Musgraves Follows Her Arrow -- To a Joint and Two Grammys

UPDATE 11/19: Musgraves crushed it at the 2019 CMA awards, where she had beautiful things to say about the female creative spirit, and how the earth needs it right now, while picking up one of two big awards. She also dueted with Willie Nelson, and the evening's hostesses joked about her enjoying "Willie's Reserve":

Carrie Underwood & Dolly Parton shout out Willie’s Reserve at the CMA’s @KaceyMusgraves @WillieNelson @reba @carrieunderwood @DollyParton @BioAnnie1 pic.twitter.com/4U7k7LK6xb

— Willie's Reserve (@WilliesReserve) November 18, 2019

UPDATE 9/19 : Sheryl Crow's kids thought Kacey Musgraves' marijuana was bad skunk

UPDATE 4/19: Kacey Musgraves as Bongs: A Twitter Thread

UPDATE 5/18: Musgraves guested on "Hello Sunshine" with Reese Witherspoon, who said she loves "Follow Your Arrow" because it was the first country song she'd heard about alternative lifestyles. 

UPDATE  5/16: 

 

Musgraves says one of the first songs she wrote after she moved to Nashville was "Burn One With John Prine."

UPDATE 7/15 - Musgraves has a new album sprinkled with pot references "like dab hits," along with a Willie Nelson duet, says CelebStoner. She will tour this summer starting July 9 in the US and UK. 

UPDATE 12/14 - Adding to her award count, Musgraves scores a Tokey for Best Video from Tokin Woman. 

Singer/songwriter Kacey Musgraves was nominated for four Grammys this year and on January 26 she won two: Best Country Album ("Same Trailer Different Park") and Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round").  The 25-year-old newcomer performed the song she co-wrote with Brandy Clark, "Follow Your Arrow," on the nationally televised awards ceremony, with the lyric:

Make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that’s something you’re into
When the straight and narrow 
Gets a little too straight  
Roll up a joint or don't (I would) 
Just follow your arrow 
Wherever it points

The fresh-faced Musgraves looks a lot more like Princess Kate than a stereotypical pothead. The video for "Follow Your Arrow" features Musgraves in Daisy-Duke-short shorts, a cowboy hat and toy guns, reminiscent of the act of VIP Candy Barr. Like Tokin Woman Besse Smith on her 1937 recording of "Gimmie a Pigfoot," Musgraves waits until the last verse to add her own reefer admission. She sang it with the "I would" on the show.

In March 2013 the Hollywood Reporter called Musgraves "The Weed-Smoking, Ball-Busting, Girl-Kissing Country Singer," and reported in 2011, when "she signed to Lost Highway Records, the boutique division of Universal Nashville...for left-of-center artists" she "was doing sit-down acoustic gigs" playing songs with lyrics like, “My idea of heaven is to burn one with John Prine.” (The first song on the first John Prine album was "Illegal Smile.")

"Mild evocations of lesbian smooching and marijuana may not seem radical outside the world of mainstream country," the Reporter continued. "But it seemed like a huge risk when Musgraves chose that song, of all the ones on her album, to perform at a UMG luncheon for hundreds of country radio programmers at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium last month. Any doubts she had about performing the song disappeared when attendees started laughing uproariously after the first line and applauding furiously after the first chorus. Afterward, the radio types were all abuzz about what a brilliantly catchy and clever ditty it was… and how they could never play it on their stations." (Country fans: call your local stations and request this song!)

Musgraves' "Same Trailer Different Park" album jumped to No. 12 from No. 28 on the Billboard chart after the win. The "Follow Your Arrow" video has had 2 million views (see it below):

Black Herstory Month

In honor of Black History month, Tokin Woman celebrates some African American women who celebrated marijuana. First and foremost is Bessie Smith (left), who smoked and sang about "reefers" throughout her career.

Born to a large, poor family in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Bessie joined a traveling minstrel show at age 14. Bessie was soon performing on stages all over the country as The Empress of the Blues. In 1933, Smith recorded "Gimmie a Pigfoot," featuring Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden, for John Hammond's Okeh record label. In the last verse Smith sings, "Gimmie a reefer" in this video.

"[S]he was more than merely famous, she was a living symbol of personal freedom: she did what she liked; she spoke her mind, no matter how outrageous her opinion; she flouted bourgeois norms and engaged in alcohol, drugs, and recreational sex," wrote Buzzy Jackson in A Bad Woman Feeling Good (2005, W.W. Norton & Co., New York).

On September 26, 1937, weeks after the Marijuana Tax Act made marijuana effectively illegal in the US,  Smith was in a traffic accident on US Highway 61 and died from her injuries. Some say Smith was turned away from a "whites only" hospital for treatment. Her funeral was held in Philadelphia on October 4, 1937 and was attended by about seven thousand people.

VIP Louise Cook, nicknamed "Jota" or "Snake Hips," was an exotic dancer in Harlem who appeared in Oscar Micheaux's breakthrough 1931 film The Exile. She also turned comedian Milton Berle onto marijuana.

Louis Armstrong wrote of her, circa 1929, "I shall never forget her, and her Dance. She was so wonderful in her 'Shake dance she would take 5 and 6 Encores."

