Methamphetamine Codeine Murder – Del Ray Hillian

When Methamphetamine Codeine Murder first hit the turntables in mid-1970s, most Southern radio stations refused to play it. Too raw for country, too country for rock, and far too honest for gospel, the single from Sand Mountain native Del Ray Hillian quickly earned its reputation as the darkest cut ever released on the WonTone label.

Hillian had just come off a string of small-town roadhouse residencies, his voice worn ragged by years of smoke, bourbon, and bad luck. Recorded over two nights at Tri-State Sound in Wildwood, Georgia, the session captured the sound of a man standing halfway between altar call and autopsy. The band was a rough miracle: Bobby “Stacks” Abernathy on pedal steel, Doyle Puckett on upright bass, and the late Rayford “Cotton” McGill on piano, whose honky-tonk stride in the background throughout the track feels like the devil himself pounding out gospel.

The song itself plays like a confession scratched into the wall of a county jail. Across four verses, Hillian drags the listener through every stage of damnation—script pads and Greyhound stations, thunder-haunted valleys, the long ride to the gallows. The chorus, “It’s a methamphetamine codeine murder, writ in blood upon my shirt,” is less metaphor and more obituary in 4/4 time.

Producer Orson V. Laxton, the eccentric field recorder behind early Persimmon Roberts sides, later claimed he tried to soften Hillian’s delivery with a gospel choir. Hillian refused, saying, “If the Lord wants in this song, He can knock.” The final mix kept the track bare and brittle, just a man, a bottle, and a band that sounds like it’s being recorded in a funeral home basement.

When Methamphetamine Codeine Murder finally saw release on a limited 7-inch, most copies were pulled from shelves after complaints from church groups in Alabama and Georgia. Yet the record survived in the margins—passed hand-to-hand among truckers, bartenders, and night-shift millworkers who swore Del Ray had somehow set their sins to music. Decades later, a warped acetate discovered in a Scottsboro pawn shop confirmed what the legend claimed: Hillian’s voice on the final chorus wasn’t performance. It was exhaustion.

In the sprawling mythology of WonTone Records, Methamphetamine Codeine Murder remains a holy relic of the label’s outlaw era—a song too doomed for Nashville and too sacred for hell. Every reissue, no matter how clean, still carries the hiss of that original tape—like a ghost in the studio struggling to breathe.