Cannabis & the Jazz Era — Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow & the Reefer Songs

The cannabis jazz era, roughly the 1920s through the 1940s, is the cultural origin story for American marijuana culture. Long before psychedelic rock and hippie anthems, the music of Black America was woven through with cannabis — in lyrics, in song titles, in the daily lives of musicians, and in the vocabulary the Federal Bureau of Narcotics would soon weaponize against them.

How Cannabis Reached the Jazz Scene

Cannabis arrived in the United States through several streams in the early twentieth century: with Mexican migrant workers who crossed the southwestern border, with Caribbean sailors landing in port cities (especially New Orleans and New York), and with Indian and West Indian indentured laborers who brought ganja traditions to Jamaica and from there to the American South.

By the late 1910s and 1920s, cannabis (then sometimes called “muggles,” “tea,” “reefer,” “gage,” or “jive” in jazz vocabulary) was inexpensive, plentiful in New Orleans, and circulating widely in Harlem and Chicago. Musicians, who worked all night and needed to sustain mood and creativity without the heavy aftermath of alcohol, adopted it as a working tool.

Louis Armstrong — “The Gage”

Louis Armstrong was the most famous cannabis user in American jazz history. He smoked daily for decades, beginning around 1920, and his commitment to the plant never wavered. In private letters, in his autobiography drafts, and in conversations recorded by friends, he was unambiguous — he believed cannabis made him a better musician and a better human being. He called it “the gage,” an older African-American slang term, and considered it superior to alcohol on every dimension.

His 1928 recording “Muggles” with the Hot Five — an instrumental whose title was period slang for marijuana — is one of the earliest explicit references to cannabis on a commercial American record. Armstrong was arrested in 1930 in Culver City, California, while smoking with drummer Vic Berton outside a club. He spent nine days in jail and was given a suspended sentence; the case helped trigger early Bureau of Narcotics interest in jazz musicians as enforcement targets.

Armstrong continued to smoke cannabis until his death in 1971. He once wrote in a letter to President Eisenhower’s aide that marijuana was “a thousand times better than whiskey.” He believed deeply, and said publicly, that cannabis criminalization was a racial injustice masquerading as health policy.

Mezz Mezzrow — The “Muggles King”

Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow was a white Jewish clarinetist from Chicago who became the most prominent cannabis dealer in 1930s Harlem. His autobiography Really the Blues (1946, co-written with Bernard Wolfe) is one of the founding documents of American hipster culture and contains the most detailed first-person account of the early cannabis trade.

Mezzrow supplied marijuana to musicians including Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and many others. His product was known on the street as “mezz” or “mighty mezz” and his reputation for quality was such that “mezz” became Harlem slang for any high-grade cannabis — an early documented use of a dealer’s name as a generic term for the drug.

Mezzrow was arrested in 1940 with sixty joints at the New York World’s Fair, served seventeen months on Rikers Island, and asked to be classified as a Black inmate — a request that was granted. He spent his post-prison years in Paris and remained one of cannabis culture’s most colorful chroniclers until his death in 1972. Really the Blues is still in print.

The Reefer Songs

Between roughly 1928 and 1945, dozens of jazz and blues recordings made cannabis their explicit subject. The genre is sometimes called the “reefer songs” or “tea pad songs.” A partial canon:

• Louis Armstrong — “Muggles” (1928) — instrumental; title is the slang.
• Cab Calloway — “Reefer Man” (1932) — the most famous explicit reefer song; the “reefer man” is a dealer.
• Don Redman — “Reefer Man” (1932) — companion recording.
• Bessie Smith — “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)” (1933) — the lyrics ask for “a reefer and a gang of gin.”
• Stuff Smith — “If You’re a Viper” (1936) — “viper” was hipster slang for a cannabis user. Later covered by Fats Waller and Rosetta Howard.
• Buster Bailey — “Light Up” (1938).
• Fats Waller — “The Reefer Song” / “Viper’s Drag” (1934).
• Benny Goodman — “Texas Tea Party” (1933) — “tea” was 1930s slang for marijuana.

By the early 1940s, the recording industry had quietly stopped issuing new reefer songs. Anslinger had begun pressuring radio stations and record labels, and the cultural mood shifted under wartime censorship norms. The genre persisted underground but disappeared from mainstream commercial release.

The Bureau Targets Jazz

Anslinger’s personal preoccupation with Black musicians is one of the documented features of his career. His files at the National Archives contain extensive surveillance of jazz performers. He maintained a written list of musicians he wanted arrested, including (variously over time) Armstrong, Ellington, Calloway, Lionel Hampton, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billie Holiday.

The Billie Holiday case is the most documented. Anslinger pursued her for years, ultimately arranging an arrest that contributed to her loss of cabaret cards in New York and to the spiral of legal and health crises that ended her life in 1959. Bureau agents reportedly cuffed her to her hospital bed in her final hours. The case is detailed in Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (2015) and in independent archival research.

Anslinger’s strategy of targeting jazz musicians had a dual logic. Operationally, jazz culture was a known cannabis distribution network. Politically, the racial coding of jazz allowed Anslinger to frame enforcement actions as a defense of (white) American morals against (Black) cultural corruption. The Bureau’s own published statements and Anslinger’s congressional testimony repeatedly used jazz, dance halls, and Black musicians as the scenery of moral menace.

The Vocabulary Cannabis Inherited

Modern cannabis vocabulary inherits directly from the jazz era. Many of the words in use today — “reefer,” “joint,” “roach,” “tea,” “gage,” “viper,” “muggles,” “mezz,” “jive” — were jazz-musician slang in the 1920s and 1930s. So were ritual practices: passing in a circle, the etiquette of sharing, the social grammar around use. These were not invented by the 1960s counterculture; they were inherited.

The Forgotten Origin

The standard popular history of American cannabis culture begins with the Beats and the hippies. That history is incomplete by at least three decades. Black musicians, working in cities under the noses of (and often in cooperation with) Mexican, Caribbean, and Latino communities, built the first sustained American cannabis subculture. They created its language, its etiquette, and much of its music. Anslinger built his enforcement apparatus on top of theirs, and the racial-justice argument for cannabis legalization — the argument that prohibition has always been about race — runs straight through the cannabis jazz era.