"To be in the studio singing with a band, it was just like HEAVEN to me." -Joyce Street
Starting at the tailend of the 1960s and continuing through the bygone ’90s, the Mississippi-born Joyce Spence journeyed across the United States and Canada, propelled by her husband Dave’s job in retail, chasing a dream of being a country singer all the while. As they bounced around the United States and Canada, they brought with them a growing family and all those attendant obligations—but they also brought along a world full of songs in Joyce’s head. That’s where they started, little melodic and lyrical puzzles she’d figure out while tending the duties of home, wrangling children, and putting dinner on the table. Occasionally Dave, a music fan who loved to dance, would remark, “That’s a good one.”
They both believed in Joyce’s songs, and when they afford to dip into their savings account to book time at local recording studios, these songs landed Joyce in exciting places — Hollywood recording studios and the country music mini-burg of Austin, Texas — and introduced her to a cast of cult country stars, including Don McGinnis and Hal “Hillbilly Heaven” Southern.
Significant radioplay eluded her and any sort of viable path in the music industry failed to materialize, but the recordings Joyce put to tape reveal a striking voice, one capable of bringing quiet power to reverent gospel tunes and belt out rowdy pop country alike. She could play it with a wink or devout, sweet or gritty, but her songs ring out with a blend of holy calm and ornery exuberance. Listening back to her recordings, Joyce didn’t mince words: “You can hear why I believed in my music.”
Joyce, who released music under her maiden name, Joyce Street, her label-chosen name Joye Street, as well as the edgy sounding Joyce Jagger pseudonym, grew up surrounded by music in Waynesboro, Mississippi. From her earliest age, music held sway over her. She heard it at church, was moved by it when her family saw movies, and obsessed over it on the radio, making note of her favorite R&B and country numbers, by the likes of Brook Benton, Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, and Patsy Cline. Before long, she’d written her own gospel hymn and sung it with her sisters Winnie and Mary at their family church. The songs kept coming, and not a few of them. By the time she earned a note of recognition in the August 1970 issue of The Country Music Spotlight, the 19-year-old had written “more than 300 songs to date.” She wasn’t trained and didn’t grasp notation, but that hardly mattered. She could simply “hear” the songs in her head. “The sound,” she said. “I could hear how it should go.”
When Joyce was 18, she took off for Cincinnati, where she made a living singing songs in venues like Tiki Club Hide-A-Way and The Carousel. There, she met Dave Spence. The two married, and soon had a daughter they named Carmen. Dave worked for Kmart, home of the Blue Light Special, with its memetic “Attention Kmart shoppers” slogan, an Illinois-based retail chain experiencing massive growth that would continue for decades. He traveled city to city, training staff at newly opened locations. Life with Dave meant a life of travel, settling into a new town every couple of years. And besides, each place represented a whole pool of local talent to draw from.
Up first was California where they moved in 1968, setting in Orange County. The golden coast was entirely new to Joyce, who describes the young couple’s home as a technicolor dream. “We had upstairs downstairs with a patio out back,” she says. “It was round with a big swimming pool, surrounded by all the palm trees.” One day at work, Dave was discussing his wife’s songs and he learned of a nearby woman named Elizabeth Horton, who owned a small label called Reena Records. Joyce arranged a meeting and a demo of 16 original songs was performed a cappella in Horton’s room and set to a basic two-track tape, including the gospel-flecked “Lost Highway.”
Horton liked what she heard and in 1969 booked Joyce time in the studio with producer Hal Southern. They cut a Christmas 45, “Make This A Good Christmas” b/w “What I Really Want For Christmas,” and released it under the name Joye Street to coincide with the season. And while the holiday record didn’t exactly light up the phones, Horton was a believer. Two more singles were cut in short order, including the knockout “Life Ain’t Worth Livin’ (If I Can’t Have You),” a tearjerker with stately plucked electric guitar, lush backing vocals, delicate saloon piano and a mournful shuffle. The cheeky “Woman Do Something Nice (For Your Brown Eyed Man)” was reserved for the flip. “I was just a newlywed at the time, and I just remember we lived in an apartment and I couldn’t sing very loud, but I would sing in the shower,” Joyce recalled. A final Reena 45 appeared in early 1970, an “Ode To Bobby Joe”-style story song about illicit moonshine trade.
