The Knight Beats formed in Centralia, Illinois in 1961. Members of the early group included Wayne "Goldie" Gholson (guitar), King Lambird (guitar), Jim Cicigoi (sax) and Warren "Nip" Parson (drums). Sometime before 1964 the band split into two separate groups. Several of the band members, led by Goldie Gholson, briefly performed as the New Knight Beats before eventually changing their name to the Jorrells.
At the same time, King Lambird put together a new group but retained the Knight Beats name. He recruited two brothers from Centralia, Mel and Gary Presswood to play bass and drums. On organ, the group added Don Holloway from Sparta. This lineup of the Knight Beats would stay together for the next several years. Lambird's wife, Karen, would become the band's "fifth member," working long and hard behind the scenes according to one local newspaper.
The Knight Beats would become one of the more popular groups in Southern Illinois. They also had great success performing at the various "combo clashes" at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. In August 1965, the band took second place overall in the state competition, losing out to the Artistics from Mattoon. The second place prize was a check for $200.
The Knight Beats returned to Springfield the following year and were the unanimous winners of the "battle of the bands" competition, beating out groups from all over the state. In fact, over 120 bands participated in the 1966 Young America Fair Combo Clash. The second place winners that year were the Junior Jive Kings from Springfield. The Knight Beats received trophies and $500 for their first place win.
In early 1966, the group also recorded and released their only single. It included two originals. A novelty tune, "King Arthur," credited to Lambird. The b-side was an instrumental in the style of the Pink Panther theme. Apparently it was originally titled "The Purple Pussycat," but was changed by the record label to "Mo Mo." The single was released by Norman Records which was based in St. Louis, MO.
Around the time of the record's release, the Knight Beats made several television appearances, include one on The Hop in St. Louis and another in Champaign. The band also started performing at schools and universities as far away as Kansas and Missouri. In the summer of 1967, the band spent a week touring in Colorado. Bob Haney had replaced Don Holloway on organ before that trip.
During the late 60's, drummer Gary Presswood also worked as a manager at the KB Bandstand, a music store in Centralia that had a recording studio and record label. Despite that fact, the Knight Beats never made another record. The band continued to perform around Southern Illinois for the next few years before calling it quits.
King Lambird and the other members continued to play in various bands over the next several decades. Briefly in 1971, Lambird and the Presswood brothers teamed up with Arlie Neaville (aka Dean Carter) from Champaign. They called themselves The Generations.
By the 1980's, Lambird was performing 50's & 60's rock 'n' roll as King and the Jukebox Jammers. Lambird passed away in 2024.
Like many young men, Billie Joe Becoat wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He studied a variety of subjects in college and worked a number of different jobs before he was 30 but his real passion was songwriting and playing music. His talent eventually led him to San Francisco in the late 1960's where he recorded two albums for Fantasy Records. Later in life, after returning to Illinois, he became better known as the inventor of the two-wheel drive bicycle. His passion for music however never waned.
The son of a minister, Becoat grew up in Centralia, Illinois. He attended Centralia Township High School and the nearby junior college (now Kaskaskia College). He later moved to Alton, Illinois where he got married and started a family. For a time, he worked at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis as a precision assembler. There he helped build the Gemini spacecraft as well as fighter planes. In the early 1960's, he went back to school at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, majoring in zoology and chemistry. Later, he worked as a biochemist at Ralston-Purina. Somehow, Becoat still found time to write songs.
While at junior college, Becoat was known as the "madcap poet" on campus. He wrote lengthy poems "dealing with the supernatural or having a moral lesson," which were printed in the student newspaper. A few years later, Becoat's mother told the Centralia Sentinel, "Billy Joe was never really interested in anything but writing and singing his songs."
In 1964, Becoat won a talent competition at the SIU Alton Center singing and playing folk songs. He performed "All The Pretty Little Horses" and "Ox Driver's Song." His prize was an expense paid ski trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. (He sold the ticket for some much needed cash.)
After SIUE, Becoat studied at the Barnes Hospital School of Cytology. He graduated in 1967 and was working in St. Louis as a certified cytologist the next year. At night and on the weekends, he was performing his songs in the local folk clubs. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Becoat "appeared frequently at the old Circle Coffee House in LeClede Town and sang at the Crystal Palace in the Gaslight Square." Becoat soon moved to California in hopes of finding a bigger audience for his music.
