Is this a music site or is it appropriate to post other information? Looking at the many entries about Lawrence Hammond here I will add some of my own comments. Secorra Plarres-Montes was my oldest childhood friend since we war about 8 years old, I think. I met LH several times when they visited me in Mexico in 1974-5, and then when my husband was posted in Paris in 1976, the year of her death. A friend has just mailed me a copy of the new release of his music (Presumed Lost) from the USA. As I have just listened to this, many memories were stirred up, and I have heard several of the songs on this CD before (live in person). "Texas Border Patrol" and "Papa Redwing Blackbird" stand out. I also know Enrique Paredon, who contributed some of the percussion, and knew Roberto Gallardo, whose flute adds so much to Papa Redwing.

Secorra went through a period of frustration with the collapse of her 1st marriage and threw herself into her relief work in Africa and elsewhere. I would say she seemed somber during this time, quite unlike the lively and funny person I had grown up with. She was visibly angry about what was being done in Africa, especially to her pediatric patients. When she met Lawrence Hammond, she calmed down, rediscovered laughter, and seemed truly content for the 1st time in a very long time. After her recovery from her near-fatal 1974 illness, she stayed with me for a while while she gathered her strength, and mostly from that time I remember how silent she became. She just spent hours listening to music of any kind and sitting in my garden. By the time we were together again in Paris, she was completely a live wire again, and crammed her days with more activities than most of us could manage. At this time she and LH had finally seemed to have a plan for how to be together (geographically I mean). Her sudden death was a shock. It is still a shock 35 years later. I am so glad people whose lives she touched have remember her here. I last saw LH in Boston in 1981, while he was still in medical school. I did have a sense that he was carrying on somehow with what she had started. He must have just finished the last pieces of Presumed Lost about then. How remarkable that Shagrat Records discovered these and released them after so long. There is certainly a piece of her in this music. Now if someone could figure out how to release Coyote's Dream on a CD...