Sticks McGhee launched a career of booze-related songs with a profanity-strewn Army chant called Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee back in 1946.

Can’t say I’d heard of Sticks McGhee though I’ve heard of his brother, who was one half of the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Not sure whether I know this proto-rock’n’roll song either, but I know one of the same title by proto-punks Pere Ubu.

That was not the same song as this, which was adapted from a ribald military chant McGhee heard when he was at an Army boot camp during World War Two.

His first version, recorded for the Harlem label in 1946 (posted below), included a profanity-strewn chorus (“Drinkin’ wine, muthafucka, drinkin’ wine, Goddam!”).

Radio stations wouldn’t play it and hardly anyone bought it so Sticks dropped the profanities for a rollicking remake for Atlantic Records, released in 1949.

It featured his brother Brownie on guitar and harmony vocal and had much more of a rock’n’roll feel, staying on the R&B chart for six months.

Granville McGhee earned his nickname of Sticks as a child by pushing his polio-stricken older brother Brownie through the streets of their Tennessee hometown on a home-made wagon that he propelled with a stick.

He started playing the guitar at 13 and moved to New York City before joining the US Army during the war, settling there afterwards. The song was famously covered by Jerry Lee Lewis in 1959, and other versions were recorded by Lionel Hampton, Johnny Burnette, Wynonie Harris and Larry Dale.

It launched McGhee on a run of booze-related singles such as Whiskey, Women And Loaded Dice, Head Happy With Wine, Jungle Juice and Double Crossin’ Liquor but his career was not a success.

In the end it was not booze but the fags that got him – he gave up on music in 1960 and died of lung cancer a year later at the age of only 43.