Peggy Lee with the Benny Goodman Orchestra Performing “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too)” in 1942
I made a comment the other night on the air regarding the origin of Peggy Lee’s 1942 hit “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too).” I had said that Lee’s song originated from a 1936 song entitled “Weed Smoker’s Dream (Why Don’t You Do Now?).” As often happens when speaking off the top of your head live on air, we don’t always make it clear enough what we actually mean. My comment resulted in a call from a listener who suggested to me that it was hardly appropriate that I mention the word “weed” in reference to Peggy Lee’s popular song. I can’t recall exactly what I said on the air, but most times listener feedback is valuable. It’s always important, especially when discussing historical origins of jazz songs, to be clear and accurate.
So, in deference to my listener, I offer this post as a clearer explanation.
The song in question: Peggy Lee’s version of “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too)” composed by Kansas Joe McCoy from the Peggy Lee compilation Why Don’t You Do Right? (1942) on ASV — With the Benny Goodman Orchestra.
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy
The song has a fascinating history. Delta blues musician Joe McCoy (married to Memphis Minnie for a time between 1929 and 1935) originally wrote a song entitled “Weed Smoker’s Dream (Why Don’t You Do Now?).” McCoy recorded the song in Chicago in 1936 on Vocalion Records with his band The Harlem Hamfats. McCoy sang and played guitar on the record. However, there is some debate about who actually did the vocals (see Ivan Santiago-Mercado’s fascinating discussion on the evolution of the song “The Peggy Lee Bio-Discography And Videography:Observations About The Song ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?'”). But he is credited as composer of the song.
Here are the lyrics to “Weed Smoker’s Dream”:
Sitting on a million
Sitting on it every day,
Can’t make no money
Giving your stuff away.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
Faye is a betting woman,
Bets on every hand.
Trickin’ mother for you
Everywhere she land.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
May’s a good-lookin’ frail
She lives down by the jail
On her back though she got
Hot stuff for sale.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
The song’s lyrics are fascinating. This is not your typical thirties “reefer” song lyrics. The subject matter of most reefer songs of the thirties and forties deal almost exclusively with dreaming of getting high, the state of being high, or looking for the “stuff” to get high with. However, there’s more going on in “Weed Smoker’s Dream.”
Consider the point-of-view of the song’s speaker. On the one hand, the speaker seems to be addressing himself in the second person about the injustice of his own over-all dismal economic status, almost as if he’s chiding himself:
Can’t make no money
Giving your stuff away.
Or he could be addressing someone else about “giving your stuff away.” But who is the antecedent of the pronoun in this instance? Nowhere in the song is the word “weed” actually stated. It’s not clear to what the word “stuff” is alluding, at least not until the third chorus:
Faye is a betting woman,
Bets on every hand.
Trickin’ mother for you
Everywhere she land.
In this case, what the speaker is “sitting on” could be worth a “million” if only he/we would do “like the millionaires.” The “someone else” in this case is clearly a woman, a prostitute. But there is still more yet.
Also, considering typical reefer song lyrics, “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” like other more serious blues narratives, is a fairly complex social narrative of the thirties. This was the era of the Great Depression full of hard times for everyone trying to make a living, even dealers of weed. Unless, of course, you were a millionaire. Weed smokers can’t afford a price high enough to make our speaker the kind of money he’s dreaming of, especially if you’re forced to give “your stuff away.” So, in one interpretation, our speaker is calling for us (meaning other dealers or himself, depending on how you interpret the speaker’s use of the pronoun “you”) to do what the “millionaires” do to make their millions: “Put your stuff on the market.”
As mentioned earlier, putting your “stuff on the market” doesn’t only refer to weed; words and phrases like “trickin’, “good-lookin’ frail,” “hot stuff for sale” suggest “millions” could be made in the skin trade. The word frail refers to a woman here (etymology of this word can be linked to Shakespeare’s line “Frailty, thy name is woman” from Hamlet —I, ii, 46), but not the kind of woman who is weak or delicate. A “frail” woman is one who is weak in character or morals. .
As the speaker in the song suggests, prostitution during the depression could also be a very lucrative business venture, especially since because of race the social institutions of the period routinely blocked blacks from any legitimate opportunities to get ahead economically through hard work, the same institutions that favored whites and millionaires.
The frustrations of these unfair social conditions forced many blacks, like the speaker in the song, to turn to illegal activities in order to survive. It was not uncommon, for example, for black women during the depression to turn to prostitution as their only source of income to support their family, especially if there was no husband around or he was out of work. There just were no jobs for Black Americans during the depression, so rather than turn to stealing or welfare (which was a matter of pride for many black families, even though blacks rarely received any public assistance anyway), prostitution became the reasonable alternative (see Elizabeth Alice Clement’s Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945, 208-209).
Millionaires became millionaires by exercising the principles of capitalism. If a black man can’t get a job and he refuses to live in poverty, then it becomes reasonable in a racist system, especially for a class of people who as a cultural value financial independence, self-reliance, and hard work, to exercise those same capitalistic principles in order to support a family. For both African-American men and women, prostitution, then, was a reasonable economic choice of the period.
“Weed Smoker’s Dream” is not a whining lament of white oppression, but rather a pragmatic alternative to it: why not do “like the millionaires”?
