The Check’s in the Mail

Booking for the August Sweetback tour is in full swing, and as I was trying to fill in some missing dates and burning up the phone lines (please please let us play at your club, we'll be really good I promise) I decided to try to wrap up some unfinished business, specifically tracking down and sending a royalty check to J. D. Hutchison who wrote "Silver Tongue and Gold Plated Lies."



I first heard the song when Ginny Hawker recorded it on her album "Letters from my Father," but until we recorded it I didn't realize that the writer was the same John D. Hutchison that my former bandmate Tom White (who also happens to be Amanda Kowalski's uncle) told me stories about. Tom went on tour with the Hutchison Brothers once or twice back in the seventies and, let's just say he's still talking about it.

Anyway, when we went to pay out royalties for the the songs we recorded it was mostly a matter of going to a website for a publishing agency, filling out a form and making a credit card payment. J.D. Hutchison and his songs never turned up in any of these sites though, and after a while we nearly gave up on finding him. Finally it dawned on me that we were looking in the wrong place. One email to Tim Peacock, Athens, OH music promoter extrodinaire produced a phone number where I could call the man himself, which I did yesterday and immediately got a message back that he was "tickled to death" that we had recorded his song and an address where we could send him some royalties.

So hats off to a local legend who does it the old-fashioned way. And, yeah J.D. the check's in the mail.

- Jesse