Lucinda Williams

By Ben Sandmel

Lucinda Williams (born January 26, 1953 in Lake Charles, Louisiana) is a singer-songwriter and guitarist revered both for her poignant, incisive, and poetic songs and her mix of blues, country, folk, and rock. She has won three Grammy awards and her songs have been covered by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Tom Petty, and many others. She has earned comparisons as a songwriter to Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou Harris. Williams was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2013.

Williams was born in Lake Charles in western, coastal Louisiana. Her father, Miller Williams, was a professor of literature and a well-known poet whose influence on Lucinda includes his ideas of language, blues, and country. From her mother she got her love of folk music. The Williams moved around as her father taught at several colleges in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Mexico City, Santiago, Chile, and others. While living in New Orleans, she began her performance career by singing folk songs and originals. Her father prepared reading lists for her as to give her writing greater depth. She moved to Austin, TX in 1974 and also spent time there and in Houston performing and writing. After she moved to New York, her demo tape found its way to the executives at the Smithsonian Folkways label which led to her first recording of traditional blues, folk, and country songs at Malabo Record’s studio in Jackson, MS. This album, Rambling’ on My Mind, was released in 1979. She recorded her next record of all-original songs in Houston, Happy Woman Blues (1980).

Williams moved to Los Angeles and signed a development deal with CBS in 1984, but she languished there – to record executives, she seemed too rock for country and too country for rock. She bolted for the indie Rough Trade label and it released her next album, Lucinda Williams (1988). Between the eight-year gap between albums and her tendency then to start songs over in performances, she had earned a reputation as a perfectionist. Lucinda Williams features several of her signature songs — including “Changed the Locks” (in Tom Petty’s cover, a hard-charging rocker with no chorus), “Crescent City,” and “Passionate Kisses,” a song recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter that earned Grammies for both Carpenter and Williams as Country Song of the Year in 1993.

Her next record came four years later — Sweet Old World (1992) – and it solidified Williams as one of the nation’s best songwriters. The album is full of poignant, emotionally unflinching songs about death, suicide, and loss. “Mineola” is a gritty tribute to poet Frank Stanford and it considers his reasons for suicide within a stark, emotionally devastating composition. It would take another six years for Williams to release her next album – again, due to turmoil at her record label, conflicts with producers, multiple recording sessions, and Williams’ own meticulous recording process. It was well worth the wait: Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (1998) is Williams’ masterwork with its lyrical poetry carried by roots grooves that effortlessly synthesize blues, country, and rock-and-roll into a nuanced set of ballads. This album helped establish the then- new genre of Americana. This eclectic, literary set of songs made many best-of lists for 1998, topped the influential annual Village Voice Pass & Jip Poll of American rock critics, and earned a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Record. Car Wheels made Williams a rare kind of musical icon: a female rocker and songwriter whose lyrics portrayed female characters with depth, sexuality and maturity.

Her work since Car Wheels has been consistent excellent and critically-acclaimed even as she has traded in her rocking numbers for meditative ballads. She earned a third Grammy for Best Female Rock Performance for “Get Right With God,” a rocking gospel number — and frequent set-closer — on Essence (2001), an otherwise quiet, meditative set of songs. World Without Tears (2003) features an even more raw and emotional set of songs concerned with the perils and promises of human relationships. Next she released her first double album — Live at the Fillmore — and its raucous sound surprised those who remained unaware that Williams leads one of the nation’s best touring rock bands. For West (2007), a few years later, Williams allowed the darkness beneath her songs some reign with a set of low-key arrangements and lyrical tensions. This was the first album she made after two great losses: her mother passed away and Hurricane Katrina devastated her beloved New Orleans. A year later, however, she recorded Little Honey (2008), one of her most upbeat, polished albums in a decade.

Williams’ most recent albums include the confessional Blessed (2011) and a new double-live album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (2014). She continues to unearth new insights into our intimate relationships as on “Compassion” (from Down Where the Spirit), one of her father’s poems she set to music to kick off this most recent live set.