Some songs take you on a journey. With just a few chords, takes you somewhere within a few bars: to a sunny beach, to a pulsating big city – or like here: to a shabby dive at the ass of the world …
… into the “Hard Luck Café”. Keith Stegall is the tour guide of this sad folk ballad. In a velvety voice he tells of a man whom fate – bad luck? Heartbreak? – to this godforsaken place in nowhere in the USA. “They got Patsy Cline on the Jukebox, and an old Coca Cola clock on the wall” Stegall sings as a prelude, and one is already a guest in this “Hard Luck Café”. “Only a stone throw from the Greyhound bus depot” he continues to tell of this place, to which every day hundreds of lonely hearts are drawn, all of them travelling on. Only he, not the narrator. He stays here. As a dishwasher he earns board and lodging, and when he lies down behind a wooden shack at night, the night train shakes him to sleep. Clear case, the stuff dreams are made of. And the harmonies that Bill LaBounty and Randy Handley – the composers of the song – have found for this ballad are also fantastic. They tell of wanderlust, of loneliness, of desires and longings. If you click on the song on Youtube, you will learn that not 2,000 people have listened to this track. A pity. On the other hand: Keith Stegall will get over it, after all, as producer (for country superstar Alan Jackson, among others) and songwriter (for Al Jarreau, among others), he has his royalty sheep long since in the dry.
