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Covering two great country-folk songs

In February 1976, Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. recorded country-folk artist Larry Boyd and Group (at the time of the sessions Larry’s band was performing in Central Texas under the name Coldspring). The sessions were conducted at Bill’s Blue Hole Sounds studio – a converted A.M.E. stone church – just outside Liberty Hill, in the Central Texas hill country 30 miles north of Austin. The only Boyd tapes in the Sonobeat archives are various takes of Sally G and one completed version of Back Home Again, a cover of the John Denver ballad. The archives indicate Sally G was cut specifically as a demo “to render an opinion” about Larry and his group. Sally G is a nice tune written by The Beatles’ Paul McCartney and was given a good country-fried performance, including harmony vocals, by Boyd & group. If Bill Sr. followed his standard pattern, he would have sent an audiocassette dub of Larry’s demo to his A&RArtist & Repertoire (A&R) executives at record labels recruit and manage a roster of artists, connecting them to new songs and overseeing their recording and promotional activities. contacts at several national record labels, including Liberty/UA and Columbia Records Nashville, but he must have received no interest from any of his contacts, since the Sonobeat archives show no further sessions with Larry. There’s also no indication in the Sonobeat archives why Bill didn’s release Larry Boyd’s tracks as a Sonobeat stereo single.

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Bill habitually kept handwritten session notes, identifying the participating musicians, song composers, and, occasionally, diagramming the stereo position of each instrument in the basic recordings. He often included notes to himself to aid in overdubs and mix-downs. Almost all of Bill’s session notes have been lost or destroyed, but we fortuitously found his notes for Larry’s sessions along with a candid snapshot of Larry overdubbing a standard guitar track in the Blue Hole Sounds studio. These tidbits were tucked away in the box holding the Sally G master tape.

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Born in Houston, Texas, in 1950, and a graduate of Burnet High School in Burnet, Texas, about 20 miles west of Liberty Hill, Larry performed with several bands throughout Central Texas during the ’70s and ’80s and now lives in Nashoba, Oklahoma, where he continues to perform and record. And following the Sonobeat sessions, Larry wrote a passel of country songs, including Scottie Jim Beam Me Up and She Left Texas. Larry’s bandmate Eddie Farris, also a graduate of Burnet High School, received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Southwest Texas State University in San Marco, Texas, eventually making a career in the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, working to end homelessness, but as a hobby continued to play drums in rock, country, and swing bands throughout Central Texas until his death at age 62 in June 2012.

At the time of Larry’s Sonobeat sessions, Bill Sr. was fighting a losing battle with cancer that had been diagnosed in 1975. Following Bill’s death in September 1976, Larry rented the church that housed Blue Hole Sounds from the A.M.E. congregation that owned it, using it for rehearsals and equipment storage between gigs.

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