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.
___
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.