Jim Sullivan was a country-blues musician with an edge of psychedelic, according to the New York Times. He had famous friends including actor Dennis Hopper and had released two albums. Then he disappeared and was never seen again.
Jim had a family but left them behind to go to Nashville for work. Except he never showed up. His wife Barbara got a call from him on March 5, 1975, the day after he left California. He started by telling her he was fine, always something terrifying to hear when you have no reason to think the person saying it is not fine. Despite asking him to tell her what was wrong, he refused. “You wouldn’t believe if I told you,” he said, she recorded later. “Forget it. Just forget I said anything.” That was their last phone call.
Jim’s car was found abandoned three days later in the small town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico. It contained his ID, a box of his albums, and his beloved guitar. “When I heard that, I knew he wasn’t coming back,” Jim’s friend Al Dobbs said. “No matter what, Jim would never have left his guitar.” The police investigation turned up no clues about where Jim was or why he’d disappeared. One local thought they didn’t do a great job though, saying, “I always thought there was something strange about how that went down, why they didn’t investigate it more.” A search by family members and volunteers was more thorough. “There was no arroyo left unturned,” another local said, “and no trace of him found.”
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