Willie Dixon didn’t write “Spoonful” from “scratch” but he did take a song that had been around for a long time and put it into a distinctive form that became very popular. The song probably pre-dates recording altogether. Mississippi bluesman Charlie Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues” in 1929 is an early variant of the song, which also was in the repertoire of Rev. Gary Davis, but the six-string banjo player Papa Charlie Jackson recorded it a few years earlier than Patton. Although post-war fans (that’s World War 2, to be sure…) keep seeing drug references in it, “spoonful” was in fact usually a sexual reference. To “get a spoonful” was to have sex. Certainly, a close listening to the lyrics favors this interpretation over the cocaine one… and alcohol and canned heat were the favored intoxicants of Charlie Patton’s contemporaries, not cocaine. Dixon’s own recordings of “Spoonful” were not as popular as the version by Howlin’ Wolf in 1960, that launched the song in the direction of the rock ‘n’ rollers who had big hits with it, including Cream and Canned Heat. The song has also been recorded by The Allman Brothers, Ten Years After, Booker T. & The MGs, The Paul Butterfield Band, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and dozens of others, including The Kronos Quartet.

Willie Dixon Induction into Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, 1980