| Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee | |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Stick McGhee |
| Genre: | Blues |
| Label: | Atlantic |
| Drinking Wine Spo-dee O'dee | |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Jerry Lee Lewis |
| Album: | The Session...Recorded in London with Great Artists |
| A-Side: | "Drinking Wine Spo-dee O'dee" "Rock and Roll Medley" |
| Released: | 1973 |
| Genre: | Rock 'n' roll, blues |
| Label: | Mercury |
"Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee" is a jump blues song written by Stick McGhee and J. Mayo Williams in 1949 and originally recorded by "Sticks” McGhee & His Buddies. It became an early hit for Atlantic Records, reaching #2 on the US R&B charts.[1] [2]
Picardie and Wade in their book Atlantic and the Godfathers of Rock and Roll explain how the Atlantic version came to be. Stick McGhee had recorded the song in January 1947 in New Orleans for Harlem Records, a label which went out of business in 1948.[3] A distributor from New Orleans called Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records to find out if the firm could supply 5,000 copies of the song. Ertegun could not but offered to make an exact copy of the record. He first had to find someone to sing it and remembered Brownie McGhee whom Ertegun had met in his "endless trips to Harlem. I called him up and he said he could do it, but as it happened, his brother Stick was staying with him, so he might as well remake his own record." The song was recorded that same night and went on to sell 400,000 copies.[4]
Jerry Lee Lewis version