Baltimore-based singer-songwriter Miles Gannett will release his debut album, Meridian, on April 16. JamBase is pleased to premiere the record’s latest single, the nine-minute closing track “Maria Sabina.”
Gannett co-produced Meridian with Frank Marchand. They previously worked together with Gannett’s band Fractal Cat. Dobro player Fred Travers and multi-instrumentalist Ron Stewart, of veteran Baltimore bluegrass outfit The Seldom Scene, appear across the 12 tracks making up Meridian.
Gannett wrote “Maria Sabina” about the true-life story of the Mexican woman who played a significant role in bringing hallucinogenic mushrooms to the mainstream. Regarding the song’s titular character, Gannett stated:
Maria Sabina was a Mazatec “Wise Woman” who lived in Oaxaca, Mexico. The American amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, who had previously gained recognition for his book Mushrooms, Russia and History, had gone on a search for the sacred mushrooms of Mexico, which had been rumored to produce a state of spiritual ecstasy.
Wasson’s search led him to the town of Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, where he met Sabina and convinced her to allow Wasson and his team, which included Wasson’s wife Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and the undercover C.I.A. agent James Moore, to participate in one of her Veladas, or mushroom healing ceremonies. (Wasson was unaware that the C.I.A. was involved and was in fact funding his expedition, as his grant had been offered by an academic group serving as a front for the MK Ultra project.)
Wasson wrote of his experience in Life Magazine and subsequently revealed her name and location in another publication, which led beatnik pilgrims and, later, hippies to flood the area surrounding Sabina’s town in search of psychedelic spiritual experiences. Many of the Western visitors were disrespectful of the culture and religious customs surrounding use of the mushrooms, and Sabina was blamed and ostracized as a result. Her house was raided by police and her possessions taken, her house was burned down by angry neighbors, and her son was murdered.
Sabina is the reason Western society knows about psychedelic mushrooms, and she paid a terrible cost for her hospitality toward Wasson.
Pre-order Miles Gannett’s debut album Meridian via this link and stream “Maria Sabina” below:
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