Old thread, old song... let's see if this website will even take a comment any more...

I heard an interview with Buffy Ste. Marie on the radio in L.A. sometime in the late 60's. In the interview, Buffy said she wrote this song when she was pretty young. She'd read about codeine, and the danger of addiction to it, and she was appalled I guess, and she wrote this song about it. Being so young she didn't know how it was pronounced, that's why she pronounced it "codine". I guess when she recorded it (years later?) she just kept the odd pronounciation for the rhymes.

They played the track during the interview. I suppose it was a preview before the album came out? I remember being amazed and entranced at the way Buffy put her heart into it and really "wrung out" a lot of the words.

Now that I read (Wikipedia) that she became addicted to codeine in 1963 and wrote the song as a result, I'm a little puzzled, she was 21, why didn't she know how to pronounce it? Maybe so, or maybe she wrote part of the song earlier and just finished it later. Or maybe the 1963 date is wrong, subract 10 years? Or, how do we know she was even addicted? I guess we never do.

At any rate, I only heard that track that ONCE. I was in high school and I had refurbed an old radio with a big ol' speaker, very fine sound quality. Now, listening to it 40 years later on a CD ("The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie") from the library (I have about as much money now as I did then) I can remember quite vividly the sound of this. It's the same exact track they played on the radio. (And I'm still just as impressed)