The Abduction of Antônio Vilas-Boas

Written by Terry Herd, Larry Cordle, and Larry Shell

Song genesis from Cordle on "The Abduction of Antonio Villas-Boas."

Future Hall of Fame DJ, Bluegrass entrepreneur, and songwriter extraordinaire Terry Herd and I had been talking about writing together for at least 10-12 years.
Finally, the opportunity presented itself just before the pandemic shut the world down. My long-time friend and collaborator Larry Shell was in town to write with me a few days, and I had a day booked with Terry that fell during one of those days. Terry really wanted to write with Shell, too, so the day was set for the three of us to get together. Our friend, Luke Wooten, had let us use a room in his Station West studio to work in.

Terry came into the session that morning, and his first words were, I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to work with you guys and am going to bring this crazy song idea to you. I was already intrigued before he handed us this printed-out story that he had just happened upon on the internet. It was incredible! This fellow, Antonio Villas-Boas, in Brazil in 1957, claimed to have been abducted by four humanoid-looking aliens and forced to mate with a female alien of the group. We read the story Terry had handed us and just laughed and laughed. We all felt like no one else would be writing a song like that, and if we could get the story in song form, it would make for something really funny.

We worked on it all day amidst gales of laughter as each part took shape. Finally, we had to break the session up for another day, but we all felt like we were on the verge of having a funny song that was, at least, from Antonio’s telling and retelling, absolutely true. It is said that he stuck to the same story for the rest of his life. After Shell had to leave town, Terry and I got together to edit and finish the story. That’s how we came up with this song, ‘The Abduction of Antonio Villas-Boas.’ We basically followed the story, which anyone owning a computer can find by just putting the guy’s name in their browser. Of course, we had to take some creative license to hopefully make it funnier and provide an ending that we dreamed up.

I hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed writing this tale that I dare say there won’t be many like it in Bluegrass… LOL!

Thank you, Terry, for the great idea, and thank you and Shell for letting me write this one with you.