April 30, 1957 – February 18, 2022
A personal tribute by Brad Evans

There was dust filling up the parking lot as we pulled in, but it started raining before we got to the door. I nodded at the bartender as I walked in, and he nodded back. That always made me feel good — they knew me here.

In reality, they knew Bill, and Bill knew me, but reality didn’t matter too much back then. The place looked just like it did the day Sally Adams opened it in 1947. Her son George, now in his late 80s, sat sleeping by Pat Sajak spinning the wheel on an old console television. Yellowed laminate counters made up the bar top, across which the coldest Budweisers in town were slung. A dimly lit jukebox sat in the corner, looking like something out of a Billy Dee Williams malt liquor commercial.

Walking through a couple of shady-looking corridors right off of the main bar took us to the music hall, an expansive concrete block room with concrete floors and a small stage surrounded mostly by broken, leftover disco lights. On it, Cool John Ferguson sat warming up his fingers by playing the Star Spangled Banner on his electric guitar. To his right sat an 80-year-old Luther Mayer, also known as Captain Luke. You could barely see them, but Luke’s deep voice was as profound as most books of the Bible. The two of them were something to behold.

Right as they were starting to play their first song, the storm came on strong. Lightning struck. The lights went out. It was pitch black in the room, so dark no one moved. Finally, someone struck a match and lit a candle and carefully carried it up to the stage. Captain Luke sat the candle beside him and gently started singing “A Rainy Night in Georgia” a cappella. Tears ran down my face onto the table I was sitting at. The roof started leaking, too. Water was pouring in, and some of us were sitting in puddles by the time the power came back on. When it did, Captain Luke and Cool John got right to it, and everyone danced and laughed and drank too much, and we didn’t leave until they made us.

It was a place that we could never find again, a time that would never be again. But there would be other times, other places, just as wild and crazy and true and beautiful. Behind most of them, in my life at least, would be a man named Bill Lucado.

It’s an impossible task to describe him in an article. And I’d be terrified to try if he were still alive. He was at once a scholar and a scoundrel. He knew as much about classical paintings as he did the delta blues. He was rich, and it didn’t matter. He was poor, and he didn’t care. No one I ever met – and no one I will ever meet again – lived so profoundly.

For a man who could count John Lennon, Derek Trucks, Taj Mahal, Jimmy Herring, Col. Bruce Hampton and a million other great musicians among his closest friends, you’d think a small thing like Macon music wouldn’t matter. But Bill couldn’t help but create art wherever he went. And that’s why all these great artists loved him so much.

Bill’s art was weaving people together. There was no one else like Bill who could create a space that was safe for all of us. His “Shuck and Suck” oyster roast parties were the finest example of that. Coal miners, moonshiners, folk artists, investment bankers, preachers and world-famous guitar pickers all looked forward to that autumn day in Gray, Georgia. If you could pass muster with the Jones County Deputies guarding his gates, inside was the most charming debauchery that part of the world will probably ever see.

At the end of the night, after the music and the food and the wine (and whatever else was in that bus parked over there) was gone. When the overtly expensive fireworks went off, and you could only see the shadows of those of us left standing, Bill stood out among us, even in the dark. He could create experiences like that with his eyes closed. I knew how lucky I was to be his friend. All of us did.

The last chapter of Bill’s life was tough, but it was probably his best. He got cancer, and he fell in love. He even helped the woman he fell in love with and married to beat cancer. He and his wife Dr. Debbie Gadd would fight back his cancer again and again, and in between, they raised a bunch of puppies, saw a lot of live music and did things in the fashion that Bill had always done them.

Eight years went by. He amazed doctors who had given him only a few months to live when he was first diagnosed. His survival was no surprise to me or anyone else that knew him. Bill was made of something different. And then one night at home, Bill went to sleep, and he didn’t wake up. Just like that. Peaceful.

A few weeks later, a small group of his friends gathered at his place. It was a perfect day. The wind was blowing up high in the pines of the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge. We watched his wife Debbie speak about their love. We listened to Dr. Mark Ledbetter tell us why Bill was so important to this world. We heard Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi play one of Bill’s favorite songs. Then the celebration began. I think Bill would have been proud of his send-off. And I know that he continues to live in every one of us who were there that day.

A long time ago, in a fit of promoter’s wizardry, Bill got convinced that an FBI agent was after him. It didn’t frighten Bill; it just made him angry. Bill took out a full-page week-long ad in the Macon Telegraph that read:

To Whom it may concern:
What Goes Around
Comes Around!
Behold!
Bill Lucado

I cut the page out and framed it, and it’s been on a wall near me ever since. I would find that wisdom to be true soon enough.

If they ever etch a tombstone for Bill, I hope that’s what they put on it:

Behold! Bill Lucado