“1952 Vincent Black Lightning” is a Richard Thompson original from his 1991 album Rumor and Sigh. The English guitarist and songwriter wrote the song around the iconography of the Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle — one of the great mid-20th-century British motorcycles, produced from 1948 to 1955 by the Vincent works in Stevenage, England. Thompson has said that as a kid the Vincent was “always the exotic bike, that was always the one”; he was looking for “English ideas that didn’t sound corny” and pinned his song on the motorcycle as a romantic anchor.
The song’s narrative is unusually compact: a thief named James charms a girl named Red Molly with a ride on his Vincent and bequeaths her the bike on his deathbed after a fatal police shootout. The combination of working-class British romance, doomed-criminal narrative, and Thompson’s astonishing flatpicked guitar accompaniment gave the song an immediate fan-favorite status despite never being released as a single.
“1952 Vincent Black Lightning” was named to Time magazine’s “All TIME 100 Songs” list in 2011 and has crossed firmly into the bluegrass and Americana repertoires through covers by Del McCoury Band (whose driving bluegrass arrangement became one of the canonical American readings), Greg Brown, and many others. The song remains a workshop standard for bluegrass guitarists studying flatpicked technique and a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a piece with strong narrative weight and a substantial guitar feature.
