---

Telling stories in song

Brooklyn, New York, native Rick Dinsmore tells us his name at the beginning of an unmarked tape we stumbled upon when cataloging the Sonobeat archives in the early 2000s. He gives the date as July 11th, but he doesn’t mention the year (we’ve made an educated guess that it’s 1975). He tells us the song is his original composition and is about a friend named “Bill”; hence, the title. The recording’s instrumentation is sparse: just standard guitar and electric bass accompanying Rick’s story song about a man, a bar, a dancer, a few drinks, and a derringer. This story doesn’t end well.

Rick, whose recording career began in Los Angeles in the early 1970s with releases on the Vault, Fantasy, and United Artists labels, moved to Houston, Texas, in the mid-’70s, where almost immediately he began performing. He was a winner in the “New Folk” songwriting competition at the 1975 Kerrville Folk FestivalKerrville, in the heart of the Central Texas Hill Country about 100 miles west of Austin, is home to the Kerrville Folk Festival, founded in 1972 by Rod Kennedy. The Festival has been an annual event ever since, drawing tens of thousands of attendees during May and June each year., appearing on stage there on May 25th. Sonobeat co-founder and producer Bill Josey Sr. (who we’re absolutely certain is not the “Bill” who’s the subject of the song) recorded Rick at Sonobeat’s Blue Hole Sounds studio just outside Liberty Hill, Texas, 30 miles north of Austin. The recording likely was made shortly following Rick’s performance at the Festival, which was run by Bill’s friend Rod Kennedy. It’s also likely that Rod introduced Rick and Bill, as earlier in the year Bill had sent Rod a demo tape for Michele Murphy, with whom Bill was working on a folk-inflected album, so Rod knew the kind of material Bill was then looking to record.

---

---

Rick moved from Houston back to Los Angeles in the ’90s for family reasons but in 2006 returned to Texas, this time settling in Austin, performing throughout Central Texas. When he returned to Texas, he brought his “true love”, Jocelyn (Jos) Callard, who he’d met in Los Angeles. For years they performed and recorded together as, simply, Dinsmore-Callard. After a few years in Austin, Rick and Jos relocated to Georgetown, Texas, 30 miles up Interstate 35 from Austin. Rick died on September 30, 2020, at age 78, after a brief illness.

---

---

---