In his 1974 autobiography, Berle says of Cook, "She was known as one of the greatest belly dancers in the world, and her act was sensational, with everything going like a flag in a hurricane. She was one of those rare women that men had only to look at to want. And that was even standing still. She was slender, and light-skinned like the color of coffee with too much cream in it, and she had her hair in an Afro, which wasn't standard gear then. When she worked, she covered her body with oil that made it shiny and sexy-looking." Cook is the featured dancer in this clip. 

World-famous dancer and activist Josephine Baker indulged in marijuana, according to Josephine: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. Phillip Leshing, who was then a 23-year-old bass player in Buddy Rich's orchestra, recalls in the book, "I remember once Josephine invited several of us to come to her dressing room and try some very good reefer. I went down with Harry 'Sweets' Edison, the trumpet player, and Buddy Rich, and we smoked pot with Josephine Baker...but the marijuana didn't affect her performance. Never." (p. 295) 

According to Leshing, Baker "had this gorgeous gold loving cup made for Buddy and the band, a trophy, like an Academy Award, with our names engraved on it. And it was filled with marijuana. She gave it to us after the last performance at the Strand [the New York club at which they were appearing in March 1951]." The authors speculate that Baker may have first smoked marijuana with her lover Georges Simenon, who used to mix hashish with tobacco in his pipe, or with the Prince of Wales in Paris, in the days when he would come to Le Rat Mort had to be taken out "feet first every night--dead drunk and stoned," according to another lover, Claude Hopkins.

Baker adopted more children than Angelina Jolie and was decorated by France for her work for the Resistance. See a video of Baker's famous banana dance.

Two other African-American dancers who rose to prominence and are associated with marijuana are Lucille Armstrong and Maya Angelou (pictured). Singers Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday were marijuana fans, and Ella Fitzgerald recorded "When I Get Low, I Get High" in 1936.

Modern Tokin' Women include Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Grace Jones, Rihanna, and Queen Latifah. And when dancer Carmen de Lavallade was bestowed a Kennedy Center Honor in 2017,  Stella Abrera performed "Soul Bossa Nova/Dear Quincy" (with pipe) in tribute.

Veggie VIPs Rock US Postage Stamps; Madonna First Female VIP to Rock Superbowl

Several VIPs (that's Very Important Potheads) will grace US Postage Stamps as part of a new series honoring "vegetarian icons" picked by PETA. McCartney (again) joins Woody Harrelson (natch), Chrissie Hynde, Natalie Portman and Pythagoras on the stamps, which are due to go on sale later this month.

It's just been announced that Hynde will open a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles along with Ellen DeGeneris, another of the 20 vegetarians to get a stamp. (Ellen's never admitted to smoking it, but joked about it when she hosted the Oscars in 2007.) Hynde's "Legalise Me" is the theme song in the new VIP video.

It's a good bet some of the other top vegetarians also toked. Pamela Anderson wrote a letter to Obama in 2008 in favor of legalization. Joan Jett covered the trippy 60s song "Crimson and Clover" and thought pot-puffing actress Kristen Stewart did a great job portraying her in a 2010 biopic. Leo Tolstoy explored the use of hashish and other intoxicants in his 1890 temperance essay "Why People Become Intoxicated," but his conclusions seem based on his experiences with wine and tobacco.

Lots of other cannabis connoisseurs have been honored with postage stamps, including Bessie Smith, Bob Hope, and Mark Twain, whose stamp came out this year. Also given a stamp in 2011 was pioneering African-American writer and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, in whose 1931 film "The Exile" VIP Louise Cook appeared.

And it's been announced that Madonna will appear at this year's Superbowl halftime show on Feb. 5.

As well as turning a suburban spa salesman onto pot in her 1985 movie "Desperately Seeking Susan," the world's most successful female musician admitted to smoking pot and taking Ecstasy in March 2008 upon her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Material Girl (worth an estimated $325 million) is far from the only pot lover who's appeared at America's biggest sports fest. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers rocked the stadium in 2008. At Superbowl 2005, Paul Mc Cartney played "Get Back" with the lyric, "Jo Jo left his home in Tucson Arizona, for some California grass." In 2004, Willie Nelson played along with country singer Toby Keith, he of the famed tune, "I'll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again."

At least one member of last year's halftime act, The Black Eyed Peas, is a known pot smoker: rapper Taboo (né Jaime Luis Gomez) was arrested near LA in March 2007 after marijuana was found in his car. The Peas just appeared at the nation's tree-lighting ceremony along with Kermit the "It's Not Easy Being Green" Frog and President Obama.

Hempy Spring, 2009

How wild, I just resurrected this blog exactly one year after my last post. And  the symmetry continues: where last year I celebrated the introduction of Barney Frank's national legalization bill, this spring I'm happy about the first-ever state legalization bill, introduced in California by Tom Ammiano (AB390). Read more.

Inspired in part by the Wanted: Female Pot Icons discussion at celebstoner.com, I'm doing a Tokin Woman show on KMUD radio on Wednesday, April 8 between 10 am and noon. I'll be playing tunes by Very Important Potheads Who Are Women, starting with Bessie Smith (hear her sing "Gimme a Reefer"). Stay tuned for more updates.