Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams’s career started out uneventfully enough, when in 1978, at age 26, she recorded her first album for Moses Asch’s Folkways label. The daughter of poet and professor Miller Williams (who read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration), she’d spent much of her childhood moving around the south, from Jackson to Baton Rouge to New Orleans to Atlanta to Macon, and Ramblin’ on My Mind, a collection of mostly Delta blues and old country covers recorded for $250, paid tribute to the music she’d heard along the way. It didn’t earn her much more than the chance to record another album, Happy Woman Blues, in 1980, but then again she probably wasn’t expecting much. Before it joined forces with the Smithsonian Institution in 1986, Folkways couldn’t do a whole lot for an artist beyond manufacturing her records. So when Williams moved to Los Angeles in 1984, she was still looking for a deal.
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Instead, she ran up against a brick wall. Though she lost her stage fright and sharpened her edges amid a community of musicians there who were likewise interested in old country, blues, and soul–folks like Dwight Yoakam, Jim Lauderdale, Chris Gaffney, and Buddy Miller–Williams frustrated A and R scouts with her folksy, bluesy country tunes, which couldn’t be squashed into one of their tidy, tiny categories. CBS eventually funded a demo, but the rock department balked because it was too country and Nashville rejected it because it sounded too rock. Even today, despite the Grammy Mary Chapin Carpenter won for her wan rendition of Williams’s “Passionate Kisses” in 1994, no Nashville music department wants anything to do with her.
The album’s opener, “Right in Time,” is a succinct slice of longing in which every mundane gesture takes on a lusty weight. “I take off my watch and my earrings,” she sings, “my bracelets and everything”; by the end of the verse, she’s lying on her back and moaning at the ceiling. Like a soul singer, she emphasizes the expression of emotion over ideas, but she never reaches for the rafters with exaggerated gestures. With the exception of a frustrated shout at the top of “Still I Long for Your Kiss,” she barely raises her voice on Car Wheels, preferring to let inflection, pauses, repetition, and careful modulation do the work.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Shelby Lee Adams.
