set sail under the Spanish flag.
Farmers, hoping for robust growth, sowed hempseed on days associated with tall saints. Peasants jumped for joy and danced in fields of hemp to usher in a bountiful harvest, and they plucked flowers from the venerable plant to protect themselves from the Evil Eye. Young women in the Ukraine and England carried hempseed as an amulet to attract a mate and hasten their wedding day. When a bride entered her new home after a Slavic marriage ceremony, well-wishers sprinkled her with hempseed for good fortune.
According to peasant folklore, the vapors from smoldering hemp possessed cleansing qualities that protected against disease. Nevertheless, European folk traditions still considered hemp a medicinal and magical plant, attesting to what twenty-first-century scientists would eventually confirm: THC is not the only therapeutic compound in cannabis, and certain nonpsychoactive compounds prominent in fiber hemp are powerful healing agents.
Cannabis sativa illustration A familiar ingredient in European folk remedies, hemp served as a multipurpose medicine—for quelling fevers, soothing burns, relieving headaches, and dressing wounds with a disinfectant paste made of hemp flowers, wax, and olive oil. The curative powers of hempseeds, roots, leaves, and sap were well known in Germanic regions, where midwives placed sprigs of the mighty fiber over the stomach and ankles of pregnant women to prevent convulsions and difficult childbirth.
It was customary to honor Freya, the German fertility goddess, with hemp as a pagan sacrament. In the twelfth century, Hildegard von Bingen, the legendary German folk healer, wrote about hanaf hemp in her Physica. The first written European reference to the medicinal use of hemp smoke appears in the Kreuterbuch, the massive sixteenth-century herbal compendium by Tabernaemontanus, a German doctor in Basel, Switzerland.
Though forbidden by religious authorities for such purposes, the continued use of hemp as a medicament, lubricant, and anointing oil, and as a focal point for rural ritual was widely known. But few spoke of it openly so as not to arouse the wrath of the Holy Inquisitor. William Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries often wrote in coded language to address topical social issues during a particularly volatile era in English history that was marked by intense religious and political strife. It sounds like someone had the munchies in this couplet: Like as, to make our appetites more keen, With eager compounds we our palate urge.
Was Shakespeare obliquely extolling the virtues of the heretical herb? Did he actually smoke the noted weed? Lo and behold, several of these fragments tested positive for hemp, a plant that had been cultivated in the British Isles at least since AD Not surprisingly, tobacco residue was also found, along with traces of other curious substances. Hemp found a home in the New World while tobacco traveled in the other direction. The highly addictive nicotine habit spread like wildfire across Europe.
Concerned that tobacco was undermining the social order, several European states imposed draconian punishments on smokers such as the slitting of nostrils in Russia and the death penalty in Ottoman Turkey. In seventeenth-century England, puffing tobacco was initially equated with plotting against the state.
But the tobacco craze was unstoppable. After trying unsuccessfully to ban it, the British monarchy decided that smokers should pay with their money instead of with their lives. Tobacco commerce was heavily taxed, quickly filling the state treasury. To maintain their profit, merchants in turn raised the price of tobacco, which became worth its weight in silver to an addicted populace. Shakespeare never explicitly mentioned pipes, smoking, or tobacco in any of his plays or poems.
And they may not have known exactly what was in those mixtures. The English clergyman Robert Burton cited hemp as a remedy for depression in his book Anatomy of Melancholy.
Culpeper remarked in his compendium that hemp was so well known among English housewives that he did not bother to indicate all its medicinal uses. In the month of April, I sowed the seeds of hemp Cannabis in two different pots.
The young plants came up plentifully. I placed each by the window, but in different and remote compartments. In one of them I permitted the male and female plants to remain together, to flower and bear fruit, which ripened in July. From the other, however, I removed all the male plants, as soon as they were old enough for me to distinguish them from the females.
The remaining females grew very well, and presented their long pistilla in great abundance, these flowers continuing a very long time, as if in expectation of their mates. It was certainly a beautiful and truly admirable spectacle, to see the unimpregnated females preserve their pistilla so long green and flourishing, not permitting them to fade, till they had been for a very considerable time exploded, in vain, to access the male pollen. Erasmus Darwin, the mid-eighteenth-century English physiologist, doctor, inventor, and poet, experimented with breeding methods to maximize the size of his cannabis specimens.
A founding member of the Lunar Society, a discussion group of innovative industrialists and natural philosophers, he was also the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Charles was a contemporary of William B. Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg.
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