Julie Durocher is a new name to me, and was only a child when she recorded this slice of classic country back in 1966.

She sounds plenty older than her 14 years on Bad News, a song about a gal who’s “always getting into trouble and leaving little men that hate to see me go.” 

They tried to hang her in Oakland, she sings, and she faced the hangman again in San Francisco but “I broke the rope and they had to let me go.”

Strong stuff from a schoolgirl – as is the music, fusing the driving rockabilly rhythm of Johnny Cash with the honkytonk swing of Buck Owens.

A cover of a 1963 song by John D. Loudermilk, Julie recorded it in her hometown of Sauk City, Wisconsin, a world away from Nashville northwest of Chicago by Lake Superior.

It was one of just six songs she recorded for Sauk City’s Cuca Records, run by Jim Kirchstein, a local record store owner and electronics buff determined to preserve the native music of Wisconsin.

He used his engineering degree to build a studio to record local musicians, a pressing plant to manufacture their records, a radio station to play them – and sold them in his shop.

The label’s biggest success was the 1960 million-seller Mule Skinner Blues by The Fendermen (and the first releases by Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs).

This was recorded five or six years later and released in 1966, but only really reached a wider audience when her six 1960s tracks for Cuca were collected on a compilation EP called Wild As A Wildcat in 2022. 

After high school, Julie finally did make it to Nashville, recording under a variety of names in the ’70s and ’80s, most recently as Julie-Rashell Richmond. 

I discovered this tune when it was played in the new Disney+ drama series The Lowdown with Ethan Hawke. It’s much more to my taste than the comparatively mild original: