Richard Thompson wrote “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” and recorded it for Rumor and Sigh, the album Capitol released in May 1991 with Mitchell Froom producing. It was never issued as a single, yet it became the song audiences shout for at his shows. In 2011 Time put it on its All-TIME 100 Songs list, calling it “a glorious example of what one guy can accomplish with just a guitar, a voice, an imagination and a set of astonishingly nimble fingers.”
The motorcycle in the title was real and rare. Vincent built the Black Lightning, a factory racing version of its Black Shadow, at Stevenage in Hertfordshire. Only 31 were made before production ended in 1952, and in its day it was the fastest production motorcycle in the world. Thompson told the writer Geoffrey Himes in 2001 that the song “started with the frustration of coming from Britain and wanting to reflect British culture,” because American places and myths had crowded out British ones. So the outlaw rides a British bike and scorns Nortons and Greeveses, and in Thompson’s words the couple ride out to Box Hill in Surrey. He has said the song’s structure is “quite similar to a Scottish ballad from the 17th century.”
The story is told in dialogue. Red Molly admires a young man’s motorcycle, and James tells her it is a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. He gives her a ring and warns her that he is “a dangerous man” who has robbed “many a man to get my Vincent machine.” A police sergeant later calls her to the hospital, where James lies dying of a shotgun wound from an armed robbery. With his last breath he slips her the keys, seeing angels in leather and chrome coming to carry him home.
The Del McCoury Band carried the song into bluegrass. Del’s sons Ronnie and Rob brought it to him, and he had not heard it before. He recalled owning a 1947 Indian Chief himself and said the song “wasn’t your average bluegrass tune, so that attracted me to it.” The band recorded it as the opening track of Del and the Boys (Ceili Music, 2001), with Del on guitar and lead vocal, Rob McCoury on banjo, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin and Jason Carter on fiddle. McCoury moved the ride from Box Hill to Knoxville but kept the British motorcycles. At DelFest in May 2018, Thompson thanked McCoury “for popularizing this song in the United States,” and that evening the two sang it together for the first time. Robert Earl Keen recorded it as “52 Vincent Black Lightning” on Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions (Dualtone, 2015), and the band Red Molly took its name from the song’s heroine.
