Check out Brendan Codey’s folk stomper sing-a-long “My Kingdom For A Jake Leg”

Since we first heard him many moons ago, singer-songwriter Brendan Codey has made the move from Philadelphia to Berlin to New York City, but it hasn’t stopped him from making more music. After releasing several EPs the past couple of years, he is readying his next release (which is tentatively titled My Kingdom For A Jake Leg) and he teased it with the title track this week.

“My Kingdom For A Jake Leg” comes as an old-timey song about the infamous Jamaica Ginger extract that crippled users during the prohibition era set to the tune of banjos, slide guitar, and percussion shakers. Codey said this about the song (via YVINYL):

“Jake Leg has a history in the blues tradition, but it’s largely been forgotten. Aside from the obvious physical effects that were the effect of drinking it, the paralysis also essentially outed people as illicit drinkers during prohibition. They were therefore shunned twice over. That is the part of the story of Jake Leg that appealed to me as something to write about – how the simple + human choice to get lost for a few hours ends up having these life changing consequences that are then ignored by most people. That and how the people responsible essentially got away with it.”

Listen to Brendan Codey’s “My Kingdom for A Jake Leg” below.