Sugar Magnolia blossom’s blooming1
Head’s all empty and I don’t care
Saw my baby down by the river
Knew she’d have to come up soon for air
Sweet blossom come on under the willow
We can have high times if you’ll abide
We can discover the wonders of nature
Rolling in the rushes down by the riverside2,3
She’s got everything delightful
She’s got everything I need
Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double
Pays my ticket when I speed
She come skimming through rays of violet4
She can wade in a drop of dew
She don’t come and I don’t follow5
Waits backstage while I sing to you
She can dance a Cajun rhythm
Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive6
She’s a summer love in the spring, fall, and winter
She can make happy any man alive
Sugar Magnolia
Ringin’ that blue bell
Caught up in sunlight
Come on out singing
I’ll walk you in the sunshine
Come on, honey, come along with me
She’s got everything delightful
She’s got everything I need
A breeze in the pines in the summer night moonlight
Crazy in the sunlight yes indeed
Sometimes when the cuckoo’s crying7
When the moon is halfway down
Sometimes when the night is dying
I take me out and I wander round
I wander round
SUNSHINE DAYDREAM
Sunshine daydream
Walk you in the tall trees
Going where the wind goes
Blooming like a red rose8
Breathing more freely
Light out singing
I’ll walk you in the morning sunshine
Sunshine daydream
Walk you in the sunshine
Words by Robert Hunter and Bob Weir
Music by Bob Weir
Magnolias are a family of trees and shrubs, native to Asia and North and Central America. The species is notable for its showy blooms, and the most famous is that of Magnolia grandiflora, the Southern magnolia, which produces fragrant, creamy white flowers over eight inches in diameter. The tree itself can grow more than one hundred feet tall.
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English rysc; akin to Middle High German rusch rush, Lithuanian regzti to knit.
Date: before twelfth century Any of various monocotyledonous, often tufted marsh plants (as of the genera Juncus and Scirpus of the family Juncaceae, the rush family) with cylindrical, often hollow stems that are used in bottoming chairs and plaiting mats.
Compare J.R.R Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, and the character Goldberry in the novel. She is described in the following verses.
I had an errand there: gathering water lilies
green leaves and lilies white to please my pretty lady
the last ere the year’s end to keep them from the winter
to flower by her pretty feet til the snows are melted
Each year at summer’s end I go to find them for her
in a wide pool, deep and clear, far down Withywindle
there they open first in spring and there they linger latest
By that pool long ago I found the River-daughter
fair young Goldberry, sitting in the rushes
Sweet was her singing then, and her heart was beating. 38
See note under “Uncle John’s Band.”
Compare the line in “What’s Become of the Baby”: “Waves of violet go crashing and laughing.”
Compare the lines from the folk song “Sourwood Mountain”:
I got a girl in the head of the hollow,
She won’t come and I won’t call ‘er.
From Lesh’s autobiography:
The tension between Weir and Hunter finally came to a head backstage at the Capitol Theater when, after an argument, probably about Bob’s addition of a line to “Sugar Magnolia”—”[She] jumps like a Willys in four-wheel drive”—Hunter turned all responsibility for Bob’s lyrics over to Barlow, with the words, “Take him, he’s yours.” 95
The Willys was made by the Overland Automotive Company. This jeep-type vehicle, ubiquitous in World War II, is no longer in production. When the Willys first came out, there was some type of maneuver, or trick, that an experienced driver could do to make the vehicle actually leap, jump, or catch air somehow. Details are sketchy, but there was an article in Smithsonian magazine (November 1992) that refers to the idea and has a great picture of an airborne jeep to boot.
A worldwide family of birds, the North American versions are the Black-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus erythrophthalmus), which attracts attention by its series of three-, four- or five-syllable stanzas, and the Yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzyus americanus), which is known by its sequence of “kow-kow” calls that become slower toward the end. (Grzimek)
Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, which documents the influence of American folk music on The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, has a significant amount of information on the cuckoo and its role in American folk tradition. Here’s a passage from Marcus, taking off from a discussion of Clarence Ashley’s recording of the fragmentary folk song “Coo Coo Bird”:
“We Americans are all cuckoos,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1872. “We make our homes in the nests of other birds.” This is the starting point.
As long as seven hundred years ago, the English were singing that the cuckoo heralded the coming of summer [see “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)”], and yet the bird was hated. Its cry was reviled through the centuries as oppressive, repetitious, maniacally boring, a cry to drive you crazy, a cry that was already crazy, befitting a bird that was insane.
See note under “That’s It for the Other One.”
Studio recording: American Beauty (November 1970).
First performance: June 7, 1970, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco.
A note on performance practice: The band often divided the song into two distinct entities: “Sugar Magnolia” and “Sunshine Daydream.” The space between these parts could be as brief as the space of several beats; could frame a set, as in the closing of Winterland; or could be as long as a week, as the case of the performance occurring in the week of Bill Graham’s death, on October 25, 1991, when “Sunshine Daydream” came during the Polo Field concert in Golden Gate Park a week after the band opened a show with “Sugar Magnolia” (Graham’s favorite Grateful Dead song) at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.