Song of the Day 8/2: Foxes and Fossils, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

This is the story of a local cover band that became YouTube famous.

I first started seeing Foxes and Fossils in my feed a year or more ago, during the pandemic lockdown, probably because I listen to a good bit of vocal harmony stuff. I don’t recall clicking on anything, but lots of other people did, because suddenly a bunch of decade-old videos were getting tens of thousands of views. It was the modern equivalent of some A&R man finding a record in the vaults that gets released years after the band broke up.

Foxes and Fossils is based in Smyrna, Ga., and led by Tim Purcell, a veteran of the Atlanta bar circuit who, over the course of 30 years, had gone from playing original music to covers with a band called the Mustangs, who did mostly weddings and corporate events. When the corporate events dried up, the band died, but Purcell started practicing with a couple of bandmates, a high school friend and his 15-year-old daughter, Sammie, who sang in the church choir. She recruited a fellow chorister, Maggie Adams, and together they built up a playlist of harmony-rich songs, both new and classic.

Their name was the idea of their bass player, who came up with it minutes before they took the stage for their debut in 2010, at a local pizza parlor. Purcell had enough foresight to have a friend record the gig with a three-camera set-up. The Fossils’ experience assures a solid instrumental grounding for the Foxes’ harmonies, which — sorry not sorry — are sweeter than those of David Crosby and Graham Nash. It’s a little rough, but for a couple of teen-agers playing out for the first time it’s hard to beat. This was the video, now viewed almost 4 million times, that triggered the growth in the band’s audience.

This was back in 2010, remember. The group played and video-recorded local gigs, often at the pizza parlor or a nearby taco joint, creating an archive that Purcell began mining once the band’s popularity exploded. He now releases about one a month. This was the first F&F song I clicked on, mainly because I love the Alison Krauss version. That’s Maggie Adams singing lead.

As Purcell says at the end of the song, Adams departed for college not long after it was recorded and Sammie Purcell left the next year. They got together on semester breaks, but Purcell eventually recruited some new kits. The pandemic gave them a chance to work together in the studio. Some of them are now leaving for college, but Purcell said he has enough videos archives to keep his YouTube channel stocked for years to come, and he has good reason to — the tip jar, merch and CD sales are bringing in about $15,000 a month.