Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue
Heartaches & Honky-Tonks
(Frogville Records, 2007, FVR 0030)
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Odds & Ends (bits & pieces)
Close Up the Honky-Tonks
Sing Me back Home
the End of the Line
Face to the wall
Somewhere Between
You Don't Care what Happens to Me
Who Will Buy the Wine
Old Faithful
the Waltz of the Angels
Wishful Thinking
Road Too Long
Wine Me up
Come Back to Old Santa Fe
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"Heartaches & Honky-tonks... Bill Hearne's years as a country and folk musician have served him well. He is above all a storyteller... a hearty slice of Southwestern soul."
- Gabe gomez SFReporter
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Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue
Foto's
Bill Hearne trio MySpace
Bill Hearne Website
Bill & Bonnie Hearne Website
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Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue has a brand spankin' New Retro Country Honky Tonk Album coming from Frogville Records. Bill has been performing for 36 years from Nashville to LA keeping boots scootin' everywhere inbetween. Along with his wife Bonnie for most of those years, Bill & Bonnie made quite an impression on country peers Lyle Lovett, Jim Rooney, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, Jerry Jeff Walker & Michael Martin Murphey. Bill & Bonnie are Folk legends at events like Texas's Kerrville Folk Festival. Bill's retro country trio and his honky-tonk quartet have been steadily blazing up the southwest circuit becoming mainstays in Texas, New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Frogville had a great time recording this retro country album at our analog studio in Santa Fe and with Bill Palmer at the helm engineering and co-producing this country classic! Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue delivers an instant retro country / honky-tonk CLASSIC! Bonnie sings a duet with Bill, Country fiddle legend Johnny Gimble (Bob Wills & the texas Playboys) plays on a couple of tracks, this is a solid country album that folks are sure to love!
Many are the days and nights of the past 25 years that the Hearnes have coped with economic and logistical challenges as they have sung their way to a harmonious prominence in the oral histories of all the songpoet bars and sweeter honky tonks of Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. A few years ago, Nanci Griffith notably singled them out for praise in dedicating her Grammy Award-winning folk revival album "Other Voices, Other Rooms" to, among others, "Bill and Bonnie Hearne, who play the best darn folk music I ever heard."
Such younger and more famous Texas country-folk performers as Lyle Lovett and Tish Hinojosa have sworn oaths of influence and indebtedess to them. "They used to play a place called Corky's in the Montrose area of Houston," Lovett explained recently on The Nashville Network. "I would get a seat right up next to the stage and sit in front of Bill and try to figure out all his guitar licks."
Yet in the thundering herd of cosmic and other cowboys who descended on Austin in the last two decades, waving guitars and big label recording contracts, the Hearnes were much overlooked. In the singer-songwriter market they were not primarily singer-songwriters but pedal-to-the-metal pickers and players -- Bill on guitar, Bonnie on piano -- and powerful interpreters of songs no one else had yet done quite as well. Humble in appearance, their body language different from people who have grown up able to see, their cause was not helped by the onset of the music video age and its worship of youth and beauty. They remained underground heroes, known to musicians and aficionados as the real deal: a totally unaffected pure-blend essence of something unmistakably and wonderfully Southwestern. Both Bill and Bonnie were born with degenerative cataracts that took their sight away at an early age. Bill has a shred remaining - his left eye is 20/100 corrected vision and if he presses his glasses almost point blank at a restaurant menu, he can slowly make out the highlights.
Bill grew up middle class in Dallas; Bonnie was born in Corsicana, south of Dallas, and spent her early years in poverty so grim she was removed from her parents to a foster home. Eventually she was sent to the Texas School for the Blind in Austin. Bonnie studied piano in school and, despite her Baptist upbringing, had played in her first bar by the time she was 16. "I was influenced by the music I heard in church but later by Linda Ronstadt and Carole King," she says.
"Bonnie was more plugged into the folk thing than I was," says Bill, who as a kid listened avidly to the Grand Ole Opry and local country music shows in Dallas. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were heroes. And Ray Price. "When Ray Price went pop it broke my heart," he says.
Because of his visual impairment, he not only couldn't play sports but also wasn't asked to be in any bands in high school though he had been playing the guitar from the age of nine. Instead he spent long hours at home playing by himself, trying to emulate the complete sound of Buck Owens' Buckaroos on record. Which, he says, is how he developed his picking-and-driving-in-one style.
A mutual friend who had gone to special education classes with Bill gave him Bonnie's phone number in 1968 just after Bonnie had graduated from the University of Texas and Bill was a freshman there. Bill called her up, as Bonnie remembers, "And I said, `Come on over.' We started playin' Gordon Lightfoot songs and Ian & Sylvia. I guess we could tell something pretty special was happening with the harmonies."
Bonnie had been planning to get one of the jobs then open to blind people, transcribing medical records. Instead she married Bill and they joined the long-haired Tony Lama boot brigade and Austin nightlife fandango that took over after Willie Nelson came home to Texas from Nashville in 1972. For years, Nelson invited them to be part of the entertainment at his annual celebrity golf tournament, and if Willie's regular piano player wasn't around, Bonnie was often asked to fill in when Willie himself took the stage. "I learned more about chord progressions from Willie than probably anybody else in the world," Bonnie says. "Boy, I'm tellin' you, he knows a bunch," says Bill. Gradually the two of them fused Bakersfield country and urban folk into a sound that, as the years passed it became increasingly clear was entirely their own. Bill has a mellow baritone that he can shake loose into a gritty vibrato as needed while Bonnie soars above him with soft, husky high notes. Bill has the heavier accent. When he pronounces the word "hired" it can come out "hard."
"The `70s in Austin were pretty crazy times," Bonnie says. "We didn't do as many drugs or drink quite as hard as some of them. It was a scene, too much of a scene probably for us." In 1979, tiring of the hustle and grind, they left Austin and moved to Red River, New Mexico where they had been offered a steady job six months of the year at a ski lodge. For a couple challenged daily by "visual impairment," as Bill puts it, Red River was an easier life. It was small enough that they could get around without having to be driven everywhere. As Austin music friend and former restaurant owner Segle Fry puts it, "They disappeared into the New Mexico vortex for a few years."
Bill Hearne performs regularly as part of the Bill Hearne Trio; joined by Cathy Faber on upright bass and vocals, and Bob Goldstein on acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, and vocals. They can be seen and heard most every Wednesday night at the La Fonda Hotel, La Fiesta Lounge in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue is the Bill Hearne Trio plus Auge Hays on pedal steel, and with Bob playing lots of electric guitar. The music they play is the retro-honky tonk music that Bill spent many hours listening to as a youth in the late 50's, early 60's.
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