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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If Griffith is wrong about the details, she’s right about the sentiment. Though she has many supporters (the Statesman’s John T. Davis has written that she is “a fearless voyager with nerves of steel, an eagle’s eye, and a heart that blooms like a rose”), there are people in Texas who deeply dislike her work—and her. The prankish Corcoran, who in 1987 called Griffith a “country munchkin” in a positive piece on her and Lovett in Spin (prompting an angry letter from Griffith), is not a fan. “I’m her least favorite critic,” he says. “She’s so calculated. She learned to play up the Texas thing in Ireland and England, and she learned to play up the Southern literary thing here.” One writer who did not get a letter, Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Observer, says, “I was really pissed off. I was really jealous. She’s so annoying. I think she’s just dreadful.”
Nanci haters start with her Wounded Romantic image: her doe-eyed looks and her affected album covers, which feature books used as props (Lonesome Dove; The Kindness of Strangers; Other Voices, Other Rooms) to telegraph the weight of her intentions and claim kinship with leading literary lights. “She seems incredibly sincere and not sincere at the same time,” says a veteran Austin musician, who calls her Nanci “Icky” Griffith. “It’s a total act. It drives me crazy.” Nobody is that innocent, the theory goes, especially someone who has been around for so long in such a cutthroat business, someone who leads a band and produces her own records. Indeed, there are rumors about Griffith’s meanness to band members and backup singers, but they are only rumors, stoked by the chasm between their ugliness and her clean image.
People with a low tolerance for preciousness have the hardest time with Griffith’s voice. If they can’t abide her earnest singing voice, they find her onstage talking voice unbearable, especially her waffling between little-girl singsong and twangy, folksy Texan (“Nobody raised in Austin has an accent,” says Corcoran with a snort). Sometimes she even falls into a slight Irish brogue. Griffith insists it’s not a conscious thing. “It’s fear,” she says. “It’s a matter of stage fright. I fall into the person I was riding my bicycle down Burnet Road”—an Austin street from her youth. Griffith says she never thought she had much of an onstage accent until she listened to her 1988 live concert album, One Fair Summer Evening. “And then I could hear it. I sound just like my great-aunt out in Lockney, Texas.”
Griffith isn’t the only artist to adopt a false voice onstage. An accent is a safe place to go, an exaggerated sign of who you are, especially if you aren’t always sure. But all successful Nashville artists, even the Texas renegades, have a shtick, an image to help sell records. Why is Griffith judged so much more harshly about her affectations than others? Why did last summer’s letter inspire such howls of delight? Because she peddles sincerity so baldly in a musical form that has always been sanctimonious about integrity. Because she’s so successful at being someone she is not, which drives writers—who would love to be able to pull it off—crazy. Because, as one critic says, “She’s a sore winner, and no one likes a sore winner.”
THERE WERE TWO MOMENTS IN March’s Austin City Limits tribute to Townes Van Zandt that stand as touchstones for how people feel about Nanci Griffith. The first came as Earle, sitting next to her, played “Ft. Worth Blues,” the emotional elegy he wrote about his late friend. Tears rolled down Griffith’s cheeks. Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Clark, Lovett, and the rest of the songwriters onstage had their heads bowed or were looking off into the distance, wishing the camera would just go away, careful not to make a sound. Griffith looked on too, not bothering to wipe her face, slick with tears. Then the camera found her, and her countenance filled the screen—all wet face and big sad eyes. And she looked up and stared straight into the lens, like she was advertising her grief. Watching it felt, well, icky. Why couldn’t she just look away like the others?
The second moment came when Griffith sang “Tecumseh Valley,” which she had recorded on Other Voices, Other Rooms. As she had done hundreds of times before, she became the gutsy but lost Caroline. It was one of the highlights of an extraordinary show. Maybe her fans knew that not long before he died, Van Zandt, whose songs were covered by everyone from Willie to Emmylou, who was torn and frayed where Griffith is smooth and pretty, who hid his self-absorption while she displays hers naked to the world, described Griffith’s version of “Tecumseh Valley” as “the best cover of any of my songs—ever.”
One of the things Griffith’s fans love about her is that, like Caroline, she is so determined to survive—and create. “I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen,” she says. “Resilience is something that I really had to nurture within myself, because I’ve had to pick myself up off my butt and move on many times. And when I fell I had no place to fall. There was no mommy or daddy to call. That’s been a real core in all my characters—the woman in ‘Ford Econoline,’ the woman in ‘Listen to the Radio.’ Those are my favorite characters and a real key part of my writing.” Yet it is Griffith’s tendency to aspire mightily to art, to songwriting as literature, that makes her critics cringe. Most of her heroes, from Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie to Buddy Holly, never had this problem—and, oddly enough, they created great art. Unfortunately, wanting to be taken seriously is like a drug addiction. And addicts take up other heavy habits, like exalting their folk songs with violins and French horns (she will tour this year to different U.S. cities to play her tunes with local symphonies), writing books (Two of a Kind Heart looks to be a sentimental dime-store novel), and scrawling letters shoehorning their work with that of other literary outsiders.
Griffith is spreading herself thin, writing letters when she should be writing songs. “Nobody’s doing quality control right now,” a Nashville insider says about Griffith, her career, and her life. “She’s not doing her best work, and some of the people around her aren’t doing their best work.” But even if someone in management had stopped the letter from going out last summer, she would have sent others. Griffith is obsessed with being an unappreciated Texas ex. On her second album, released in 1982, she sings a song called “You Can’t Go Home Again” (“This old town never did really care that much for me”). Three years later she sent a letter to Texas Monthly about its negative review of Blue Moon, calling it “a cheap shot at me when I am only just now breaking into the national market . . . I’ve always found it quite sad that the state of Texas has traditionally ignored their own acoustic artists until those artists were forced to move on to other parts of the country where the media supported their endeavors.”
That, of course, is not the media’s job. Why Griffith should care so deeply and bitterly what writers think about her work makes one question why she makes music in the first place. She is an artist, but not because some writer says so. For some reason she was blessed with a beautiful, clear voice that touches people deeply, that speaks to their longing, to what their hearts want but can’t have—or sometimes even name. And for some reason she started singing, playing, and writing three decades ago, and for some reason she kept it up, through good times and bad, and like thousands before her, she helped keep alive the great chugging American folk tradition—with her own work and her purposeful recordings of ignored artists.
The Guardian in England once asked Griffith, “How would you like to be remembered?” and she replied, “For my music.” She says her next album of new songs might be just her, a guitar, and her pianist. After all the sturm und drawl of the past decade, that sounds pretty good. It might even be something to write home about.
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