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Prisoner of Drink
"Prisoner of Drink"
is an adaptation of fragments of a song I heard in 1948 on a jukebox in
the Trimmer Springs bar before the Pine Flat Dam was built across Kings
River in the mountains east of Fresno. I had just graduated from U.C.
Berkeley, and was a member of a Berkeley archaeological crew. I had my
21st birthday while in the field and almost the same day heard that I had
been accepted to the graduate program in Anthropology at Berkeley. The
crew and its leader decided we should celebrate these events by having a
drink at Trimmer Springs after work. It was my first alcoholic drink at a
bar. I put my nickel in the jukebox to hear a song by Ernest Tubb, called
"The Warm Red Wine," about unrequited love. Later, some of the
words repeatedly swirled through my mind along with the melody. Because of
graduate school, I didn't spend much time learning songs new to me. The
words from Warm Red Wine continued to swirl through my mind even after I
dropped out of school. To relieve the tension of these words not making
much sense, I moved the words around, dropped all phrases related to a
love affair, and added a few lines of my own, and thus "Prisoner of
Drink" gained its own identity. When asked about the song, I almost
always give my apologies to Ernest Tubb. In the early 1960s, my friend
Mayne Smith gave me a tape recording of the original song. I never learned
the words because by then I could not replace my derived song. Take the cork from the bottle I'm a prisoner of drink Now the wine is red I'm a prisoner of drink
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