The Outlaws- Ghost Riders- Henry Paul, the late Hughie Thomasson

Ghost Riders by The Outlaws, a flood of personal memories have surfaced.”The ‘Burning of Bowling Green’,” Outlaws singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Henry Paul recalled aloud, invoking an almost mythical status like some Civil War battlefield to the 1975 Ohio music festival where we first met just weeks after the release of their first album, The Outlaws (#13 Billboard), in July 1975. It contained the late Hughie Thomasson and Monte Yoho’s “There Goes Another Love Song” and the instant Southern Rock classic “Green Grass and High Tides”.

Riding to early gigs packed into the old metallic-painted windowless band van nicknamed “The Copper Coffin”, Tampa Bay’s The Outlaws risked life and limb to follow their collective dream. Fifty years ago legendary record executive Clive Davis, who had signed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Bruce Springsteen to his former label, introduced his new New York City-based record company, Arista, with a three guitar Southern Rock band’s debut album, The Outlaws. With the Allman Brothers Band forming in Daytona Beach and Lynyrd Skynyrd from the wrong side of Jacksonville, the state of Florida was Southern Rock Central in the mid-1970s, so any Stetson-wearing guitar-picking long-haired rock band in those parts  was graded on a mighty steep curve. Such was the case for The Outlaws from Tampa Bay who, like 38 Special and later Molly Hatchet, were second generation Southern rockers. The Outlaws combined the guitar army assault of their Lynyrd Skynyrd mentors with the stacked vocal harmonies of the Eagles on their July 1975 debut featuring “There Goes Another Love Song” and the instant anthem “Green Grass and High Tides”; “Gunsmoke” and “Hurry Sundown” from their strong 1977 concept album Hurry Sundown. Then there was the scintillating stratospheric vocal chorus of “You Are the Show”; and the galloping production showstopper “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. Henry Paul and the late Hughie Thomasson, the only musician to perform on every Outlaws album, joined me In the Studio for this classic rock interview marking the forty-fifth anniversary of Ghost Riders in what sadly turned out to be Hughie’s final one. –Redbeard