By Alec Harvey

BSC alumna Victoria Hallman’s new album, “From Birmingham to Bakersfield,” was recorded with Buck Owens and the Buckaroos but was thought to be lost forever. More than 40 years later, it’s finally being released. She’ll be signing vinyl copies and CDs at Seasick Records on Saturday, April 22, at 4:30 p.m. 

Ask Victoria Hallman ’75, and the singer, author, and former Hee Haw Honey will tell you that although she only spent a year as a student at Birmingham-Southern College, the college had a huge impact on her.

“Birmingham-Southern had a lot to do with me ever having a national career at all,” she says. “The culture there just changed me completely, just who I am. It’s so unique. Had I completed my education, that’s the only place I would have gone back to.”

And in 1972, BSC literally launched her career nationally.

“There was a fundraiser for Birmingham-Southern at the brand new BJCC, and Bob Hope was hosting,” she recalled. “He had heard me and asked for me to perform with him, and Birmingham-Southern was all over that. I did comedy and sang with him, and shortly thereafter, he invited me to come to Los Angeles. He got me the manager who took me to the event where Buck Owens heard me and hired me … Obviously, I was meant to be connected to Birmingham-Southern.”

And to Owens, too. She performed with the country star and his band, the Buckaroos, and, from 1979 until 1990, she was in the cast of “Hee Haw,” the TV series Owens hosted with Roy Clark. As one of the show’s Hee Haw Honeys (Linda Thompson, Barbi Benton, Misty Rowe, and Lulu Roman were some others), she worked with stars such as Naomi Judd, Ray Charles, and Ed McMahon.

She chronicled that time in her life in 2010’s “Hollywood Lights, Nashville Nights: Two Hee Haw Honeys Dish Life, Love, Elvis, Buck & Good Times in the Kornfield,” which she wrote with Diana Goodman.

In 1982, Owens invited Hallman into his studio in Bakersfield, Calif., to record an album.

“I had 10 songs on the album,” she says. “We finished it, all of it. But I was going through a divorce, and Buck was going through a big ol’ mid-career crisis, and I think that’s why we just never did anything with it. It was never released.”

When Owens died in 2006, Hallman, who was living in Nashville at the time, remembered the album and called Jim Shaw at Buck Owens Productions, who had co-produced it. They both thought it was time to release the album, but it was nowhere to be found.

“We decided that it was lost in the sands of time,” Hallman says.

But in 2019, shortly after moving back to Birmingham, Hallman got an odd phone call.

“This guy was looking for me and found me through The Authors Guild because of the book,” she says. “He told me he had found an album with my name on it at a yard sale in Los Angeles.”

Hallman had been recording since she was 6, so it wasn’t until he started listing the songs on it that she realized what had turned up.

“I was sitting in my car, and I literally started screaming,” Hallman says. “It was the lost Buck Owens thing. What are the odds? It’s impossible.”

What had turned up was an acetate of the recordings. Acetates are used to help create masters of recordings. In this case, the masters were gone, but the acetate lived on.

Hallman signed with Ominivore Records, a label that specializes in historical releases and restoring vintage recordings, a number of which have won Grammys.

And on April 22, alongside Omnivore recordings from New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Cowsills, you’ll find Victoria Hallman’s “From Birmingham to Bakersfield.”

Working with Omnivore to restore the recording was “a great memory” for Hallman.

“The album was such happy music to be done at such a sad time in my life,” she says. “Buck loved upbeat, happy songs, and these are ’80s pop country – fun music, for the most part. It did bring back happy times in the studio. I think I like this more now than I liked it then.”

Hallman spent years performing in Birmingham with the likes of the Ramblers, Bob Cain and the Cain Breakers, and the Bachelors. “Hee Haw” made her a star, and she kept performing after the show was over.

But, she says, “’From Birmingham to Bakersfield’ is a big deal, and I’m old enough now to understand that it’s a big deal.”

“I’ve never been this excited about anything in my whole career.”