About a year after she started appearing on “Hee Haw” as one of the Hee Haw Honeys, Alabama’s Victoria Hallman found herself in a recording studio, cutting an album produced by the legendary Buck Owens.

“We worked on it for about a year, year-and-a-half, actually finished it, and finally it fell through the cracks,” Hallman says.

In fact, the album was lost.

But now, it’s found, and Hallman’s “From Birmingham to Bakersfield” is finally going to be released by Grammy-winning Omnivore Recordings. The release date is April 22, Record Store Day.

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

Victoria Hallman will finally see the release of her long-lost album produced by Buck Owens. (contributed)

That career began after winning a talent showcase in Birmingham at age 4 and signing a record contract in Nashville at age 6. That led to appearances on the Merv Griffin and Steve Allen TV shows, performing for President Richard Nixon and other national exposure before she returned home, eventually graduating from Bibb County High School.

Hallman spent a year at Birmingham-Southern College and sang with Bob Cain’s Canebreakers, The Bachelors and The Ramblers.

Eventually, comedian Bob Hope suggested a move to California, where she performed with Hope and caught the eye of Owens, who cast her in “Hee Haw.” (Hallman wrote about her experiences, with fellow Hee Haw Honey Diana Goodman, in 2018’s “Hollywood Lights, Nashville Nights: Two Hee Haw Honeys Dish Life, Love Elvis, Buck & Good Times in the Kornfield”).

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Victoria Hallman, left, with Buck Owens and Gunilla Hutton. (Photo courtesy of Victoria Hallman)

A year or two after joining the “Hee Haw” cast in 1980, Hallman found herself in a recording studio in Bakersfield, California. Owens had produced a song, “You’re My Favorite Song,” with another singer, but it didn’t work.

“He said, ‘I can’t get it out of my head, and I think we can make it work with you,’” Hallman recalls. “’In fact, I think we need to cut a whole album.’”

So, the two, along with engineer Jim Shaw, began looking for songs. One of them, “Lay Your Heart On Mine,” was written by a young Alabamian named Brant Beene, who now runs the Alabama Theatre.

Ultimately, 10 songs were on the album, with Hallman backed by the Buckaroos. And ultimately, the album was put on the back burner.

“We finished it, all of it, but I was going through a divorce, and Buck was going through a big ol’ mid-career crisis,” Hallman says. “We just never did anything with it. … I really forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it.”

Eventually, Hallman moved to Nashville, where she recorded the 1987 single “Next Time I Marry.”

When Owens died in 2006, Hallman remembered the album she had recorded 25 years earlier and contacted Shaw, who was running the Buck Owens Production Company, about putting the album out.

Victoria Hallman’s “From Birmingham to Bakersfield” will be released on Record Store Day April 22. (contributed)

“He said, ‘I’d love that; let me find the masters,’” Hallman says. “Those masters couldn’t be found. … We decided that it was lost in the sands of time, and it’s nowhere.”

Fast forward to 2019. Hallman had moved from Nashville back to Birmingham, and the lost album was now nearly 40 years old.

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

Hallman thought it was one of her other albums, until the man sent her the list of songs.

“I was sitting in my car,” she says. “I literally started screaming. … What are the odds? It’s impossible.”

Turned out the garage-sale find was an acetate – a type of record sometimes made before vinyl copies were produced.

“Buck always made an acetate of everything, and that must be where this came from,” Hallman says.

The finder sent the acetate to Hallman. “So, we have this whole album to release, except it’s very scratchy,” she says.

Enter Omnivore Recordings, the Grammy-winning company that specializes in historical recordings, and audio engineer Michael Graves, who cleaned up the recording.

“He’s a magician, and it sounds great,” Hallman says. “I did no other recording. The album is as Buck Owens recorded it.”

Omnivore is releasing “From Birmingham to Bakersfield” on April 22 for Record Store Day, celebrating independent record stores. She’ll be signing copies of it that day at 4:30 p.m. at Birmingham’s Seasick Records. The album will be available digitally, on vinyl and on CD.

“Everything seemed to go over my head when I was younger,” Hallman says. “But ‘From Birmingham to Bakersfield’ is a big deal, and I’m old enough now to understand that it’s a big deal.”