Tom Shipley, who was part of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley and best known for the 1971 Top 10 hit “One Toke Over the Line,” died Aug. 24 at a hospital in Columbia, Missouri. He was 84. The cause of death was not specified.
Shipley’s death was confirmed by his son, Marc Shipley, according to The New York Times. Mike Brewer, Shipley’s partner in the duo, died earlier in 2024.
“One Toke Over the Line,” the group’s most recognized song, was released on their fourth album, “Tarkio.” The song, which humorously recounts a real-life experience involving marijuana, was not originally intended for release.
“We wrote ‘One Toke Over the Line’ to amuse ourselves one night, trying to come up with something to make our friends laugh,” Brewer told UCR in a 2016 interview. “The first time we played Carnegie Hall, we opened for Melanie. We did quite well and got several encores, but ran out of songs. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s do that new song.’ The president of our record company heard it backstage and said, ‘Oh, you gotta record that for the album.’ That kind of surprised us, because we didn’t take it real seriously.”
The song’s success brought attention not only from fans but also from government officials. “We made Nixon’s ‘hate list,’ which we held as a badge of honor and still do to this day, and Vice President Spiro Agnew named us personally on national TV one night as ‘subversives to America’s youth,’” Brewer said. “I mean, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.”
