‘Coffee Blues’: the song that gave The Lovin’ Spoonful their name
When we think of the bands that defined the cultural shift of the mid-1960s, The Lovin’ Spoonful don’t typically make the short list, but by just about any measure, they ought to. This was a group that was right there in Greenwich Village in ‘64, fusing the folk and rock worlds alongside Bob Dylan; and by ‘66, they were jockeying for position on the pop charts with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, easily outselling all of their fellow American bands in singles sales—including The Beach Boys. Like The Stones, the band’s name was respectfully plucked from the lyrics of a revered bluesman.
However, whereas Mick and Keith had selected a pretty obvious song title from the Muddy Waters catalogue, John Sebastian dug a little deeper for his inspiration, ending up with a rather loaded if cryptic phrase from the mind of Mississippi John Hurt.
Sebastian wasn’t just a fan of Hurt. Despite the two being more than 50 years apart in age, they’d started jamming together in New York in the early ‘60s, during a time when many old bluesmen were encountering a whole new audience of young college kids enamoured with their work.
“John [Hurt] showed up in Greenwich Village about ’63 or ’64 and happened to hear me play harmonica with Tom Paxton, who was opening for him,” Sebastian told the Indian River Guardian in 2015. “Then he asked me to play with him, and that grew into a real friendship.”
Sebastian, who had a harmonica-playing father and grew up surrounded by musicians, was an instant appreciator not just of Hurt’s still evident talents as a songwriter and guitarist, but his personality as a performer and ability to have fun with his audience.
“[Hurt] had a tune called ‘Coffee Blues’,” Sebastian said, “A thinly veiled tune as many were at this time, with an introduction about how he always had his cup of Maxwell House coffee because it’s ‘good to the last drop.’ Then he’d sing ‘I love my baby by the lovin’ spoonful.’ So that is where we got our name.”
By 1965, as Sebastian’s new band was scoring its earliest hits with ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ and ‘Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?’, journalists and fans, in turn, started asking a question of their own: “What does ‘the lovin’ spoonful’ actually mean?”
Coming as it did during a period of rampant paranoia about recreational drugs and devil-inspired rock n’ roll bands trying to seduce the youth of America, there was often concerned speculation about the name being a drug reference, which Sebastian and his bandmates could always easily deny.
The preferred response was to explain, truthfully, that Sebastian was a friend of John Hurt, and that the idea to use that specific lyric from ‘Coffee Blues’ had come from another friend, Fritz Richmond of the Kweskin Jug Band. Richmond thought it would be a good moniker for a group that was trying to find the middle ground between Hurt’s blues and Chuck Berry’s rock, and John Sebastian agreed.
The only trouble was that Richmond, Sebastian, and certainly John Hurt all knew the actual connotation of the “lovin’ spoonful” line, and explaining that in any further detail—particular to a square reporter—could get dicey.
As Sebastian has often acknowledged, the lyrics of ‘Coffee Blues’—while ostensibly about having to make your own cup of coffee after a girl left you—also twist the metaphor into a reference to cunnilingus. “It was always a big crowd pleaser because of Hurt’s particularly innocent delivery and his guileless way of presenting it,” Sebastian explained, via Songfacts.
Concluding, “His audience was frequently filled with beautiful college women—he always had appeal for the women in the audience… And as he began to sing [that song], by the third or fourth time, when he’d come to the words ‘the lovin’ spoonful’, everybody would know what he was referring to. It was a set piece for him, and that’s why it was memorable.”
