You Can’t Go Home Again
Repeatedly abused (she says) in the Texas press, folksinger Nanci Griffith attacked the media in a blistering letter that has everyone in her native state talking—and wondering if she’s okay.
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Even before releasing her debut, 1978's There’s a Light Beyond These Woods, Griffith hit the road, touring by herself and with a band, doing her own booking and publicity, playing small clubs and college radio stations. She was a folkie but she was no softie, and the hard work began to pay off. Fans heard the yearning in her voice, identified with her characters, and loved her literate songs about Texas; critics gushed. In 1985 she recorded her first Austin City Limits. Wearing red shoes with white socks, she looked kind of like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Lovett sang backup. Between songs she spoke in a hushed little-girl voice, then fell into a wobbly twang, then became meek again—sometimes in the space of one story. The rapt audience didn’t seem to mind.
That same year, Griffith moved to Nashville, where she found that she had a reputation. “The day my phone was hooked up, [revered country songwriter] Harlan Howard called me, and the next day Chet Atkins,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really something.’” The major labels came calling too; she signed with MCA. She was a breath of fresh air in conformist Nashville. Her first two albums for MCA—Lone Star State of Mind and Little Love Affairs—had a folk heart but a country-pop body (they were coproduced by Griffith and Nashville heavyweight Tony Brown). She put together a band, the Blue Moon Orchestra, that would stay with her until the late nineties. She had her first hit, Julie Gold’s “From a Distance,” which went to number one in Ireland. Other Nashville artists—Suzy Bogguss, Kathy Mattea—had hits with her songs. Though she couldn’t make the leap to being a country star, she moved out of the clubs and into the concert halls, especially in Ireland (she loved Dublin so much she kept an apartment there for six years) and England. “She became well-known and popular, in a way without any of us knowing it,” Gilmore says. “And she surprised a lot of people. The industry seemed to have decided that literary folk music wasn’t commercial, but she proved that was wrong. Her degree of success paved the way for others, like Lyle and me, to go that way.”
Perhaps influenced by Lovett’s success, Griffith twice tried and failed to cross over to the mainstream pop market—with Storms (1989) and Late Night Grande Hotel (1991). While working on the latter, producer Rod Argent mentioned to her that the Everly Brothers had been the soundtrack to his life. “I thought, well, you know, folk music is the soundtrack to my life,” Griffith says. That epiphany led to Other Voices, Other Rooms, the celebrated 1993 album on which she interpreted the material of other writers, from the unjustly overlooked (the late Kate Wolf, the soon-to-be-late Van Zandt) to hoary forebears (the Carter Family). A gorgeous set of seventeen songs from her personal soundtrack, it had the good vibes of a living-room performance. By the time it won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, Griffith had become a den mother for the folk tradition.
In 1994 she released the fine Flyer; it was as if working in the crucible of her influences had fired her muse. The record had some of her best writing in years (Time’s review said she “may just be one of America’s best poets”) plus smart arrangements and guests like Adam Duritz of Counting Crows and U2’s rhythm section. Two years later she fulfilled a childhood dream by performing her songs with the Boston Pops and Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1997 she released Blue Roses From the Moon, a pop-country album that featured Buddy Holly’s Crickets, her longtime heroes.
Then, last summer, came Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), another collection of other writers’ songs. But where the original was inspired, the sequel sounded, like its title, forced. Quantity was clearly a consideration—Griffith brags that 83 musicians played and sang on the record—but the quality of some of the songs (“You Were on My Mind,” “Walk Right Back”) was suspect. Strangest of all, Griffith—usually such a sure singer—sounded lost. She bent words unnaturally, self-consciously hammering them as if the eccentricity of interpretation would help deliver the meaning. The most glaring moment was on “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train.” Griffith gave the lead to the song’s writer, Guy Clark, and then further lines to Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Eric Taylor, and Gilmore before joining in herself. The performance is folk vérité, a bunch of crazy old troublemakers singing about themselves; the song, in the best folk tradition, sings the singers—until Griffith chimes in with, “To me he was one of the heroes of this kahn-try.” Her pronunciation is completely out of sync, as if she’s trying to distinguish herself from the formidable company. It may have been her record, but she shouldn’t have tried to make it her song.
LAST YEAR WAS NOT A GOOD ONE for Griffith. First came the illness, then the cold reception to Other Voices, Too. And then came the letter. The very things that her fans loved—her sensitivity, her vulnerability, her writing—were on the page in a new light. This was not the Nanci Griffith they knew. Exactly, said her critics.
She had written letters before, in reply to specific reviews. This, she felt, was different. “That letter was written only to publications that I felt had really been unfair to me,” she says. “I felt extremely offended. I was selling out four nights at Albert Hall. I was championed in Ireland and given a second home. And every time I came to Texas, I got a bad review. The Dallas Morning News was the most guilty. I took the Crickets out on the road with me. The Dallas Morning News had the audacity—the audacity—to call them a Holiday Inn lounge act. I just said I’m never coming back. There are some Texas artists who can do no wrong. They can spit on the ground and the Austin Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and Texas Monthly think that’s the greatest piece of art that ever walked. And then some artist like myself—I just get slapped. I’ve won three Grammys, I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve championed Texas writers, I’ve championed the state of Texas, and every time I’ve come home, I get slapped. I don’t like it. It’s a real Thomas Wolfean thing.”
The difference is that Wolfe couldn’t go back because the people he wrote about felt betrayed. Griffith feels betrayed by what others have written about her. And this was just local press. Why would this bother a national and international artist? “It’s my home,” she replies. “It’s my home. If I get a bad review, I don’t really care about it if it’s not Texas. My whole family lives in Texas. You want your family to be proud of you, just like you want your native soil to be proud of you. And that’s all they see, the bad things. All they see is the Austin Chronicle calling me daft. I’m anything but daft. Michael Corcoran’s ten-year campaign of malicious things that he’s written about me—where does it come from? I just felt like I had a right to defend myself.”
Griffith is being disingenuous about specifics. Her letter was less a reply to brutality and abuse than an excuse to rant. Though Texas Monthly and the Morning News printed negative reviews of Other Voices, Too, they were mild rebuffs that praised her other work. Thor Christensen’s concert review in the Morning News ran ten months before Griffith mailed her letter and was moderate at worst (“But without Buddy’s voice, the Crickets sounded more or less like any other good-time oldies band cranking out ‘Peggy Sue’ at the local Holiday Inn lounge.”). Though Texas Monthly ran an unfavorable review of Once in a Very Blue Moon in 1984, four years ago Joe Nick Patoski wrote that Flyer “demonstrates an artistic maturity that makes it clear she could be a pop star.” The Houston Chronicle’s Rick Mitchell says he searched the paper’s files back to 1983 and could find only one lukewarm review. The Austin Chronicle has run both positive and negative reviews, but it never called her daft—that was the Statesman’s Corcoran. (On the subject of specifics, Griffith’s Grammy count is too bountiful—according to the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, she has won one, for Other Voices, Other Rooms.)
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