Lubbock Mafia; Singer/Songwriter; Actress Wellington, Texas; July 20, 1944- Jo Carol Pierce comes from the same West Texas environment that produced Terry Allen, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock. Like her contemporaries, she spent most of her life trying to understand that unique place through writing and music. Married to Gilmore in the mid-1960s (divorced 1967), Pierce relocated to Austin in the early 1970s where she began writing songs and plays and polishing the acting skills she learned in high school. Her most successful plays were In the West (five year run in Austin; Kennedy Center in 1991) and the critically acclaimed Bad Girls Upset By the Truth. The latter, which was originally titled Commit Suicide Every Morning And You'll Feel Better All Day, highlighted Pierce's amusing but quite moving autobiographical ruminations on relationships ("Secret Dan"; "Buttons of Your Skin"), religion ("I Blame God"; "Does God Have Us By the Twat or What?"), and emotional breakdown with J. D. Foster and David Halley providing musical accompaniment. Pierce performed Bad Girls regularly at Austin's Chicago House in the early 1990s and began singing at other clubs around town. Her songwriting skills were greatly admired by Austin's musical community and in 1993, a group of them including Allen, Gilmore, Ely, Kris McKay, David Halley, and Loose Diamonds paid tribute to her on Across the Great Divide: The Songs ofJo Carol Pierce. In 1994, Pierce and old friends Ely, Hancock, Gilmore acted in and sang original songs for a musical play called Chippy (written by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen). Based on the diary of a prostitute in the Texas Panhandle during the Great Depression, the play had a successful run in Philadelphia and New York. The music from the play was subsequently issued as a soundtrack, Songs From Chippy. In 1995, Bad Girls Upset By the Truth made it to CD on Monkey Hill records and into the late 1990s, Pierce was at work on a screenplay for 20`h Century Fox. --David Goodman, author of Modern Twang: An Alternative Country Music Guide and Directory