Most of the late Laura Nyro's (October 18, 1947 – April 8, 1997) better known compositions--Wedding Bell Blues, Sweet Blindness, Save the Country, And When I Die--are accessible enough. With their straight ahead lyrics and sweet melodies, these songs, and others, made Nyro a 60's icon, if not exactly a star.
And yet, one of the hits, “Stoned Soul Picnic,” which peaked at number 3 in 1968 with the Fifth Dimension cover, is enigmatic and difficult. Here is Laura’s version, from the 1968 album Eli And The Thirteenth Confession. Bonus: This cover by the Staple Singers.
The song opens with "Can you surry, can you picnic?"
"Surry" as a verb? Note that the word is rendered thus on lyric sheets. We could assume she meant "surrey," since the dictionary does not recognize "surry."
OK, then. We all know that a surrey is a four-wheel two-seated horse-drawn pleasure carriage. So Laura is just hearkening back to a simpler time. Fair enough. One other thought is that "surry" could be a contraction of "Let's hurry," and that makes things a bit easier to handle.
Now for "stoned soul." Is she trying to describe a state where the soul, and not the body, gets high? This is surely hard to understand. Could it be a religious experience? "There'll be lots of time and wine." Easy enough. And wine is often linked to religious rituals.
"Red yellow honey sassafras and moonshine." Let’s unpack this. Red honey, supposedly endowed with hallucinogenic properties can have a red-golden (yellow) appearance. Moonshine is usually clear in contrast. Sassafras was used when the song was written as a flavoring agent and diaphoretic (medicinal to make one sweat). Carcinogenic properties were later discovered.
But, given all these colors and fragrances, perhaps Laura is just appealing to our senses here.
Now for the big concepts: "Rain and sun come in akin (likely meaning related to each other), and from the sky come the Lord and the lightning." So, this stoned soul picnic IS a religious experience. Our souls are stoned, and our senses are full, even overwhelmed.
And then: "trains of blossoms, trains of music, trains of trust, trains of golden dust." Here "train" can be understood as a sort of aftermath, or accompanying or resultant circumstances. Think of the train of a wedding dress. This would be something that follows the Lord and the lightning.
So what follows are music, trust, and golden dust. Nice wordsmithing. “Golden dust” these days describes some brands of commercial perfume, and may have even been used in that sense back in 1968. Golden dust can also refer to arts materials and even specialty paint.
Finally, we get a fade out with "surry" repeated many times. What is this obsession with "surry?"
Try this: Laura is combining "surrey" with "sorry," and "let’s hurry" in a kind of triple entendre. Strip off the modern conveniences, hurry down to the Lord's picnic and be sorry for your sins. This is a good working definition of the Catholic sacrament of confession or reconciliation.
Whew!! Come to a picnic for your soul, and experience a religious event. Heavy going for the then 20-year-old Nyro. Heavy going, all right, but easily expressed just the same.
Laura revealed much of herself in the Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album, and the work still moves us, more than 50 years later. 1968 was not an easy time, and neither is 2022, but music—good music—can transcend time itself.
[Lyrics quoted as “fair use,” as is the album cover image]