How ‘Tom Sawyer’ inspired The Doobie Brothers’ first number one hit
‘Black Water’ was always somewhat of an unlikely hit single for The Doobie Brothers. By the mid-1970s, the California rock band had been known for hard-hitting songs like ‘China Grove’ and ‘Long Train Running’, most of which were sung by guitarist Tom Johnston. Fellow guitarist and singer Patrick Simmons had been singing occasional lead vocals on the band’s first three albums, but none of his songs had ever been picked to be a single.
When the band were recording their 1974 LP What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, the follow-up to their breakthrough album The Captain and Me, Simmons was messing around with a guitar figure while recording other songs. The folky guitar line caught the ear of producer Ted Templeman, who encouraged Simmons to flesh it out into a song.
“I was sitting out in the studio waiting between takes and I played that part,” Simmons told Guitar Player in 2016. “All the sudden I heard the talk-back go on and [producer] Ted Templeman says: ‘What is that?’ I said: ‘It’s just a little riff that I came up with that I’ve been tweaking with.’ He goes: ‘I love that. You really should write a song using that riff.’”
It was Simmons’ recollections of New Orleans, plus a healthy helping of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that shaped the lyrics to ‘Black Water’. “I was on the streetcar going through the Garden District, and I just started writing down lyrics,” Simmons told Goldmine Magazine in 2011. “It was raining, [so I wrote] ‘Well if it rains, I don’t care / Don’t make no difference to me / Just take that streetcar that’s going uptown.’”
“And there’s the line ‘I’d like to hear some funky Dixieland and dance a honky-tonk’ — I had been going down to the French Quarter as often as possible and going into the clubs and listening to Dixieland, just hanging out,” Simmons added. “The first verse is my childhood imaginings of the South from reading Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the second verse is actually being there and what it’s really like.”
Even when it was completed, nobody had seen ‘Black Water’ as being worthy of an A-side. Instead, the track was included as a B-side to the album’s first single, ‘Another Park, Another Sunday’, which peaked at number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100. Johnston recalls that an old-school radio push eventually convinced the band to re-release ‘Black Water’ as its own A-side.
“That’s a story that could have happened back then, but never would ever happen now: Roanoke, Virginia picked that tune up and started playing it in heavy rotation, and somebody in Minneapolis who I guess knew somebody in Roanoke heard the song and decided to follow suit, and it ended up becoming our first number one single,” Johnston told SongFacts in 2009. “That was Pat’s first single. And oddly enough, it was never looked at as a single by the record company.”
“I remember when I first heard it was number one, we were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we were just getting ready to go on stage, and then I guess Bruce [their manager Bruce Cohn] must have told us,” Johnston added. “I think we were already aware of the fact that it was getting airplay, but nobody was really paying a lot of attention. And then all of a sudden it became number one and we were paying attention. I remember I went in and congratulated Pat backstage, and we’ve been playing it ever since.”
Check out ‘Black Water’ down below.
