Album Notes

In December 1997, legendary Nashville-based producer Brian Ahern (Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Roy Orbison) ventured to Calgary, AB. to record a weeks worth of live performances for a band called Beautiful Joe. This was to be a pre-production exercise that would be a lead up to the band making a studio recording in Nashville. Ahern brought with him three coffin-sized cases of vintage recording equipment, as well as his cronies Miles Wilkinson (Guy Clark, Willie Nelson) and Mark Lambert (Leon Russell), to assist in the recording process. This collective set up shop in the basement of a MacLeod Trail roadhouse called Bullshooter’s and got down to business.

Beautiful Joe had taken their name from a children’s book written in 1892 by Margaret Marshall Saunders. It was a wonderful piece of non-fiction about a famous dog that lived in Meaford, ON and the book sold over 1 million copies. The band came together during the recording of Jane Hawley’s 1996 solo recording “Letters To Myself”. They jelled immediately and it wasn’t long before they were performing to enthusiastic crowds wherever they played. Their performances varied from wonderful nights at the Twin Cities Hotel in Longview, AB to jam-packed gigs at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern and Matador Club (where Jane thought she saw a lot of men dancing without their shirts on, only to realize that they were fighting and not dancing). They also did a great performance on the Rita MacNeill television show shown nationally on CTV. They shared that evening with Blue Rodeo.

As it turned out, the recording / pre-production sessions were all that would ever get finished. There would be no studio recording. For reasons too numerous to mention, and in some instances, reasons that no one can remember, the band and the infrastructure surrounding it imploded.

Beautiful Joe, the dog, died over 100 years ago. Bullshooter’s closed it’s doors shortly after these recordings were finished. I guess you could say that Beautiful Joe, the band, went into hibernation in the summer of 1998. This disc features performances and interpretations of songs the members of the band listened to in their formative years. From the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan, from Ernest Tubb to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, it is music that the band played at the country dances and parties where they honed the Beautiful Joe sound. The sessions at Bullshooter’s also captured a large volume of original Beautiful Joe music and that will be saved for another day.


Beautiful Joe!! What a dog! What a band!