In honor of Tom Shipley, who passed away last month, and Mike Brewer, who passed away late last year, today’s classic song of the day is their biggest hit, “One Toke Over the Line.” The single, billed to Brewer & Shipley, was released in March of 1971 and went all the way to #10 on the Billboard Hot 100—and #8 on the Cash Box Top 100.
“One Toke Over the Line” was written by Brewer & Shipley and released on Kama Sutra Records. Mike Brewer explained how the song came about:
“One day we were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, ‘Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.’ I liked the way that sounded and so I wrote a song around it.”
Pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think?
Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley met in 1963 when they were playing the coffeehouse circuit in Kent, Ohio. They started playing as a duo and, in 1968, moved to Los Angeles. They weren’t terribly happy there, so in 1969 they moved to Kansas City, where they started playing college towns and getting increased notice. Brewer & Shipley recorded nine albums together and had two major hits: “Tarkio Road” and “One Toke Over the Line,” both released in 1971.
It was just announced that Tom Shipley passed away on August 24, 2025, age 84. His bandmate Mike Brewer passed away eight months earlier, on December 17, 2024. He was 80 years old.
Which leads us to today’s daily bonus video of the day. Even though “One Toke Over the Line” was explicitly about getting stoned, some people heard the exclamatory “Sweet Jesus” in the song’s lyrics and thought it was a religious tune, some of that Jesus Rock that was big at the time. That’s what led to Gail Farrell and Dick Dale performing a white bread, squeaky clean, totally oblivious version of “One Toke Over the Line” on The Lawrence Welk Show. Lawrence himself commented after the duo’s astoundingly tone-deaf performance, “There you heard a modern spiritual by Gail and Dale.” You gotta think the cats in the band, at least, knew what the song was about and were holding in their laughter until after the cameras were turned off. It is a jaw-droppingly clueless performance that I can’t stop watching.