“My dad, he didn’t make moonshine, but he knew people that did,” Joyce explained. The Reena singles got some notice, but mostly flew under the radar. Just as well, the Spences were being called away from the West Coast to Austin Texas. Just like the Blue Light Special, the Spences couldn’t stick around for too long.
“There were lots of hits coming out of Austin,” Joyce remembered. “When we were there, it was like a little Nashville.” If Joyce’s belting voice and clever songs could get her noticed in Hollywood, she figured she could certainly be noticed in the thriving early-’70s Austin music scene Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Guy Clark were all out there, bringing a hippified sensibility to western music and electrifying the town’s music scene. “We used to go to those big, huge Texas dance halls,” Joyce said of rare nights out on the town.
While the local country scene was hopping, Joyce was mostly focused on matters at home. With Carmen and a new son, David, to look after, Joyce busied herself with setting up their duplex in Austin. “We put new carpet in,” she said, describing its dark blue hue, a green couch, chain lamps hanging from the ceiling, and a big glass coffee table. Life was mellow for the young family. On weekends, they’d go tubing on the Guadalupe River. “We had a big old camper,” Joyce recalled. “We would stay all weekend at the Gulup. People would make brisket and fry okra, they would just make huge dinners. They’d cook them briskets all night long.”
But weekend outings and a day-to-day housewife routine notwithstanding, the songs kept piling up, and soon enough Joyce went looking for a studio. She learned of Sonobeat Records, a recording studio ran by Bill Josey Sr. and Bill Josey Jr, who’d made his name on the airwaves of KAZZ, the first FM station in the use that regularly programed rock music, airing selections by Janis Joplin and the 13th Floor Elevators. Sonobeat was also a label, with loose ties to major labels, but Joyce was unaware of that fact when she booked her session.
“When I went in there, I didn’t know they were a record company,” Joyce said. “I just thought it was a little recording studio.” Joyce booked a March 1973 session and paid, joining the house band to cut the grinding “Don’t Make Me Cry” and the steel-swept “I’ve Got A Head On My Shoulders.” Josey forwarded the demo along to Columbia Records and heard back: they liked it when Joyce sang in a high register.
So she returned to Sonobeat in March for another session, joined by her friend, guitarist Glenn Proctor, who accompanied guitarist Johnny Lyon’s Country Nu-Notes, which featured Bob Garrett on drums, Jimmy Placquert on steel guitar, Mickey Rice on bass, and Phil Tucker on lead guitar. They did some redos and cut a few more new ones, including the seductive “Music Soft and the Lights Down Low,” which only exists now as an isolated vocal track. Proctor and Joyce recorded a few one their own too: “Tied Down,” a folkie ode to would be illicit romance and the gorgeous Proctor original “Back Streets Of Your City,” just Joyce’s slightly- reverbed voice and Proctor’s insistent strum.
The resulting recordings didn’t jibe with the progressive country spirit of the day and failed to find any traction at labels. “There’s a lot of singers out there, but not everybody’s writing hit songs,” Joyce said. But the Sonobeat sessions were satisfying for her on a creative level. “I thought, ‘If I have a good song, I want to record it.’”
In 1974, the family moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, where Joyce and Dave had her third child, a daughter named Treva. More and more, it seemed that songs like “Tied Down,” that 1973 strummer about a resisting infidelity, could apply to her dream of making music: “You know I’d sure enough love to love you/But I’ve got a home and a hubby/Baby, baby I’m tied down.” With three kids to focus on and Dave’s busy work, there never was enough time or money to focus solely on Joyce’s songs. But Dave remained encouraging, especially when songs like “That Man of Mine” popped out in 1975. While lots of songs came and went, when one stuck it meant something. “You just keep singing it over and over and you like it,” Joyce says.
It was a fruitful time for music in Joyce’s life. Her brothers were nearby, and they played in bands around Chillicothe. “We would go up there on weekends and I would sing with them.” Galvanized by musical spirit in the air, Joyce and Dave utilized the family’s savings to date at Joe Walters’ Appalachia Sound Studios in Waverly, Ohio. With “That Man of Mine” in her head, she told Walters she needed musicians, and he replied, “I got this guitar picker, but he’s really wild. Do you want him?”
