2023-09-05 07:00:00
Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a few months before my mother. Lucinda’s father, Miller, taught poetry at universities. The family moved a dozen times over the course of her childhood — chasing short, bad teaching contracts back and forth between college towns in Iowa, Mississippi, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, and farther south to Chile and Mexico. Her mother, Lucy, was a drinker. They were often short of money, sometimes borrowing bread from the neighbors to eat. Like my mother’s little brother Stephen, they used a dresser drawer instead of a crib for Lucinda. Lucy was medicated with lithium, among other things, and prone to mood swings and deep spells of depression. Miller would blame Lucy’s slurring and incoherence on the medications, not the alcohol. When an incident with Lucy would become too much — “yelling, screaming, cussing, throwing things at my dad or at the wall” — Miller’s best solution was to take the kids out to play Putt-Putt golf. He once found Lucinda, 3 years old, alone and crying, locked in a closet by her mother. Lucinda was kicked out of high school and never finished. Miller remarried and eventually settled into a nice university job in Arkansas. As an adult, Lucinda continued her father’s pattern of moving regularly, never sticking around for too long, adding more places to her list: Houston, Austin, New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville. She has said that for most of her life she felt most at home when in no place at all: in a bus on the road, in a hotel room, on another stage on another night.
But in her songs, she returns again and again to the same territory, setting her words in the same familiar places. One of the more common observations about Lucinda is her gift for singing these place names. On her masterpiece, Car Wheels on a Gravel Roadthis is the order in which they arrive: Macon, Jackson, Rosedale, Mississippi, Algiers, Opelousas, Louisiana, Lake Charles, Nacogdoches, East Texas, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Lake Pontchartrain, Heaven, Greenville, West Memphis, Slidell, Vicksburg. No one sings these words like Lucinda does. When she names them, she makes them her own. There are plenty more in the rest of the work: Beaumont, La Grange, Pineola, Subiaco, Thibodaux. I could go on. You get the point. She’s made it clearly. Draw a line that starts in East Texas and runs through South Louisiana and over the river and up through the Delta all the way to Memphis and across to the Ozarks in Arkansas and back down to Texas again. Add in the afterlife and that’s her territory.
There are different names that could be given for this territory, this place she sings about. A good one, I think, would be the idea of Louisiana. (That comes from a thing she once said to author Bill Buford: “All my old boyfriends were in love with the idea of Louisiana, and they’re dead!”) A few other artists have worked with the idea of Louisiana: You can glimpse it in a couple of Les Blank’s documentaries. It’s in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms but not really in the other novels. You can hear it when Clifton Chenier squeezes his accordion. You can taste it, maybe, if you are standing outside somewhere eating with your hands and the food is dripping a little down on your feet. But you can’t actually ever go visit it, because it doesn’t exist. Lucinda’s territory isn’t what’s drawn on the map, not exactly.
Buford wrote that her songs are “relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible fuckup of a man.” And Robert Christgau noted that her music “achieves its perfection by being more imperfect.” She has won or been nominated for more than 15 Grammys, received several lifetime achievement awards, been compared to Billie Holiday, and called “one of the great geniuses of popular music.” When The New York Times asked Steve Earle to describe her voice this spring, he said, “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom?” I don’t detect any lies. If anything, I’d say her critical reception is an understatement.
If this was one of those stories written on the occasion of her memoir, Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told Younow would be the part where I would begin to describe the book and the body of her work and maybe digress one or two times to a wider context as a way of making the case for her being as important as any of the great songwriters of our time (yes, including Dylan), which is how I feel. To be honest, though, I don’t care much for that sort of explanation or whether you agree with me about her status in the canon or not. The other stories can give you those things. The occasion that I want to tell you about is how I got a PDF of Lucinda’s memoir on the third of March this year and kept reading it over and over again for months, often sitting at my dinner table in Iowa City alone and late at night and listening to her music very loud until I fell asleep in my chair. Other times I was sober in bed, quietly making notes on the pages I printed out. Other times in a clawfoot tub with my thumb on a phone, trying to keep my hands dry with a towel. You could call what I was doing research — I certainly wish I could bill by the hour for it — but you could just as well call it a séance. I was looking for ghosts. I can’t tell you exactly why I spent so much time doing this over and over and over again. Sometimes I felt so physically sad from the work of dredging these things up, whatever it is that Lucinda’s voice can draw out from me, that I had to stop myself and try to forget the whole thing. I’d listen to Lightnin’ Hopkins for a few days, feel a little better, and then eventually go back to Lucinda.
This is a foolish way to spend your time — going back night after night to the lonely well of your pain to have another drink — but show me a single Lucinda fan who hasn’t done it on occasion. It was winter in Iowa, and I was feeling a long ways from the idea of Louisiana. I might have been under the spell of something else at the time (a woman from Mississippi; other troubles) but I couldn’t explain any of that or say much about it if I tried. What I tried to type out on those nights instead was something about Lucinda’s approach as a poet: the way that, when you can’t exactly explain what you’re thinking or remembering without getting it somewhat wrong, or when the thing you’re trying to explain is inexpressible, sometimes the only way to do it is to just name your world: the places and people and things in it. Sometimes that can be the only way to explain it.
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