 |
Three-time Grammy
winner Lucinda Williams started playing 30 years
ago on the streets
of Austin, Texas. “It’s strange when you
think about how long it took me to get where I am now.” |
| |
Lucinda
Williams spies a friend waiting outside the doorway of
her dressing room at La Zona Rosa in Austin, Texas,
one of many cities where this wandering troubadour has
resided. “You-eee!” she coos in a singsong
drawl that mixes a sigh with a hug into her favorite family
term of affection from a decidedly Southern youth. Just
off stage after another concert, Williams transforms
the backstage hideaway into her living room, welcoming
a gaggle of longtime acquaintances. The folk art hung
on its bright desert-orange walls suggests that this could
be her home—if she currently had one. The Lone
Star capital is where this singing and songwriting darling
of the musically discerning set got her start and earned
her early stripes, busking on Guadalupe Street, aka “The
Drag,” across from the University of Texas in 1978.
At
52, she is hitting her stride and then some. Tousled
blond mane atop funky but chic cowgirl-meets-biker-chick
garb, Williams seems more the still-girlish Southern
woman enjoying a night on the town with old pals
than the reigning
queen of American song, declared by pundits as
the female equivalent of the Bard himself, Bob Dylan. Despite
the
accolades, Williams remains unpretentious. In performance,
the unassuming three-time Grammy winner can make
even
a cinderblock venue feel like a homey blues bar,
a cozy folk
café, a rocking rock-and-roll dive. Onstage,
she’s
a down-home pro, name-checking local friends and dancing
to her own band.
Williams
introduces many of her songs with the guileless sort
of barstool-to-barstool storytelling
chat that
makes friends of strangers as last call draws
near. And her
creations—which
prompted progressive Country music icon Emmylou Harris
and Time magazine to declare Williams “America’s
best songwriter”—carry a hefty sense
of soul-baring candor. Her songs are by turns whispered
confession, seductive
sigh, bluesy paean to heartbreak, hearty howl of
good-time
glee. Though she has enjoyed enough album sales,
successful tours, and hit versions of her songs—remember
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit with the Williams-penned “Passionate
Kisses”?—to be free from material want,
in her soul Williams remains the young woman singing
on the
street for spare change.
Read the complete story in the
pages
of Cowboys & Indians magazine at
your local newsstand or call (800) 982-5370.
|