“I went in and that’s the first time I ever met him,” she recalled. He had long brown hair and was blind, but Joyce can’t recall his name—but says that wildness was not overstated. “I just sang it and he just played it, and picked it up,” she continued. They quickly cut “That Mine of Mine” and a B-side, a gleaming gospel about forbidden romance, “The Good Book Says It’s Wrong” with the house band. Thrilled with the result, Joyce funded a custom pressing through their in-house Revelation Records Ltd. imprint.
“After I made that 45 record, I was all excited about it,” she says. She took it to her brothers and they were dismissive of the guitarist’s far out playing. “They didn’t like him,” she said. They said, “He doesn’t know how to play.”
Sibling jealousy aside, it’s worth noting that while his name’s been lost, the playing her is genuinely inventive and strange, especially the fuzz laden solo on “That Man of Mine,” which takes the Linda Rondstadt-styled belter to a whole other level, evoking the new wave’d edges of Carlene Carter. And he’s just as exploratory on “The Good Book Says It’s Wrong,” a gleaming gospel about forbidden romance. He darts gnarled leads through Joyce’s impassioned vocal. “I’m sorry if you thought I was leading you on,” she sang. “Let’s do what’s right in a world where there’s so much wrong/I feel your hand/your body’s warm and willing/but I just can’t/The good book says it’s wrong.” Walking the line between the sinner and the saint, Joyce embodies a struggle for fidelity, and the guitarlines speak the same language.
But the self-funded single failed to materialize into a label deal or much airplay. By the late ‘70s, the Spences found themselves in Vancouver, Canada. Though they’d left the West Coast behind, they’d been there in the famous 1971 earthquake that convinced many scientists and observers of the possibility of California collapsing into the ocean. In 1979, she worked up the upbeat and undeniably catchy “California, You’re Slipping.” Once again, the family raided the savings and booked time at Pinewood Studio in Vancouver. The Canad an micro-custom Arc released it and serviced it to the radio. Radio programmers sent the label faxes expressing admiration and airplay for the song, but nonetheless, the single failed to gain any commercial footing.
Let down, she turned to her faith to make sense of the setbacks. “I said, ‘Lord, it’s for you to take it and use it when you want and whenever you want,” Joyce said. “I might think it’s time, but God might say, ‘No, I’m not ready. It’s not your time. I’m not ready to use you yet.” The Spences, of course, had more moves to make — from Nevada to British Columbia, back to Ohio…wherever the Blue Light Special rang out.
As the years went on, Joyce found herself called away from secular songcraft and toward gospel music, the kind of music that first filled her soul as a child. “I wanted to sing something that could help somebody, maybe help ‘em to become a Christian and save their soul,” she said. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, she turned her full creative attention to the Lord. “There is nothing wrong with singing a good love song,” she clarified. “When you go to church and the preacher preaches a sermon, he tells you about life, He’ll tell you a story.” Joyce’s story songs had their own dark corners, but they all point back to her faith, ultimately. “I prayed, and God put it in my mind, He opened my mind after years and years, and said: I made love, and you wrote about it.”
In 2012, the Spences settled in Spokane, Washington, where Dave spent his final years before passing away in 2014. In addition to her own abiding faith in the church, it was Dave’s faith in Joyce’s music that helped bolster her belief and musical dream. “He was always involved,” she said, noting how he’d dance to her songs and help pick out her wardrobe. Though her songs never became hits, they remain relics of the great adventure the Spences embarked on, and their shared belief in Joyce’s talent and heartfelt musical conviction.
Though her discography reveals abundant humor and energy, perhaps the most affecting vocal included her is a Reena tape of Joyce singing the traditional “Lost Highway.” All alone and sans accompaniment, her voice rings out, at times pushing into the red. It’s an aural snapshot of a moment that contained so much promise and potential. But it doesn’t sound like any sort of audition or try out, just a quiet and worshipful reverie. Losing herself in abandon, Joyce Street lets loose a warning and an invocation all at once. “But if you wander/And if you stay/You might get on the lost highway,” she sang, extolling sinners to put their wandering days behind them and get on the path. Bearing a warning of the road to hell, Joyce found herself in front of a microphone, singing her songs. Her own personal heaven.
-Jason Woodbury, September 2022
