Billy Joel has been around so long that he’s had stages in his career we’ve almost forgotten about. In the beginning he was an unusual talent and it took a while to find a perch.
Later he put out the album The Stranger that was a massive hit. When MTV came along, he started releasing more pop sort of songs.
He toured for decades but had to at least pause recently when he was diagnosed with a brain order. Now 76, he has a unique spot in music. He can play almost any genre of music and has a vast catalogue
to draw on.
In this video, he plays one of his earliest hits, The Ballad Of Billy The Kid. Historically, the lyrics are nonsense. Billy the Kid, aka Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, was born in New York and moved with his family first to Indianapolis then to Wichita before finally heading to New Mexico where his legend took root. Among other things, he was involved in the Lincoln County War.
He left a deep impact on the American imagination as you can sort of tell from Joel’s song, which, at a minimum, was ambitious at a time when rock music was maturing along with its best performers.
