There are some musical artists who just have a knack (for lack of a better word) for leaving me wrecked, with a sort of punch-in-the-gut sense of awe. One of them is Aimee Mann. Another is Lucinda Williams.
I saw Lucinda Williams a couple nights ago, opening for Bonnie Raitt (whose reputation in her own right needs no explanation). It was immediately apparent that Williams had suffered from some recent physical ailment since I last saw her, over ten years ago. She was escorted onto the stage by a member of her band, and she had to support herself on a music stand for most of the show, although she stood by herself part of the time. As she acknowledged on stage, on top of a lifelong condition of spinal bifida, she’d suffered a stroke in November, 2020. She cannot currently play guitar. But she can still sing, although she referenced a note sheet taped onto the stage during this particular show.
Described in Wikipedia as “One of the most celebrated singer/songwriters of her generation,” Lucinda Williams has received 17 Grammy nominations and three Grammy awards for her singular country, country-rock and country-folk-flavored songwriting that has been oft-characterized as “Americana.” Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, her career began with performances at a young age in Austin and Houston, Texas , Jackson Mississippi, Los Angeles, California, and eventually Nashville, TN.
Her songwriting talent was recognized by a broader audience in the late 80’s. Her song “Passionate Kisses” was covered in 1992 by Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Tom Petty covered one of her tunes, “Changed The Locks,” for a soundtrack to an Edward Burns film called “She’s The One.” Widely appreciated as a uniquely emotive and perceptive songwriter, her somewhat eclectic style eluded easy classification. There was no recognizable “Americana” genre in the late 70’s and she was often styled as “alt-country” as she put out two albums in 1979 and 1980, the first, “Ramblin’ on my Mind,” a collection of blues covers. Her third album, self-titled, really showcased her talent but she finally received the popular acclaim she was due with the 1996 release of “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road,” winning a Grammy in 1999 for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Rolling Stone has since judged that album as the 98th of the 500 greatest albums of all time. (Not too shabby, when you think about it). Time called her “America’s best songwriter” in 2002.
It’s a cliche to say that “every song” on a particularly good album is a “classic,” but in the case of “Car Wheels On a Gravel Road,” that happens to be true. As put by Jenn Pelly in her review of that album, Williams has always been hard to put in a distinct “category:”
In her dry Louisiana drawl, she sings plaintively of abusive childhoods and bad marriages; of drunken bar brawls and suicidal poets; of her own heart that shatters and mends and shatters again, like a puzzle, down-and-out. A magnet for the kind of unrequited love that seems to stop the Earth from turning, Williams persists. Then she’s onto the next town.
Williams was born a rolling stone. Her late father, the poet Miller Williams, was a college professor and the family moved often, to Mexico and Chile and a dozen Southern towns. After Williams was expelled from one New Orleans high school in part for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in protest of Vietnam, dad gave her a list of 100 great books to read instead. (Williams’ family of civil rights activists and union workers passed on that spirit of dissent as well.) Miller’s profession brought a young Lucinda into contact with Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and, most influentially, Flannery O’Connor. Williams would never let go of her O’Connor-inspired fantasy of writing a Great Southern Novel. Instead, Williams set hers to music, becoming an itinerant Southern Gothic beat.
To me at least, her songs are mesmerizing: always visceral, sometimes touching, often sad. Some of them are downright heartbreaking in their portrayal of personal relationships, perseverance and hardship set against a gauzy backdrop of a rough, often drab, ordinary life in the American South. There’s an undercurrent of poverty or near-poverty in much of her work, a frank expression of reality that doesn’t often make its way into the popular culture.
I’m really struggling here to find the best clips of her performances, because there are just so many, and they all hit me the same way. So after fiddling through a whole bunch of them, I just picked the title track:
I couldn’t find a real good version of the title track to “Essence,” the follow up to “Car Wheels,” on YouTube, which sort of annoyed me (she’s never done a music video). But along the way I found an extraordinary (if grainy) 1999 performance of “Greenville” (from the “Car Wheels” album), with Emmylou Harris and Neil Young. The song’s about a redneck boyfriend, full of himself, who turns out to be just a drunken, abusive loser, prompting Lucinda to send him back home to the crappy, anonymous small town where he came from (there are Greenvilles in several states and no particular one is singled out here).
Here’s “Changed the Locks” from her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”
Finally, a song about being separated from someone you love … by the walls and fences of a prison. “Concrete and Barbed Wire” from Farm Aid (2004)
Williams is a hardcore Democrat, by the way (“Vote Blue no matter who”), which I hadn’t known until I started looking her up for this piece. I probably should have guessed that, just from the extraordinary, unforgiving scope of human experience that shines through in just about all of her songs.
There just aren’t that many singer/songwriters whose talent is so acute they can almost represent a genre of their own. The performance she gave this week wasn’t her best, but it still brought the house to its feet, knowing they were most likely witnessing the twilight of a legend. I worry that she may stop performing soon, so I wanted to write this.