Billy Gashade

the long version

Billy Gashade is a wandering musician who crosses paths with the notorious and the legendary, as well as the unheralded. Billy's song is lyrical and at times elegiac, but never sentimental. And his easy, natural refrain remains true to this day: that most folks were neither as bad nor as good as they seemed, and they did the best they could with what they had. He became friends with Frank and Jesse James, he knew Jim and Cole Younger, who rode with the James boys, and he met characters as different as Oscar Wilde, Calamity Jane, Chief Crazy Horse, William "Billy the Kid" Bonney, General Custer, "Wild Bill" Hickok, and John Wesley Hardin. From the ravages of the Civil War to the early innovations of the twentieth century, the piano player who came to be known as Billy Gashade sang for his supper in saloons and bawdy houses from New York to New Mexico.