Hard Road

@Steve8888888 wrote:

Does anyone know who Bill is, in the song Hard Road from the Happy Woman Blues album. Strong song. I’d love to know the reference. Thanks.

There is a litle bit of discussion on this by Tom Overby under the Title The Lost Songs but doesn’t hint at who Bill is.
Here is part of Tom’s comments.
THE LOST SONGS
by TOverby on Sun Jul 11, 2010 11:39 pm

Over the last couple of weeks I have made a pretty surprising and remarkable discovery that was more than a little influenced by the bootleg/live concert thread in here -as I think you will see.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by Lucinda’s attorney to compile a list of “unexploited” Lucinda compositions. An unexploited song is a song that Lucinda has written and recorded but was not included on an album and as a result was not a part of her catalog of published songs. I knew there were a few odds and ends that were left over from the Lost Highway records but not very many. I also knew that there were a few songs from the early years like Letters, which Laura Cantrell somehow got her hands on (which is still a bit of a mystery) and recorded a few years ago. At the same time I was reading the bootleg thread here in the forum and my interest was piqued because there were a couple song titles being mentioned that I was not previously aware of- like for instance Bill, but somebody mentioned that they thought it might the original title of Hard Road–it isn’t but I’ll get to that in a second. I then asked Lucinda’s attorney if she wanted to me include early songs that may have only been demos etc., and she replied yes, definitely.
The day I began to put the list together I went and asked Lucinda to give a me a list of early songs that she never put on records. I mentioned to her that there was a thread on her website that discussing old songs etc. and I asked her if she remembered a song named Bill, and she said “wow I had forgotten all about that one”. What happened next is the kind surprise that could only come from Lucinda. She went and got a folder and handed it to me and said “look thru this, there’s some things in here -but I think there are some that are missing because I think I have another folder somewhere”. I knew that she kept a big folder with all of the original handwritten lyrics of most of her songs, and things she’s working on, but let’s just say I had no idea what was really in there.
I began going thru the folder, page by page, putting them in an excel spreadsheet in chronological order and I was grouping these songs as pre-RT, or pre Rough Trade. Some of them were dated and some of them were written with the same blue ink so I knew they had been written around the same time. The more I went through them the more fascinated I was became- there were a lot that I had no idea even existed-how could that be–only a couple of these were in the box of old tapes that we had discovered a few years ago. As I typed in the last song title into the spread sheet I sat there staring at the screen looking at a list of 20+ songs that I had listed as “pre-RT” and suddenly it just dawned on me what exactly I was looking at. It was one of those “holy #$%&!!!” moments. These were much more than the lost Lucinda songs-these were the LOST ALBUMS. These are the songs that would’ve been the albums that would have bridged the gap between 1981-1988, had her career taken a normal path. As I read through them again I realized how perfectly they fit , they filled in the story – a few of the earlier ones reference New York, as if picking up the story line right from the song Happy Woman Blues. All of the ones written in the same blue ink were dated and written in 1984, and showed a continued development of her writing. A couple do contain a line or two that show up in other songs. Oh yeah, Bill is definitely not Hard Road.

For some reason it had never even occurred to me that might be the case-that she would have all these other songs that would have been the albums she would have done in the 80’s. I had gone through a lot of her archives and there was no hint that all these songs existed. I was stunned -how could that be? -well because, as she told me, most of these songs were only recorded on cassettes (and she wasn’t sure where they were). Yes, of course makes perfect sense.
That’s where the story ends right? Not quite. After this big discovery, I was talking about it with her and was telling her how amazed I was to find all of these songs, and how these would have been the lost albums and she said very nonchalantly “oh yeah they would’ve, a lot of them were written at the same time as RT and SOW-but nobody wanted to sign me”. I also suggested to her that at some point we should go and record these solo acoustic so we have them in some form–which she agreed.
It was more than a little odd then to read the interview, posted only a couple of days ago, but one she had done about 8 or 9 years ago, where she mentions all these early songs that have this innocence, and she might just record them acoustically. A very strange coincidence.
One last thing -in the time since I made this discovery, there have been a couple more posts in the bootleg thread that mention songs (That’s How I Got To Memphis, Duck And Dive) that are not on my list.
I think I need to find that other folder.TOverby

I have an MP3 of the unreleased song “Bill” discussed above , maybe it’s the same Bill referenced in Hard Road.

lwj

Thanks for digging those old threads up, LWJ. And, if anyone wants to find the original threads LWJetta quoted from above, and maybe comment further on them (please do so in those threads, as that will keep those discussions intact & in one place), here are links:

The Lost Songs

Six Blocks Away

Tom

@JZMusicNYC wrote:

My friend Tiger & I used to sing with Bill Priest in NY back in the late 70’s. Last time I saw him was 1980, I think. He’s a brilliant singer- songwriter. I used to book him & Lucinda at The Flushing Local Coffeehouse. We’ve been looking for him for years. Anybody out there know where he is? Thanks, 🙂 JZ

No luck searching for info as to Bill’s wherabouts but did find a song called ‘Silent Souls” that he did way back in 1973 at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.
A 10 disc set of the Early Years at Kerrville.
A sample of his song is # 34 and Lu appeared one year later at the Festival-song is # 134 “One Night Stand”, Lu with Mickey White on guitar and Rex Bell on vocals and bass.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kerrvilleearly/from/folklib

lwj