Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana

S. E. Rogie was born Sooliman Ernest Rogers in 1926 in Fonikoh, in Sierra Leone's Pujehun District. He paid for basic schooling as a boy by cutting and selling firewood, and later worked in Freetown as an apprentice tailor, where musicians among his customers drew him to the guitar. Largely self-taught, he learned from palm-wine players and from his brother's records of the American country singer Jimmie Rodgers, whose picking and yodelling he liked to imitate. He sang in English, Krio, Mende and Temne, and hits such as My Lovely Elizabeth made his name. His career took him far from home. In 1973 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, playing schools across California and taking the name Rogie because it sounded more African. In 1988, at the invitation of the BBC Radio 1 DJ Andy Kershaw, he moved to England, recorded a session for the BBC, played the Cambridge Folk Festival and toured with a new band, the Palm-Wine Tappers. Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana was the title track of his final album, recorded in 1994. That February he had heart bypass surgery, but against medical advice he travelled to Estonia to perform and lost consciousness on stage. He was flown from Tartu to London and died at Lewisham Hospital on 4 July 1994, aged 68. The record became his farewell, and the gentle palm-wine guitar on it has kept finding new admirers, from Vampire Weekend, who sampled his playing, to Taj Mahal, who reportedly credited Rogie with teaching him how to make a guitar resonate.