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We know who she is, but not really

The Sonobeat archives hold no information about Mississippi-born country singer Joyce Spence (née Street) beyond the fact that in February 1973 she self-financed recording sessions yielding four songs at Sonobeat’s studios on North Lamar in Austin, Texas. Comparing Joyce’s Sonobeat tracks to those of the Country Nu-Notes, Johnny Lyon’s Austin-based country band, and knowing that Joyce had no band of her own and that the Nu-Notes were recording with Sonobeat during the same month, we conclude that the Nu-Notes provided the instrumental backing tracks for Joyce. The four songs – I’ve Got a Head on My Shoulders, Don’t Make Me Cry, Tied Down, and Troubled Woman – were Joyce’s original compositions. Oddly, we found only the raw vocal tracks of Troubled Woman and The Music Soft and the Lights Down Low in the Sonobeat archives and assume these songs weren’t intended as a cappella pieces but, rather, that they were extracted from the session master tapes, which were likely delivered to Joyce since she paid for the sessions.

In March, Sonobeat producer Bill Josey Sr. mixed down monaural demos of I’ve Got a Head on My Shoulders and Don’t Make Me Cry and, as a courtesy to Joyce, sent a dub of the songs to Ron Bledsoe, Vice President of 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. at Columbia Records in Nashville. There are no documents in the Sonobeat archives indicating whether Ron ever responded to Bill, but we can assume it was a “pass”, as Columbia returned the demo tape to Bill and never released any of Joyce’s material.

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Joyce returned to Sonobeat a month later, in March 1973, to record five additional tracks accompanied by Glenn Proctor, but mostly Joyce on vocals and Glenn on guitar, along with re-dos of I’ve Got a Head on My Shoulders and Don’t Make Me Cry. Nothing about these songs is known except the titles and composers, which are marked on the tape box holding the mono dubs. Except for Back Streets of Your City and Swimming in the Bottle, which were Glenn’s compositions, the rest of the March recordings were Joyce’s original songs. Joyce and Glenn recorded two versions of Swimming in the Bottle, Glenn singing the first version and Joyce singing the second.

Joyce’s February tracks were solidly performed in a straight ahead manner with a straight ahead band, the Country Nu-Notes, backing her, who returned to back Joyce’s March re-dos. But these recordings, channeling the Bakersfield Sound popularized by country icon Buck Owens, weren’t in the zeitgeist of the progressive country movement that had taken a grip on Austin and the country music industry in the mid-’70s, so Joyce’s recordings were never sold to a major label or released by Sonobeat.

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In late 2021, we were approached by The Numero Group, which under license from Joyce had been collecting her recorded output, which includes the tracks Joyce recorded with Sonobeat and at other studios spanning a decade, and we were pleased to work with Numero to make this happen. In late 2022, Numero released the digital version of Joyce’s anthology album, Tied Down, under her maiden name, Joyce Street. Numero released the vinyl edition on March 31, 2023. At long last, Joyce Spence née Street got that long-elusive and long-deserved national release.

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