Other half of famed Kansas City folk-rock duo dies, eight months after bandmate
Tom Shipley of the iconic Kansas City folk/rock duo Brewer & Shipley has died at the age of 84.
The New York Times confirmed Shipley’s death with his son Marc, who said his father died Aug. 24 at a Columbia hospital. Shipley, an Ohio native, had been living on a 15-acre property outside Rolla, Missouri.
Shipley and Michael Brewer, an Oklahoma native who died Dec. 17 at 80, teamed up in the late 1960s in Kansas City and became stars with “One Toke Over the Line” in 1971. It reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Shipley told The Star in 2021 that they had written the song “as a joke to make our friends laugh.” But when he and Brewer opened for Melanie at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1970, they ran out of songs to play as encores, so they broke out “One toke over the line, sweet Jesus …”
“The audience went crazy,” Shipley said. “And the record company president was there. And he said, ‘That’s a single.’ We go, ‘What? Are you crazy?’ But we recorded it, and, of course, it was a hit.”
Brewer & Shipley also were instrumental in the formation of Kansas City’s Good Karma Productions, which produced regional concerts, and played frequently at the legendary Cowtown Ballroom in the early 1970s. They recorded nine albums, highlighted by “Tarkio” (1970), which included “One Toke” and the popular “Tarkio Road.”
The duo was in the first class of inductees into the Kansas Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and frequently performed in the area until the pandemic hit in 2020.
“I still consider myself a Kansas City guy,” Shipley said in 2021. “I still cry when the Chiefs lose.”
