Author Description

In the 22 years Tommy Thompson spent with the Red Clay Ramblers - a band born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1972 - he thrived on the friendship, music, and creative options that a musician’s life brought to him. Tommy wrote inventive lyrics, collaborated productively and energetically with band members on songs and scripts for plays, worked tirelessly to develop a band niche and threw himself into the task of booking a continuously challenging schedule of gigs for the Ramblers. Tommy and musical colleagues – notably Mike Craver and Bland Simpson - composed the music and lyrics for several plays including Earrings, based on Lee Smith’s novel, Oral History. The Red Clay Ramblers performed off Broadway, again, in Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind; and undertook guest band cuts on a variety of albums, including Michelle Shocked’s 1991 LP, Arkansas Traveler, among other diverse musical activities. This paper is about some of the rough lyric work by Tommy Thompson, lyrics that never quite evolved into performable tunes, such as one of the last songs he wrote - something called “The Walls of Time.” Some of those lyrics survived in personal files. Some lyrics and music, as Mike Craver speculated, might have been consigned to the vaults of recording labels that put out the music of the Red Clay Ramblers.