Another Ten Songs You May Not Know Are Covers: Wildwood Flower (#10)

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It's time for another round of songs that were hits, but many people didn't know the "big hit version" was actually a cover. This is my third installment of ten songs that were covers (plus a set of songs that you may not have known actually were covered because you remember the original so well!), so as long as they keep coverin' 'em I'm gonna keep coverin' those covers! Here's the first song. #10: Wildwood Flower In a few short years we went from songs getting banned for hints of drug use (I remember Paul McCartney saying the BBC knew there was something drugged-up about "A Day in the Life," but they bypassed the "found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and I went into a dream" Captain Obvious reference to concoct the notion that the "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" meant holes in one's arm from shooting heroin...oy) to hit songs that celebrated it. Not the heavy stuff, of course (such as Steppenwolf singing Hoyt Axton's opinion of "The Pusher"), but suddenly we've got "One Toke Over the Line" and this classic Jim Stafford ditty that was a top ten pop hit in 1974. It didn't fare all that well in the more conservative country music circles, though, only reaching #57 on the country chart. Well, that's interesting, given that this song's origins are not with Jim Stafford but ten years earlier with country comedian/songwriter Don Bowman. It'd take a week to explain Don Bowman if you didn't grow up with him, and even then I'm not sure you'd explain him properly. He had three very distinct careers: he was the original host of the American Country Countdown (he was sort of Casey Kasem for the country people...in fact, he even subbed for Kasem on American Top 40 in 1973!) and spent a good deal of time as a DJ. He was a songwriter of both comical and serious material, writing a number of things with a fella you may have heard of by the name of Waylon Jennings. (One of their best-remembered compositions is "Anita, You're Dreaming.") Then he was a more-talking-than-singing performer who had a string of albums in the 60s. That last item is what we find him doing here, taking the melody from the standard "Wildwood Flower" (which goes back before the Carter Family, but it's usually credited to them) and gives those flowers a new twist: it's wild-growing marijuana. On Bowman's version you'll hear Chet Atkins on guitar and Boots Randolph on saxophone. And you'll hear the first version of the song that Jim Stafford made a hit a decade later. Wildwood Flower (Originally "Wildwood Weed") Written by Don Bowman Originally recorded by Don Bowman, 1964 Famously covered by Jim Stafford, 1974 Sittin' there on that sack of seeds: