This was the debut album for Michelle Shocked, purportedly recorded by Cooking Vinyl founder Pete Lawrence on a Sony Walkman at an unplanned performance at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Shocked herself has called it a “bootleg” and says it was released without her permission:

My music career began as the Bootleg Poster Child. It’s such a quaint word, bootleg, conjuring images of hillbilly moonshine and bathtub gin-soaked speakeasies. Copyright infringement sounds downright frivolous when compared to a portentous term like content theft. Like the billions which content theft drains from our economy and the millions of jobs lost, it’s serious big business. Most bootlegs these days are what we casually call ripped streams. In 1988, people were enthralled to learn that I’d been catapulted overnight to fame and fortune by a bootlegger who’d released my songs recorded at campfire on a Sony Walkman with weak batteries. “Aren’t you lucky!” they exclaimed. It’s taken thirty years, but finally, when I tell people the story of the Texas Campfire Tapes, they are aghast. “How can they do that?!” they ask me now. The fact remains. They can’t. But they did. And no one stopped them from distributing a bootleg album without permission from its creator. They just circled the wagons and created a flimsy paper trail after the crime.

The album has now been reissued (with Shocked’s direct involvement) on the Mighty Sound label. My copy is a UK pressing on Cooking VInyl via Beverly Coin & Jewelry in Beverly MA