Listen for yourself: here’s the The Harlem Hamfats version from 1936:
Call and Response 
“Kansas” Joe McCoy and His “Weed Smoker’s Dream”
Posted in Jazz, Jazz History, Jazz Playlists, Music, Social Commentary, tagged Kansas Joe McCoy, Memphis Minnie, Peggy Lee, reefer songs on June 7, 2015| 1 Comment »
Peggy Lee with the Benny Goodman Orchestra Performing “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too)” in 1942
I made a comment the other night on the air regarding the origin of Peggy Lee’s 1942 hit “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too).” I had said that Lee’s song originated from a 1936 song entitled “Weed Smoker’s Dream (Why Don’t You Do Now?).” As often happens when speaking off the top of your head live on air, we don’t always make it clear enough what we actually mean. My comment resulted in a call from a listener who suggested to me that it was hardly appropriate that I mention the word “weed” in reference to Peggy Lee’s popular song. I can’t recall exactly what I said on the air, but most times listener feedback is valuable. It’s always important, especially when discussing historical origins of jazz songs, to be clear and accurate.
So, in deference to my listener, I offer this post as a clearer explanation.
The song in question: Peggy Lee’s version of “Why Don’t You Do Right (Get Me Some Money Too)” composed by Kansas Joe McCoy from the Peggy Lee compilation Why Don’t You Do Right? (1942) on ASV — With the Benny Goodman Orchestra.
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy
The song has a fascinating history. Delta blues musician Joe McCoy (married to Memphis Minnie for a time between 1929 and 1935) originally wrote a song entitled “Weed Smoker’s Dream (Why Don’t You Do Now?).” McCoy recorded the song in Chicago in 1936 on Vocalion Records with his band The Harlem Hamfats. McCoy sang and played guitar on the record. However, there is some debate about who actually did the vocals (see Ivan Santiago-Mercado’s fascinating discussion on the evolution of the song “The Peggy Lee Bio-Discography And Videography:Observations About The Song ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?'”). But he is credited as composer of the song.
Here are the lyrics to “Weed Smoker’s Dream”:
Sitting on a million
Sitting on it every day,
Can’t make no money
Giving your stuff away.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
Faye is a betting woman,
Bets on every hand.
Trickin’ mother for you
Everywhere she land.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
May’s a good-lookin’ frail
She lives down by the jail
On her back though she got
Hot stuff for sale.
Why don’t you do now
Like the millionaires
Put your stuff on the market
And make a million, too.
The song’s lyrics are fascinating. This is not your typical thirties “reefer” song lyrics. The subject matter of most reefer songs of the thirties and forties deal almost exclusively with dreaming of getting high, the state of being high, or looking for the “stuff” to get high with. However, there’s more going on in “Weed Smoker’s Dream.”
Consider the point-of-view of the song’s speaker. On the one hand, the speaker seems to be addressing himself in the second person about the injustice of his own over-all dismal economic status, almost as if he’s chiding himself:
Can’t make no money
Giving your stuff away.
Or he could be addressing someone else about “giving your stuff away.” But who is the antecedent of the pronoun in this instance? Nowhere in the song is the word “weed” actually stated. It’s not clear to what the word “stuff” is alluding, at least not until the third chorus:
Faye is a betting woman,
Bets on every hand.
Trickin’ mother for you
Everywhere she land.
In this case, what the speaker is “sitting on” could be worth a “million” if only he/we would do “like the millionaires.” The “someone else” in this case is clearly a woman, a prostitute. But there is still more yet.
Also, considering typical reefer song lyrics, “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” like other more serious blues narratives, is a fairly complex social narrative of the thirties. This was the era of the Great Depression full of hard times for everyone trying to make a living, even dealers of weed. Unless, of course, you were a millionaire. Weed smokers can’t afford a price high enough to make our speaker the kind of money he’s dreaming of, especially if you’re forced to give “your stuff away.” So, in one interpretation, our speaker is calling for us (meaning other dealers or himself, depending on how you interpret the speaker’s use of the pronoun “you”) to do what the “millionaires” do to make their millions: “Put your stuff on the market.”
As mentioned earlier, putting your “stuff on the market” doesn’t only refer to weed; words and phrases like “trickin’, “good-lookin’ frail,” “hot stuff for sale” suggest “millions” could be made in the skin trade. The word frail refers to a woman here (etymology of this word can be linked to Shakespeare’s line “Frailty, thy name is woman” from Hamlet —I, ii, 46), but not the kind of woman who is weak or delicate. A “frail” woman is one who is weak in character or morals. .
As the speaker in the song suggests, prostitution during the depression could also be a very lucrative business venture, especially since because of race the social institutions of the period routinely blocked blacks from any legitimate opportunities to get ahead economically through hard work, the same institutions that favored whites and millionaires.
The frustrations of these unfair social conditions forced many blacks, like the speaker in the song, to turn to illegal activities in order to survive. It was not uncommon, for example, for black women during the depression to turn to prostitution as their only source of income to support their family, especially if there was no husband around or he was out of work. There just were no jobs for Black Americans during the depression, so rather than turn to stealing or welfare (which was a matter of pride for many black families, even though blacks rarely received any public assistance anyway), prostitution became the reasonable alternative (see Elizabeth Alice Clement’s Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945, 208-209).
Millionaires became millionaires by exercising the principles of capitalism. If a black man can’t get a job and he refuses to live in poverty, then it becomes reasonable in a racist system, especially for a class of people who as a cultural value financial independence, self-reliance, and hard work, to exercise those same capitalistic principles in order to support a family. For both African-American men and women, prostitution, then, was a reasonable economic choice of the period.
“Weed Smoker’s Dream” is not a whining lament of white oppression, but rather a pragmatic alternative to it: why not do “like the millionaires”?
Listen for yourself: here’s the The Harlem Hamfats version from 1936:
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