Ginger Jake and the blues: a tragic song of poisoning.

Jake Leg
Depression-era drinkers of illicit ginger alcohol foundit numbed more than just their worries

“I CAN’T EAT, I CAN’T TALK,” complained blues artists the Allen Brothers in 1930. “Been drinking mean jake, Lord,” they bemoaned. “Now I can’t walk.” The song was titled “The Jake Walk Blues,” and the Allen Brothers weren’t the first performers to address this peculiar, depression-era malady: It’s widely believed that a blues singer named Ishmon Bracey actually diagnosed the source of the infirmity, which consists of potentially crippling paralysis of the legs, in his song “Jake Liquor Blues.” The problem was jake, which was a nickname for Jamaican Ginger extract.
The extract was used for its medicinal qualities since the 19th century in the United States, as it is reputed to help relieve nausea and diarrhea. With the passing of the Volstead Act in 1919, the production of all commercial alcohol was forbidden in the United States, but for one important exception: medicinal products. Jake, which had a 70 percent alcohol content and was available at any corner drugstore, became a popular beverage. It was inexpensive and mixed well with soft drinks such as Coca Cola; additionally it was useful as an additive to bathtub gins and moonshines to mask the harsh, acidic taste of these illicit beverages. Because of jake’s low price, it was particularly popular among White working class and African-American tipplers. These would be the group hardest hit when jake suddenly turned poisonous.
The Food and Drug division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture got wise to the growing popularity of Jamaican Ginger extract. By March of 1930, the extract was no longer legal. But, in the latter days of the Prohibition, illicit alcohol manufacturers took such bans as something of a dare. In particular, Harry Gross, the president of a Boston-based firm called Hub Products, decided that Jamaican Ginger extract couldn’t go by way of the street grates.
In late January, 1930, along with a chemist friend, Gross found that by adding triorthocresylphosphate phosphate, (TOCP) to Jamaican Ginger extract, it would essentially hide any signs of significant alcohol from government tests. TOCP was an industrial chemical, a “plasticizer” added to materials such as plastics to keep them pliable. The addition was tasteless, odorless, and colorless, and thought to be harmless. It wasn’t. TOCP proved to had one significant side effect: It killed cells in the central nervous system, particularly the spinal cord.
The first sign of Jamaican ginger poisoning was a paralysis of the lower extremities known as “Jake leg.” If victims of Jake Leg had to get from one place to another, they strode by way of the “Jake Walk”, a distinctive gait of high-knees and sloppy, ground slapping steps. There are no records of people overdosing or dying as a result of Jamaican Ginger paralysis, but for some the effects never completely wore off. Estimates range between 50,000 and 100,000 people having been permanently crippled with partial paralysis.
The source of the poisoning was quickly tracked down and taken off the market, and Harry Gross himself was punished with a two-year prison sentence. As the victims of Jake Leg were mostly poor and migratory workers, their plight quickly fell from public view, but for a dozen or so blues and folk songs that essayed their condition.
Jamaican Ginger is still widely available and remains a popular folk remedy. Many products are made with it as a defining ingredient, including tea candles and ginger beer. In fact, there is a French cocktail that called for mango, rum, and ginger extract (minus TOCP, of course). This fruity mixture might well cause an embarrassing loss of control of the lower extremities, but we promise this: it’ll be temporary. (Courtney Mault)


JAKE LEG.(outbreak of paralysis in 1930s)
Source: The New Yorker
Publication Date: 15-SEP-03
Author: Baum, Dan

