Slow Train

”Slow Train” was written by Mike Sorrell, Billy Earl McClelland and Randy “Shiney” Moon in 1993. I believe it was recorded in Memphis when Billy was working with Skip McQuinn at a studio up there. I don’t know who the other players were and I’m not sure where we wrote it. It could have been up at West Point Sound, but I’m not sure. My timeline of where I was and what I was doing over the past 75 years has become quite skewed, so to speak.

As was the case with most of the Blues tunes we wrote, Mike had the lyrics and then, Billy and I came up with the music. As I previously stated, it’s possible Mike tried to give us his musical vision by singing it to us, which if you ever heard Mike sing, you know that Billy and I were just as lost before he helped us as we were afterwards, if not more. (Love you Mike, but you know you couldn’t sing.)

Besides missing Mike’s friendship and being able to call and talk and reminesce with him about Auburn, daddy’s old truck Mike had restored, something he’d found on YouTube that I saw 10-15 years earlier and various other mundane topics, I really miss his commenting on our songs, since many of them began with his lyrics. And, when it was a Blues tune, he seemed to always have some obscure bit of blues lore that he would toss into his description. I’m not as versed in the Blues as he was, or Billy either, so I can’t emulate Mike’s describing a song.

And, I really miss Billy Earl’s playing and being BE. We had so many great times over the years riding through Valley, before it was Valley, in my old Ford Galaxie 500 aka “the blue blimp” making plans, concocting schemes and doing various other low-scale, nefarious things. Lord, the stories that car could tell. And, down in the ‘studio in the woods’ bs-ing about everything and everyone. I miss him. Those were the days. Can I get an amen, y’all?

“Slow Train” is the Blues. I think it’s one of Billy’s better performances vocally and instrumentally. For all the ‘Blues aficinados” out there, this tune is definitely for you. Hope you like it.

Thanks to Polina Tankilevitch and Matthias Groeneveld for the thumbnail photograph.

Thanks to Wolfgang-1958, Didzis Rubenis, JuliusH, and Christian Bodhi for the videos from Pixabay and Kelly Lacy (2), Darina Belonogova (2), Matthias Groeneveld, Polina Tankilevitch, and for the videos and Viktor Mogilat for the photograph from Pexels.