If You're a Viper

"If You're a Viper" (originally released under the title "You'se a Viper", and sometimes titled "If You'se a Viper") is a jazz song composed by Stuff Smith. It was first recorded by Smith and his Onyx Club Boys in 1936 and released as the b-side to the song "After You've Gone".

The song was a hit for Smith and is one of the most frequently covered songs about marijuana smoking in American popular music. In its early history the song was identified with Rosetta Howard's 1937 recording and sometimes still is. Howard slowed the song's tempo considerably, and rewrote significant portions of the vocal melody (for example, the line "bust your conk on peppermint candy"). Fats Waller, who recorded the song in 1943 for a V-Disc session, closely followed the Howard arrangement, and his version, which has been commercially released numerous times since the 1950s, has kept the song in circulation. Waller's track is also a small footnote in the story of Harry J. Anslinger's efforts to prosecute jazz musicians for smoking marijuana during World War II.

Jazz trumpeter Jonah Jones performed the vocals on the first Stuff Smith recording. The song captures some of the slang and culture surrounding marijuana smoking in the US jazz scene in the 1920s and 1930s. "Viper" was Harlem slang for a pot smoker at the time and the song has numerous marijuana references. Edward Jablonski wrote that the term was inspired "by the hissing intake of smoke" and Russel Cronin wrote, "Conjure the image of the hissing viper for a second: taking a swift, sly suck on a skinny little joint. A viper is a toker, which practically all jazz musicians were, and the viper songs celebrated a new social hero."

Smith's song was not the only one to refer to Viper culture in the 1930s. Waller had a stride-piano piece of his own called "Viper's Drag" (earlier recorded in 1930 by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra) Sidney Bechet wrote and recorded "Viper Mad" and Fletcher Allen's "Viper's Dream" later gained a wide audience when it was recorded by Django Reinhardt in France.

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