[3] As Morrison biographer Ritchie Yorke described it, the song remembered "how it was when you were a kid and just got stoned from nature and you didn't need anything else".
We stopped in the village on the way up to this place and I went to this little stone house, and there was an old man there with dark weather-beaten skin, and we asked him if he had any water.
[5]Music critic Johnny Rogan describes "And It Stoned Me" as "a wonderfully understated remembrance" of that experience, with "no pat moralizing or sentimentality.
That lyric is thought to be a reference to jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, whose recordings Morrison listened to with his father as he was growing up.
[7] The song has been covered by Jackie DeShannon,[8] Bob Dylan (with Van Morrison),[9] Zero, Jerry Garcia,[8] James Morrison,[10] Widespread Panic,[11] Gov't Mule,[12] David Gray,[12] The Allman Brothers Band,[13] John Mayer, Passenger, and Joe Higgs.