And It Stoned Me

Well Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew is spinning a real deep cut here on THE ZOO. Right now we have And It Stoned Me by Van Morrison from the Moondance album coming through the speakers. This track opens that 1970 record and it still feels like a warm rain on a summer road every time it plays. It is pure Caledonian soul, that special mix of Irish roots and American rhythm and blues that Van made his own. The horns and the acoustic guitar just roll along while Van’s voice finds that sweet spot between wonder and grit.

The story behind the song comes straight from Van himself in interviews over the years. He was about twelve years old back in Belfast and he and his friend Billy were heading out to fish at a place called Ballystockart. They got caught in one of those sudden Irish downpours that soak you right through. Standing by a fence with their fishing poles and a silver half-crown, they stopped at a little stone house in the village. An old man with dark weather-beaten skin was there and they asked if he had any water. He gave them some he had drawn from the mountain stream. Van took a drink and everything seemed to stop. Time stood still for about five minutes. Everything was quiet and he felt like he was in another dimension. That is exactly what the song is about. It is not some chemical high. It is getting stoned on nature the way kids do when the world just opens up and shows you something bigger than yourself.

Biographer Ritchie Yorke put it well when he said the song remembers how it was when you were a kid and just got stoned from nature and you did not need anything else. Music critic Johnny Rogan called it a wonderfully understated remembrance with no pat moralizing or sentimentality. In the chorus Van sings about it stoning him to his soul just like Jelly Roll. That is a nod to jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. Van grew up listening to his father’s big record collection of American blues, jazz, and gospel, and Jelly Roll was part of that soundtrack. Some folks hear other meanings in the slang, but Van has always pointed back to those records he shared with his dad. The lyrics paint the whole day like a little movie: the rain letting up, jumping in a pick-up truck, swimming with the fishing poles, and that old man with the gallon jar. It is the kind of memory that sticks because it is so ordinary and so magic at the same time.

They recorded the track in the summer of 1969 at Warner Publishing Studio in New York City. It sits right at the front of Moondance, the album where Van moved from the deep jazz poetry of Astral Weeks into something more accessible while keeping that spiritual lift. The band gives it a relaxed swing and those horns add the soul. On the original vinyl back cover the title even got listed wrong as just Stoned Me, but the real name has always been And It Stoned Me. Van has brought the song out live for decades, sometimes in medleys, always with that same sense of wonder. It is one of those tracks that reminds you music can still catch a moment of pure presence and hand it back to you.

To understand how Van got to writing songs like this you have to go back to East Belfast in 1945. George Ivan Morrison was born into a working-class Protestant family. His mother sang and his father worked in the shipyards and kept one of the best record collections in Northern Ireland. Young Van soaked up Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and all that American blues, country, and gospel. By the time he was thirteen he was already out playing, singing, and blowing saxophone and guitar in local bands. He formed his first skiffle group, The Sputniks, named after the satellite, and they played cinemas around town. Later he joined the Monarchs and toured military bases across Europe. He dropped out of school at fifteen to chase the music full time.

The big break came in 1964 when he put together Them to play the new R&B club at Belfast’s Maritime Hotel. The name came from that old science-fiction movie about giant ants. Them tore it up with extended blues workouts and Van’s raw vocal. They scored hits with Here Comes the Night and Baby Please Don’t Go, and Van wrote the garage-rock classic Gloria that has been covered by everyone from the Doors to Patti Smith. After a U.S. tour and some frustration with the business side, he left the band and headed to New York. Producer Bert Berns got him into the studio and out came Brown Eyed Girl, the sunny hit that still gets played everywhere. From there Van pushed further with Astral Weeks in 1968, that singular mix of jazz, street poetry, and Celtic soul, and then Moondance locked in the sound that made him Van the Man.

Van has always kept working on his own terms. He has released dozens of albums, earned a knighthood, Grammys, and a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, yet he still circles back to those early influences and those quiet moments of wonder. Songs like And It Stoned Me show how the kid who got stoned on stream water never really left the man who keeps making records. The fishing trip, the rain, the old man, the records with his dad—they all sit inside the music.

If you want to dig deeper into the catalog, head over to the official Van Morrison website where you can find Moondance and the rest of the discography. You can also follow along on the official Facebook page, the official Instagram, and the official X account. Fans keep the conversation going in groups like Fans Of Van Morrison and Mystic Avenue, and the unofficial fan site at Mystic Avenue blog has setlists and stories that keep the spirit alive. Keep the records spinning, Zoo Freaks. This one still stoned us just like Jelly Roll.