Lucinda Williams leaves Nashville's Ryman Auditorium awestruck by career retrospective
Lucinda Williams' mix of Southern-fried Greenwich Village folk and universalized cowpunk sensibilities perfectly blended with the intimate yet loud acoustics of downtown Nashville's Ryman Auditorium on an early fall Saturday evening.
The Grammy-winning Americana progenitor's concert offering was a three-pronged success story: a career retrospective tied to two first-half of 2023 releases, her memoir "Don't Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You" and new album Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, a "comeback" of sorts following her 2020 stroke, plus also, a night that proved Willie Nelson's 1973 prognostication wrong -- for one night at country music's Mother Church, sad songs and waltzes were indeed selling this year.
Even before being slowed by the impact of her stroke, Williams was a legend at her own pace, in her own time. After spending a night with stories of her life and the catalog of blues, country, folk and rock songs they inspired, one notion stood out most profoundly: Williams' life is a bittersweet measure of divination and experience, simultaneously irreverent and spiritual.
If anything, stare deeper into her life and discover that Williams is a faithful student of peerless instructors. Her father, Miller Williams, was the son of a Methodist preacher and award-winning poet and teacher from the Arkansas hills. Her songwriting inspirations included Bob Dylan, who famously noted that his best work was based on the blues, Carter Family songs, or Protestant hymns.
Within the first five songs Williams played, she played Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" album cut "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." Then, she celebrated the influence of Pearly Brown -- a Blind Baptist minister she saw perform in Macon, Georgia when she was 18 -- on her work. Then, she broke into a spirited version of Hank Williams' iconic Zydeco country jam "Jambalaya." This was followed by her 1980 sophomore album title cut, "Happy Woman Blues."
She is, if anything, a faithful student.
Here are a few other takeaways from the evening.
Patience and solitude shared
Lucinda Williams takes roughly four years to compile albums.
Compile is the best word to describe how she discovers the progressive spaces between rock's most popular eras. The art in that work makes songwriting not a commercial craft but rather the committal of thoughts to page as modernist free-form poetry.
More flatly, she's the kind of person who opts to obsess over the crack in the road instead of just idly thinking of it as being where the sidewalk ends.
Celebrating the art that comes from that act requires sitting in shared patient solitude in the Ryman Auditorium on a Saturday night.
Then, the song emerges from Williams, who guides its delivery, pacing and resonance.
A quartet of songs announced the arrival of Williams, appearing to feel comfort with the audience in the room, the work of Buick 6, her long-time backing band, the awareness of her inspirations and the open-mindedness of her audience.
A live-to-tape playback of "Crescent City," "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," "Bus To Baton Rouge" and "Little Angel, Little Brother" would reveal four songs from four different eras in her catalog (1988, 1998, 2001 and 1992, respectively), but delivered in a way where they were placed in the show to highlight Williams' autonomy and power as a storyteller.
She often laughed at people who had previously thought her work to be more defined by "woo woo" mysticism. However, understand her as the daughter of a preacher's kid who chose poetry over the cloth. It's clear that she's quite aware of spirituality but not wholly accountable to it for the power of her art: instead, she's a craftswoman who values work -- the magic is mainly of her hands and aided by what she calls the "gift" of the crowd in attendance.
Dead poets (and songwriters) society
The 1989 film "Dead Poets Society" discusses using the vibrant art of deceased, profoundly remembered creatives to "seize the day."
A similar notion guided Williams' Ryman concert.
In her artistic arsenal, poetry is as much an earned gift as it is a precise, destructive weapon.
She spoke at length and with great reverence about the memories of legendary songwriters like Austinite Blaze Foley, Pearly Brown and Hank Williams. Listen to her mention that "Blind Pearly Brown has come and gone" and it hits like hearing Paul Simon lament that "Joltin' Joe (Dimaggio) has left and gone away" in Simon and Garfunkel's classic "Mrs. Robinson."
The lines are, indeed, similar.
They both highlight a betrayal of innocence followed by the acceptance, by osmosis, of the bittersweetness of both now being experienced and being an artist and having the power to birth both emotions in new listeners. Ultimately, that's the balance of the existential weight of the blues and the "go tell it on the mountain" gospel-inspired freedom of folk music described in one powerfully emotional sweep.
WIlliams has honored her father and the "Swamprat Rimbaud," Frank Stanford, in song. Believe her father -- whose image was flashed on a screen behind WIlliams during the concert -- to bear a striking resemblance to Allen Ginsberg.
2016's "Dust" is her father's poetry reimagined in song.
"So you stare at the ceiling / And wish the world would mend / Try to recall some better feeling / To no good end / Try to recall some better feeling / To no good end / But / Even your thoughts are dust," she sang.
In the previously mentioned silence and while noting her, weathered by the effects of her 2020 stroke, the song rings as hard as it does heavy, its composition and the mastery of Williams' backing players more necessary than ever.
"I made some mistakes, but I'm not going to go back in the back and flog myself," Williams joked.
Her final song, a take on her 1998-released "Joy," arrived with improvisational riffs of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile," bombastic drum breaks, and the artist and band finally arrived as a sonic monstrosity.
Williams, ever-in-control, shouted about looking in West Memphis, Arkansas, or Slidell, Louisiana, for her joy, as if it was the raison d'etre of not just the moment she penned the song but of her career in full.
She received a slow, grateful and deserved standing ovation from a a crowd as impressed as they were emotionally overwhelmed.
Williams receives award
For the past 30 years, the singer-songwriter has enjoyed living part-time in Nashville among a community of people who, as she stated at The Ryman, "lean towards the left [politically] and appreciate good music."
Thus, before the event's encore, Williams was surprised onstage by former EXIT-IN owner-operator Chris Cobb, who is currently the president of Music Venue Alliance Nashville (MVAN), an organization of Music City-based independent music venue owners and operators who, as their website notes, "are committed to retaining and nurturing the fragile, yet complex ecosystem of every individual aspect of [Nashville's] famous music scene."
He -- alongside operators of the Basement East, Eastside Bowl and Rudy's Jazz Room, among many -- was there to present her an annual award from the organization meant to highlight "a member of the music community who supports MVAN with their presence, platform, and music."
To The Tennessean, Cobb noted, "The award was created in 2021 when we launched Nashville Helping Nashville as MVAN's annual event. Lucinda was selected as the initial recipient then, but it took us a few years to finally get it to her. Tonight's show was the perfect time and the historic Ryman Auditorium was the perfect place. No one is more deserving of this inaugural honor than the legendary Lucinda Williams.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Lucinda Williams leaves Nashville's Ryman Auditorium awestruck by career retrospective
