‘We Must Sip The Wine . . .’

One Saturday in early 1989, when I was living in Minot, North Dakota, I went out to the flea market at the state fair grounds and found a fellow selling records. He was clearing out his inventory and was offering boxes of about sixty LPs for ten dollars each. No digging, no sorting. Take the box and you get what you get.

I bought one box that day, and after going through it and finding lots of interesting stuff – some of which I’d never heard of – I went back the next day and bought his last box. 

Among the musicians I found in one of those boxes were Tracy Nelson and the group she fronted for a time in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Mother Earth. Over the years, I collected more and more of the group’s stuff, and I eventually landed on the 1972 album Tracy Nelson/Mother Earth and the song that became one of my favorites, titled “I Want To Lay Down Beside You,” written – according to the label – by Tim Drummond:

I want to lay down beside you
And hold your body close to mine
Like a grape that grows ripe in the vineyard
Comes a time when we must sip the wine 

I can tell by looking you’re not mine, babe
And what I’m saying now is true
The child that’s wanting to start living
And that child can get its start from me and you

Close your eyes and don’t you think of nothing
Let your thoughts remain inside this room
Let me lay my head down on your pillow
And share, oh share, the night with you 

I want to lay down beside you
And hold your body close to mine
Like a grape that grows ripe in the vineyard
Comes a time when we must sip the wine 

We must sip the wine . . .
We must sip the wine . . .
We must sip the wine . . .
We must sip the wine . . .
We must sip the wine . . . 

A few years and a couple of moves later, I found myself in Columbia, Missouri, and in a used record shop there, I found a 1977 solo album by Rick Danko, who’d played bass (and a few other instruments) and was one of the lead voices for The Band, one of my all-time favorite groups. 

And the final song on Side One of the album was titled “Sip The Wine.” With only a few changes in the lyrics, it was the same song that Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth had recorded in 1972. This time, however, the writing credit went to Danko.

The earlier writing credit is no doubt correct; it’s Drummond’s song. Some friends and I theorized that maybe Drummond – who played on a few of the tracks on Danko’s album – assigned the credit to Danko as a favor. Or it might have been just a mistake. I checked today, and at the website Second Hand Songs – a site that tracks cover versions – “Sip The Wine” is credited to Drummond. 

Either way, it’s a great song, and I like both versions.

– whiteray