1952 Vincent Black Lightning

Richard Thompson wrote the song and released it on Rumor and Sigh in May 1991, not as a single; it was recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and Konk Studios in London, produced by Mitchell Froom, 4:43. A thief named James gives Red Molly a ride on his 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, a rare British motorcycle, and on his deathbed leaves her the bike. Thompson called the motorcycle a good lodestone around which the song could revolve.

The McCoury version opens Del and the Boys (2001). Sing Out says a friend of Del and Ronnie, Dick Bowden, heard the song on a radio program near New York and passed it on, and that Del liked it, chose the tempo and key, and Ronnie worked up the arrangement; Paste says instead that Ronnie and Rob brought it to their father, who had not heard it. The band plays it in C against Thompson's B-flat, with Rob on the opening banjo and Jason Carter and Ronnie in the interludes, and the line "down to Box Hill" became "down to Knoxville". Paste calls the studio take a bit tentative and the live versions more confident, naming Live from State College, PA as Del's favorite. Del has said he rode motorcycles himself, among them a 1947 Indian Chief.

It won the IBMA's song of the year in 2002. Del and Thompson sang it together for the first time at DelFest, splitting the verses and keeping the banjo break, and at the Newport Folk Festival Del said Thompson wrote it and does it better than he does. Dick Gaughan, Jeff Lang, Bob Dylan (live in Clarkston, Michigan, on July 14, 2013), Sean Rowe and Robert Earl Keen have also played it, and Time put it in its 2011 list of the all-time 100 songs. Which version our upload is has not been determined.