While living in San Francisco, struggling to get noticed, Becoat recorded a demo at Wayne Farlow's studio. Farlow, who had recorded a young Tom Fogerty many years before, suggested Becoat take the demo tape across the bridge to Fantasy Records. Before Christmas 1968, Becoat had a recording contract with the label.
His debut album, Reflections From a Cracked Mirror, was released in May 1969 on Fantasy. (In the UK, the album was released on Liberty Records). Becoat sang and played 12-string guitar and harmonica on the album. It contained ten original songs.
You can listen to the entire album below:
The album received several glowing reviews. In Billboard, Ed Ochs wrote that Becoat is "a black Dylan, taking over where Dylan leaves off, with his sweet, swaggering blues. Lyrically and musically, Becoat is the smartest, hippest and most original folk artist specializing in urban and country lore since Lightnin' Hopkins."
The review in the September 1969 issue of Playboy read, "Of the young black singer-writers whose material is based on collective racial experience, Billie Joe Becoat is among the most potent we've heard. Reflections in a Cracked Mirror (Fantasy) contains ten compositions in a folksy blues-Gospel bag; they are as complex as any songs in the folk-rock library, yet remarkably lucid and pertinent. Becoat's emotional but controlled voice would be a gas in any context."
The lead track on the album, "Caldonia the Second," was also released as a single. The b-side was a non-album track, "The Harp Player (From A Goethe Poem)," which Becoat sung partly in German.
In October 1969, Becoat performed at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Other performers included Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, John Fahey and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. A month later Becoat opened for Creedence Clearwater Revival at a benefit concert held at the Fillmore West. He had already written the material that would make up his second album.
Let's Talk For Awhile was released in July of 1970 on Fantasy Records (Liberty Records overseas). Ten songs, all original. Listen below:
"Firefly" was released as a single with "You Can Slip, You Can Slide (You Can't Hide)" on the flip side. The reviews for the second LP were positive though less enthusiastic than before. On review wrote, "Pleasing, that's about it." Becoat continued to perform around Berkeley for the next year or more. His record deal with Fantasy was not extended.
Becoat returned to Alton by 1972 and soon started working in construction and carpentry. He continued to write songs however. In October, he copyrighted two songs, "Don't Spoil A Woman" and "Shang-A-Lang."
By the late 1970's, Becoat was working on new music with his friend Howard Neal, also from Alton. With Becoat's help, Neal built a small recording studio in the basement of his house in 1978. Neal also started his own label, Shoestring Records. One of the first singles on the label was "Disco Fever" with words and melody by Becoat and music by Neal. The single, along with most of the Shoestring catalog, was compiled by Numero Group in 2024 as part of their Eccentric Soul series.
Becoat and Neal wrote several additional songs together around that same time. Some of the titles included, "Hobo Girl," "Don't Give Up On Love," "Don't Turn Your Bed To Stone," "(Maybe) Someday We'll Get Together," and "The Show Must Go On." On some of these songs, Becoat used a pseudonym, Dwayne Z. Norris. Demos were recorded for several of them but none were released. Another song written by the pair, "Tell Me Everything You Know," was recorded by Carletta Sue and released on Shoestring.
During the 1980's, Becoat performed music around the Alton area on occasion, often playing bass. At the time he owned his own business installing windows and doing home repairs. His life changed completely in 1986 however. While fixing a broken chain on his son's bike, he got the idea for a new kind of bicycle, one that delivered pedal power to both the front and rear wheels. The concept turned into an obsession. Four years and more than $200,000 later, he turned his vision into a reality.
In 1990, Beacoat received a patent on the two-wheel drive bicycle. His innovation quickly received national press, including a profile of Becoat in Ebony in 1993. The cycling world took notice as well. Some people believed the idea would revolutionize the industry while others saw it as a passing fad at best. With the help of investors, the majority of which were African American, 2-wheel drive bikes were soon being manufactured. In fact, over the next few years a handful of different models were produced under various brand names such as BWA (Bikes With Attitude), Legacy, Discovery and McGregor.
