Country songs tend to involve heartbreak, loss, empowerment, American landscapes, and loving where you came from. But country music doesn’t exist in a bubble, and sometimes, musicians will get creative with their subject matter. In fact, there are a surprising number of country songs out there about taboo subjects like drugs. Let’s look into a few examples ahead of 4/20, shall we?
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1. “High Cost Of Living” by Jamey Johnson
“My life was just an old routine, every day the same damn thing / I couldn’t even tell I was alive / I tell you, the high cost of livin’ / Ain’t nothin’ like the cost of livin’ high.”
Well, it is quite expensive to be alive. But that’s not exactly what Jamey Johnson is singing about in “High Cost Of Living”. It’s a cheeky song, but it also doesn’t really celebrate drugs. In a way, the song is a cautionary tale. Johnson sings about doing drugs and making bad decisions, and how important it is to seek help when you really need it.
2. “Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle
“He’d buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line / Everybody knew that he made moonshine.”
This Steve Earle classic from 1988 is about a lot more than just making illegal alcoholic beverages and growing pot. “Copperhead Road” is about a vet whose predecessors are moonshine-makers and bootleggers, and how he wants to leave that particular world behind to become a marijuana grower, using skills he learned from the Viet Cong to avoid capture by the DEA.
3. “I Can Get Off On You” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson
“Take back the weed, take back the c*caine baby / Take back the pills, take back the whiskey too / I don’t need them now, your love was all I was after / I’ll make it now, I can get off on you.”
One of the more underrated country songs about drugs from the outlaw country movement has to be “I Can Get Off On You” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. This song is all about being willing to forgo drugs and alcohol in favor of that special someone.
4. “Wagon Wheel” by Bob Dylan (With a Country Version by Darius Rucker)
“Walking to the south out of Roanoke / I caught a trucker out of Philly had a nice long toke.”
This tune was originally written by Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Darius Rucker brought the tune out of obscurity with his chart-topping version in 2013, though “Wagon Wheel” has been covered by quite a few other country singers, too.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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