Dr. John Morgan, a professor at the City University of New York Medical School, likes to call himself a pharmaco-ethnomusicologist. His first love is early-American vernacular music, and his apartment, on the Upper West Side, is stacked with ancient records. Some years back, Morgan was listening to the Allen Brothers' "Jake Walk Blues," released in 1930. In a kazoo-backed Tennessee twang, the brothers sang, "I can't eat, I can't talk, drinking mean jake, Lord, I can't walk." The lyrics pinballed through Morgan's memory and lit up twice. First was a lecture he'd heard in medical school, in 1961: a professor had mentioned a strange paralysis called "jake walk" that he had observed during his residency in Cincinnati in the thirties. Next was a face from Morgan's childhood in Ohio, that of a legless beggar called Nigger John. Nigger John had had the "jake leg," Morgan recalled his mother telling him. She had said it in a way that discouraged further inquiry. Stout and bearded, Morgan, who is sixty-three, delicately set the arm of a turntable on a thick, spinning record, and after a moment's hiss we heard what sounded like pure despair. "Ishmon Bracey, one of the Mississippi greats," Morgan whispered. From seven decades back, Bracey wailed, "Jake leg, jake leg, what in the world you trying to do? Seems like everybody in the city's messed up on account of drinking you." Morgan has collected a number of songs about the jake leg or the jake walk. "From them we learn that some new kind of paralysis appeared in 1930," he said. "No songs mention it before then." He began bending back blunt fingers. "The paralysis was brought on by drinking something called 'jake.' It afflicted enough souls to instigate an entire subset of folk music. Blacks and whites were affected. It rendered men impotent. And it was no longer inspiring musicians by 1934, which meant it was a cataclysmic but discrete event." He sat back and spread his hands. "Behold the study, through folk music, of a substance-induced epidemic," he said. "Pharmaco-ethnomusicology." Morgan has been researching the jake leg on and off for twenty-seven years. He has put together a CD collection of seventeen tunes mentioning it, including one by Gene Autry, and he has written half a dozen medical-journal articles on the subject. In the nineteen-seventies, he interviewed a number of the epidemic's surviving victims and collected his data, a teeming bazaar of anecdote and chemistry, in a huge manuscript that has been gathering dust for years. He also has a filthy carton full of clippings. With a little prodding, he agreed to turn all the material over to me. "I'm not giving up on the story myself," he said. "I just don't mind someone else telling it, too." As far as we know, the outbreak was first detected in Oklahoma City, by Ephraim Goldfain, a thirty-four-year-old physician who had emigrated from Romania as a child and had put himself through medical school by operating a streetcar. He was bookishly handsome, with swept-back red hair, a cleft chin, and round horn-rimmed glasses. With a few partners, he ran a thirty-five-bed clinic called the Reconstruction Hospital. On February 27, 1930, a man whose name is lost to history staggered in off the street. The patient's feet dangled like a marionette's, so that walking involved swinging them forward and slapping them onto the floor. He told Goldfain that he had strained himself lifting an automobile, and a couple of days later his calves had begun to tingle. Then his legs went useless below the knee. He wasn't in any pain, he said, but he could barely get around. Sudden paralysis in those days usually meant polio, but to Goldfain, who recounted the patient's history in a medical journal, this didn't look like polio. He didn't pay much attention to the story about lifting the car. Goldfain thought the man's symptoms suggested lead poisoning. He ordered blood and spinal-fluid tests. They came back negative. Later that day, another man appeared, exhibiting the same bizarre palsy. And then another. By the end of the day, Goldfain's clinic had admitted five patients with the distinctive paralysis. One of them, a podiatrist, claimed he had caught the illness from his own patients, and handed Goldfain a list of the ones who had gone foot-floppy in the past few days. The list had sixty-five names. Oklahoma in 1930 was a hard-luck place. Thanks to price-killing oversupplies of wheat and cotton, its people had gotten a head start on the Depression. The same day that Goldfain saw his five patients, the American Hospital Association criticized Oklahoma City's medical preparedness, noting that it had fewer hospital beds per capita than any other city of its size. Now it was struggling with what looked like a full-blown epidemic. In one frenetic day, Goldfain visited thirty men on the podiatrist's list, and in the succeeding weeks followed up with other visits. The men's feet dangled, their legs hung dead below the knee. Some could get around on crutches, some couldn't make their legs move at all, some could use neither their legs nor their hands. Goldfain knew at once that this was no contagion. No children were sick, and hardly any women. The men Goldfain saw all lived in a seedy part of town known for bootlegging. They struck him as being ashamed...


Ginger Jake and the blues: a tragic song of poisoning.
Vet Hum Toxicol. 1995 Jun;37(3):252-4.
Ginger Jake and the blues: a tragic song of poisoning.
Woolf AD.
Massachusetts Poison Control System, Boston 02115, USA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=7571360&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_DocSum Prohibition, "The Noble Experiment", ushered in speakeasys, gangsters and bathtub gin in the 1920s. For many Americans, however, it led to a period of joblessness, hard times, and austerity. The story of Jamaican Ginger ("Jake") poisoning, in which batches of a cheap, alcoholic tonic were laced with tri-ortho cresyl phosphate (TOCP) is one of cynical despicable behavior on the part of those responsible and a tragic enduring legacy for the invisible group of Americans who were victimized. TOCP, a potent organophosphate, caused an axonal dying-back neuropathy affecting mainly large muscle groups. Jake poisoning struck about 50,000 adults, mostly poor middle-aged vagrants with little medical care or social standing. Their symptoms and stories were told not only in medical journals but also in song. Hillbilly jazzmen sang of the "Jake Leg Blues" with a resignation to the fate of their own undoing, brought on by the intemperance of a wasted life. The postscript is grim--those responsible received little punishment; many who drank "Jake" were left both uncompensated and crippled by irreversible paralysis.