Despite having produced more than 5,000 bicycles by 1993, the main company, 2 Bi 2 Inc., lost more than a million dollars in that same period of time. Becoat was undeterred. He continued to sell 2-wheel drive conversion kits as well as adapt his idea in new ways. He designed a front wheel drive scooter and was looking at ways to expand his design to motorbikes. Becoat self-published a memoir about the whole experience in 1995 called Dream Peddler: The Story Of An Entrepreneur.
Even during this busy period of his life, music was never far from Becoat's mind. In 1993, he told Ebony that he was working on a blues album. A year later he told the St. Louis American that his Revol Records was promoting talented musicians in the Alton area.
In 2011, Becoat suffered a stroke. As part of the recovery process, he started playing guitar and bass again. Around that time, Becoat's nephew recorded a short "day in the life" documentary of him playing music and talking about his life.
In 2015-2016, Becoat uploaded several videos of himself to YouTube, playing the blues and telling stories.
Billie Joe Becoat passed away on November 20, 2025.
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Billie Joe Becoat's brother, George Becoat, was a member of the Semi-Tones featured in our previous post. Two of their sisters, Mary L. Hayden and Pauline Brooks, were well known gospel musicians in the St. Louis area.
This video of a Becoat family gathering includes audio of Billie Joe singing and playing " I Guess I'll Have To Learn To Fly," a song he first recorded in 1969. The audio was recorded in 1995.
Over a period of just a few years, Ron Ricky released two obscure 45s with two different groups in two different styles. Until now, there has been very little information online about either of these records.
Ricky was the stage name of Ron Reichenbacher of Centralia, Illinois. In August 1965, Reichenbacher had just returned to Southern Illinois from California where he had been serving in the Navy. He was soon named vice-president of Bill-Rick Ford, a local car dealership owned by his father.
At night he was performing around Centralia with the Semi-Tones. Ricky was the group's drummer and bandleader. The other members of the combo included Chuck Smith and Dave Wheeler, both formerly of California, along with George Becoat, a highly-regarded musician and singer from Centralia.
Centralia Sentinel, September 8, 1965
The quartet was advertised as having "just arrived from California." According to various newspaper listings, a group called the Semi-Tones had in fact been performing in Torrance, CA a few months prior.
Kinmundy-Alma High School, 1966
By December of 1965, the group had recorded their first and only single: "There's A Girl in My Heart" with words by Ricky and music by Becoat. The flipside was a cover of the Righteous Brothers' 1963 single, "My Babe." The record was released on the Semi-Tone label and pressed by Decca. The address printed on the label, 1409 S. Pine, was Reichenbacher's home address at the time.
Ricky and the Semi-Tones performed regularly around Southern Illinois at various night clubs and area dances for the next two years before calling it quits. During this time, Ron Rick continued to sell cars and even opened his own motorcycle dealership in Centralia, Rick's Cycle Center. He hadn't yet given up on his rock n' roll dreams however.
Kinmundy-Alma High School, 1969
By the summer of 1968, there was a new rock group performing in Southern Illinois - Wax Museum. The group consisted of Ron Ricky, Merle and Ted Arnold of Alma and Don Brink of Hoffman. The Wax Museum took 4th place at the Marion County Fair "battle of the bands" in August. The competition was won by The Unified Sound, who were also from Centralia.
By March 1969, Wax Museum was in contractual talks with Capitol Records according to the Centralia Sentinel. The group had two new original songs they were hoping to sell to the major label: "Blow Your Mind," written by Ricky and Merle Arnold and "If I Should Call You," credited only to Arnold. Both songs were recorded at the K-B Bandstand music store in Centralia and released on their label, K-B Records.
There is no audio currently available online for either song. Teenbeat Mayhem! describes "Blow Your Mind" as "crude, moody guitar & organ with pounding fuzz break." The record was sold locally but never got picked up by Capitol Records or any other label. The Wax Museum continued to perform in and around Centralia for the next year and a half, sometimes billed as Merle Arnold and Wax Museums.
Ron Rick(y) continued to sell cars and motorcycles throughout the rest of his life but it is unclear if he played music professionally after 1970. Reichenbacher passed away in 1985 at the age of 42. His obituary made no mention of his time as a musician and bandleader.
