Boxcar Willie, left, and Jim Martin sit in a Springfield recording studio in this Oct. 4, 1982, photo.
Boxcar came to Springfield to put the finishing touches on his new album. “I came up here to give my ideas of what the songs should sound like in their final form. When you go to Nashville for three or four days it gets real expensive ... If we were in Nashville, spending all that that money we might let some things slide rather than trying to improve on them.”
Boxcar’s real name was Levil Travis Martin (no relation to his producer). A traditional country singer, most of his songs were about trains. Martin said he adopted his stage name when he “saw a hobo in a boxcar one time ... and he looked like a friend of mine named Willie.”
This image is part
of a much larger collection of historically rich photographs from the News-Leader’s photo archive. Each week, the Springfield-Greene County Library will tap into this vast collection and present an interesting image “from the darkroom" and share its history. This image is presented in partnership between the Springfield-Greene County Library District and the Springfield News-Leader. For more historical images of the Ozarks, visit: thelibrary.org/fromthedarkroom.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: From the Darkroom shows Boxcar Willie recording in the studio
