Yesterday it snowed in Tennessee
I heard it also snowed in Tallahassee
But not a flake fell on little ol’ me,
‘Cause I was in shu shu shu,
shu shu shu,
shu shu shu shu shu shu, Sugartown.
Small rewrite of an old Nancy Sinatra “hit”.
The songwriter, Lee Hazlewood elaborated on the song:
I was in a folk club in LA which had two levels. I could see these kids lining up sugar cubes and they had an eye-dropper and were putting something on them. I wasn’t a doper so I didn’t know what it was but I asked them. It was LSD and one of the kids said, ‘You know, it’s kinda Sugar Town.’ Nancy knew what the song was about because I told her, but luckily Reprise didn’t.
He explained, “You had to make the lyric dingy enough where the kids knew what you were talking about — and they did. Double entendre. But not much more if you wanted to get it played on the radio. We used to have lots of trouble with lyrics, but I think it’s fun to keep it hidden a little bit.”
“It was hard to put any other songs with ‘Sugar Town’,” Nancy remembers. “It was basically about LSD, but was not publicized as that. It was Lee’s ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. It went against my image.”