Tom Shipley, half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, whose dizzying encounter with cannabis at a gig provided inspiration for “One Toke Over the Line,” a surprise Top 10 hit in 1971 that lived on as a timeless artifact of the stoned 1960s, died on Aug. 24 in Columbia, Mo. He was 84.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Marc.
While they became famous for a song so bathed in blue smoke that it almost gave listeners a contact high, Michael Brewer and Mr. Shipley were no novelty act. Veterans of the 1960s folk revival, they released eight albums over a decade starting in 1968. Their music often addressed social issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“We were and still are ballad artists,” Mr. Shipley said in a 2011 interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, a music site. “But our hit was a novelty song. Once you have one of those you are pretty well stuck with it.”
Indeed they were. In 2020, Rolling Stone listed the hazy ditty at No. 3 on its survey of “The 20 Greatest Songs About Weed,” behind the Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life” and Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” both from 1966.
“One Toke” was featured in the 1998 film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” an extended celluloid hallucination based on the book by Hunter S. Thompson, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp.
Long before that, the song had made an appearance in a setting so surreal that even Mr. Thompson, under the heaviest influence, scarcely could have conjured it: a 1971 performance by the ever-smiling singing duo Gail Farrell and Dick Dale on Lawrence Welk’s anodyne variety show.
Those in the Welk orbit were apparently unaware of the latest drug terminology, and they were clearly thrown by a seemingly holy reference in its signature line: “One toke over the line, sweet Jesus.” At the conclusion of the number, the host, trademark baton in hand, weighed in: “And there you heard a modern spiritual.”
It was a fittingly absurdist turn for a song that was never supposed to have been a hit in the first place.
Inspiration for it came between sets at a gig at a nightclub in Kansas City, Mo., after a friend gave Mr. Shipley something to smoke and warned him to limit himself to two hits.
“Of course I wasn’t about to believe him and continued on,” he told It’s Psychedelic Baby. He was plucking a banjo in the dressing room when it hit. “I said to Michael, ‘I’m one toke over the line,’ and he broke into song. There was a refrain that night and some verses the next day, and that was about it.”
“We were trying to make ourselves, and some of our friends, laugh,” he added. “I never would have guessed what it would lead to.”
It might have led nowhere if Brewer & Shipley had not run low on material while opening for the singer-songwriter Melanie at Carnegie Hall, forcing them to try out the song in public.
The audience loved it, Mr. Shipley said, as did the president of their label, Kama Sutra Records, who was in attendance. The duo went fishing in the Florida Keys and returned to find that the company had released it as a single.
“We didn’t pick it to be, or write it to be, a single,” Mr. Shipley said in 1971. “It’s just another song to us.”
To Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, it was not. During his campaign against songs that appeared to promote drug use, he “named us personally, Tom and me, on national TV, as subversives to American youth,” Mr. Brewer recalled in “One Toke Over the Line … and Still Smokin’,” a 2021 documentary about the duo.
The Federal Communications Commission took a stand, too, and “One Toke Over the Line” was banned by radio stations in cities around the county, including New York, Chicago and Washington.
“We were a couple of dangerous, scary guys,” Mr. Shipley joked in the documentary.
Thomas Nathan Shipley was born on April 1, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio, the elder of two children of Woodrow Shipley, who was later the principal of Bedford High School in Bedford, outside Cleveland, and Josephine (Baker) Shipley, who worked sterilizing instruments at a pharmaceutical laboratory.
He took to music early. While a student at his father’s high school, he performed in a rock band, a doo-wop group and a Dixieland ensemble. After graduating in 1959, he fell into the folk revival scene while enrolled at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in geology in 1963, he began performing on the coffee house circuit and eventually met the Oklahoma-born Mr. Brewer at one such gig in Kent, Ohio.
They formed a duo and headed to Los Angeles, where they recorded their first album, “Down in L.A.” The title was apt.
“We were very depressed,” Mr. Shipley told It’s Psychedelic Baby. “Neither of us were L.A. kind of people.”
After returning to the Midwest, the duo released a follow-up album, “Weeds” (1969), before breaking out with “Tarkio” (1970), which included their famous pot anthem and hit No. 34 on the Billboard 200.
They escaped one-hit-wonder status — technically, at least — by lodging two other singles on the Billboard Hot 100: “Tarkio Road,” which reached No. 55 in June 1970, and “Shake Off the Demon,” which got to No. 98 in February 1972.
Their career began to cool during the 1970s, and the duo finally split in 1979. They reunited for a concert in 1989 and began touring occasionally after that, eventually recording two more albums, “Shanghai” (1993) and “Heartland” (1997).
In later years, Mr. Shipley took a job producing videos for the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.
In addition to his son Marc, he is survived by his wife of 44 years, Jan (Hoeffken) Shipley; another son, Matthew; two daughters, Deborah Stagner and Lisabeth Weaver, from his marriage to Irene Seghy, which ended in divorce; and four grandchildren.
Michael Brewer died last year.
Looking back on Brewer & Shipley’s career in the 2011 interview, Mr. Shipley said: “I guess we were pretty big. It’s hard to say. I know we were making a lot of money, but who could count.”
“There was a three-year period when I was hardly anywhere but on the road,” he added. “Everyone says I had a lot of fun, but it was mostly a blur to me. Maybe something I ate.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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