Wildwood Weed

Well now, Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a real country-fried gem that has been making folks grin and scratch their heads since the mid-seventies. Jim Stafford’s “Wildwood Weed” off that self-titled album is spinning right here on THE ZOO, and it is one of those spoken-word story songs that sneaks up on you with a dry Florida drawl and a punch line that still lands. The whole thing is built on the bones of the old Carter Family tune “Wildwood Flower,” that pretty little parlor piece about pale flowers and nut-brown hair, only Stafford and the man who first wrote it turned the flower into something a whole lot more interesting growing wild on the farm. Don Bowman, the country comedian who took home Comedian of the Year at the CMA awards back in the sixties, cooked this one up around nineteen sixty-two or sixty-three. He said later it was so scandalous at the time that nobody would even publish it. Stafford picked it up a decade later, gave it that deadpan swamp delivery, and turned it into a crossover smash that climbed all the way to number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in nineteen seventy-four. Some AM stations refused to touch it because the joke was plain as day, yet the record still crossed over onto the country charts and the adult contemporary lists, proving once again that a good story and a straight face can slip past the gatekeepers.

The tale itself is simple and sly. Two brothers are out on the farm when one of them reaches down for a weed to chew on the way farm boys have done forever. Things get fuzzy, things get blurry, and the next thing he knows he is laying flat on his back asking himself questions he cannot answer. His brother gives it a try and disappears for most of the night. They finally catch up with him around six o’clock the next morning, naked and swinging on the windmill, swearing he flew up there. The very next day they pick a bunch of those weeds, dry them in the sun, mash them up, and stuff them in a corncob pipe. Smoking that wildwood flower got to be a habit and they figured there was no harm in it. As Stafford tells it in old introductions, it was kind of handy—you could take a trip and never leave the farm. Then one day a feller from Washington comes by, turns white as a sheet, digs and burns until every last cute little weed is gone. The brothers just smile and wave, sitting there on that sack of seeds they managed to hide. Stafford has always been careful to credit Bowman when he plays the song, and in television appearances he has pointed out that he is not out to promote anything harmful. He even joked once that he does not even gargle Listerine because he heard it kills germs on contact and he does not like the idea of something dying in his mouth. That kind of quick, sideways humor is pure Stafford, and it is what made the record stick with people long after the novelty charts moved on.

Fans still quote the lines at each other the way old friends pass around a favorite story. You will hear somebody say they are sitting on a sack of seeds when a plan works out better than expected, or they will laugh about brother Bill on the windmill. The song showed up again years later when Les Claypool of Primus recited it during a theatrical encore, proving the story still travels well outside pure country circles. Stafford himself kept performing it for decades in Branson, often with a little extra color in the live versions, and listeners who caught him on Nashville Now or in the theater still talk about the way he could switch from the comedy to a blistering classical guitar piece without missing a beat. He is a genuine virtuoso on the instrument, self-taught on guitar, fiddle, banjo, piano, and harmonica, and that skill is what let him move from novelty records to television and a long run as a live entertainer.

Jim Stafford got his start the old-fashioned way, down in Eloise, Florida, near Winter Haven. Born James Wayne Stafford in nineteen forty-four, he grew up in a musical house where his daddy, a dry cleaner, would haul out the guitar on the front porch and draw a crowd of neighbors. A friend across the street came home from the Army with another guitar, and the two boys started making noise together when Stafford was about twelve. By sixteen he was already making a living with the instrument. In high school he played in a little band called the Legends alongside Bobby Braddock, Kent LaVoie (who later became the singer Lobo), and Gram Parsons, who went on to the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. After graduation he headed to Nashville and joined Jumpin’ Bill Carlisle’s band, soaking up the country novelty tradition from a master of double-entendre songs. He also worked the road with Carl Smith and tried to break in as a one-man band, developing the comic routines that would later fill his shows. Nothing much happened at first, so he drifted through Memphis and Atlanta before landing back in Florida, playing lounges, go-go bars, and strip clubs, honing the off-the-wall songs he liked best.

The break came when he ran into his old high-school pal Lobo, who was already riding high with hits of his own. Stafford pitched him a talking song called “Swamp Witch.” Lobo passed on recording it himself but told Stafford he ought to cut it, then helped land a deal with MGM. “Swamp Witch” scraped into the top forty in nineteen seventy-three. The next year “Spiders and Snakes,” co-written with David Bellamy, went all the way to number three, sold over two million copies, and earned a gold record. “My Girl Bill” and “Wildwood Weed” followed right behind, giving the debut album four top-forty singles. Television came next: a summer variety show in nineteen seventy-five, regular spots on The Tonight Show, a co-hosting gig on Those Amazing Animals, and later writing and performing for the Smothers Brothers revival. He also wrote songs for the Disney film The Fox and the Hound and appeared in the Clint Eastwood picture Any Which Way You Can, contributing “Cow Patti” to the soundtrack. In nineteen ninety he settled into Branson, Missouri, opened his own theater, and spent three decades mixing the old hits, guitar fireworks, and storytelling for the folks who came through the Ozarks. The theater closed during the pandemic and was later taken down, but the guitar-neck landmark out front was saved, and Stafford still turns up for limited runs with his wife and band.

That is the long road that led to the record the Zoo Crew is playing for you Zoo Freaks right now. A Florida kid who learned guitar on the porch, paid his dues in Nashville and the clubs, and turned a scandalous little story song into a number-seven hit that still makes people smile fifty years later. You can find more on Jim Stafford at his official Facebook page here, where the folks who followed the theater keep up with what he is doing. The man still knows how to tell a story and still knows his way around a guitar, and “Wildwood Weed” remains one of the cleverest winks the seventies ever slipped onto the radio.