Buck Ramble at the Picture Show is not just a soundtrack — it is a séance.
A record made of celluloid ghosts, dusty marquees, missing reels, and outlaw sincerity, assembled from the fragments of Ramble’s strangest cinematic years.

Recorded during the decade when the studios didn’t know what to do with him — when he was too serious for comedies, too haunted for hero roles, and too poetic for drive-in westerns — these tracks capture the moment where the legend broke away from the films and became something larger.

Each song on this album was originally written for a different Buck Ramble picture:

some released in compromised form,

some recut for television,

some never screened outside of a single town’s closing night,

and at least one (Hell at High Noon) that survives only as a burned-through print in a county archive.

The music is larger than the movies that held it.
Where the budget ran out, the voice kept going.

This album collects those performances as they were meant to be heard — stripped of studio edits, laugh tracks, narration overdubs, and all the compromises that once buried them. What remains is the sound of a man acting with absolute seriousness inside films that were often collapsing around him, singing to audiences that may never have existed… and meaning every word.

In these songs, we hear:

the romantic outlaw who stole trains just to make love last,

the weary investigator who hunted sins older than the badge itself,

the villain who watched the canyon burn and called it beautiful,

the sheriff in moccasins who treated a comedy like it was scripture.

If the movies couldn’t contain Buck Ramble, the songs did.

Buck Ramble at the Picture Show plays like a lost theater rediscovered in the woods —
one final reel still spinning in the dark,
projecting a man who never stopped believing
that every story — even the broken ones —
deserves a song worth dying for.

You Can’t Hang a Man Twice

Mr. Bojangles (Single Version)

Sammy Davis Jr.