“1952 Vincent Black Lightning” by Richard Thompson

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" turned up in 1991 on Richard Thompson's album Rumor and Sigh, and it's a whole doomed romance squeezed into one ballad. Thompson wrote it, sings it and plays it, with Mitchell Froom producing, and it has the bones of an old folk tale told with a modern wink.

The story belongs to James, a thief with a fast motorcycle, and Red Molly, the girl he wins over by taking her for a ride on his 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. By the end he's dying, and the bike is the one thing he has to leave her. Thompson tells it with a storyteller's economy and a guitar part so busy and nimble you'd swear there were two players in the room.

It was never a single, and it didn't need to be: it became a fan favorite and one of the most admired songs of his solo career, and a live take later surfaced on Two Letter Words: Live 1994. In 2011 Time put it on its All-TIME 100 Songs list, marveling at how much one man could do with a voice, a guitar and his imagination. A band even named itself Red Molly after its heroine.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.