Williams, Lucinda

Lucinda Williams

Singer, songwriter

Musical Short Stories

Difficult to Categorize

Released From RCA Contract

Selected discography

Sources

Lucinda Williams writes songs about women looking for independence and fulfillment, about men and women welcoming love or barring the door against it, about people doing their best to get by in a world too self-absorbed to care. Though she sings about average people to the average person, “Williams may never be a household word—her raw, plaintive soprano and her songs about hard truths and desperation tend to make the Wal-Mart crowd anxious,” Alanna Nash observed in Stereo Review.

Although her acceptance by major recording labels has been hindered by her spare, often bitter songs, which fail to fit a specific musical category, Williams has refused to alter the true emotional content of those songs. “In the brushed-off ad-libs and the shuddering rushes of breath that surround her lyrics,” Tom Moon wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “is the sound of a woman willing to risk everything for the chance to tell her side of the story.”

“If there’s a common element to Williams’s songs,” Richard Harrington observed in the Washington Post, “it’s a sense of motion—moving on, moving out, moving up. It’s something Williams knows firsthand from a childhood spent gravitating from college town to college town with her father, the poet Miller Williams.”

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Williams spent her childhood traversing the South—from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Fayetteville, Arkansas—even traveling south of the border to Mexico City, Mexico, and Santiago, Chile. A strong sense of the South, with its country music sadness and Delta blues edge, is firmly rooted in her songs.

Musical Short Stories

An even more striking characteristic of Williams’s music is her “literary attention to detail, her poetic ability to make the most of the little things,” Rob Patterson noted in the Austin Chronicle. Williams began playing the guitar and composing songs in 1965, when she was twelve years old. Her musical influences ranged from such legendary performers as Robert Johnson (blues) to Hank Williams (country) to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (folk). But more important in the development of her songwriting abilities were literary influences.

Along with her father’s teachings, Williams received constructive criticism from family friends that included noted poets James Dickey and John Ciardi. She also found instruction and inspiration in the works of writers Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. The literary insight Williams gained into human emotions has enabled

For the Record…

Born c. 1953 in Lake Charles, LA; daughter of Miller Williams (a university professor and poet); married Greg Sowders (divorced). Education: Attended University of Arkansas.

Performed in folk clubs, New Orleans, Houston, and Austin, early 1970s; as “Lucinda,” recorded first album, Ramblirt’ on My Mind, Folkways, 1979; signed with Rough Trade Records and released Lucinda Williams, 1988.

Addresses: Home —Austin, TX. Record company — Chameleon Records, 1740 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

her, through her short-story-like songs, to say “more with less, especially when the topic turns to the ineffable qualities that bring people together and sometimes keep them apart,” observed Harrington.

In the early 1970s, Williams began playing in coffeehouses in New Orleans, Nashville, Los Angeles, Houston, and Austin. She continued playing the folk circuit throughout the decade, eventually recording two albums under the name “Lucinda” for the Folkways label: Ramblin’on My Mind (1979) was an acoustic collection of Delta blues and traditional country, while Happy Woman Blues (1980) was an offering of original material. The albums, however, failed to solidify her standing outside of her folk club following.

Difficult to Categorize

Seeking to fulfill her professional ambitions, Williams moved to Los Angeles in 1984 in hopes of landing a record contract. But, as Harrington noted, Williams has “always been something ’more than’—more punchy than folk, more twangy than pop, more centered than country—and record execs gave her less than support.” She recorded demo tapes for various major labels, only to find they seemed unable to categorize her music. She explained to Bill Flanagan of Musician how one manager tried to figure out why she wasn’t being signed: “‘What seems to be the problem? Maybe you need more bridges in your songs!”’

Finally, in 1988, Williams was offered a contract by the independent label Rough Trade. With a budget of $15,000, Williams and her band’s lead guitarist, Gurf Morlix, produced Lucinda Williams. With its eleven original compositions offering stories of love, fear, anticipation, hope, and longing told in a plain and pained voice, the album was a critical sensation. “She has the kind of voice that suggests the rise and fall of empires as witnessed through the bottom of a shot glass,” Steve Simels of Stereo Review declared, adding that “listening to her album was an experience that hit me about as hard as falling in love.”

Rolling Stones Steve Pond lauded the very aspects of Williams’s music—a lack of polish to hide the human frailties—that the major record labels shunned: “If that means an occasional tentative vocal or an awkwardly blunt line, it also helps reinforce the feeling that you are listening to a singer who is simply telling you the truth about herself. And that’s welcome in any genre.”

Despite the success of Lucinda Williams, she would not release another album for four years. Williams left Rough Trade for RCA, lured by label president Bob Buziak, a strong supporter who promised her complete creative control over her next project. But after recording the album, Williams was not satisfied with the results and refused to release it.

Released From RCA Contract

With most of her backup band gone because of other commitments, a second attempt at recording material for the album was even more unsatisfying. And when Buziak was fired during a corporate shake-up at RCA, Williams was once again being pressured to record music that was marketable, rather than emotionally honest. She refused, and RCA reluctantly released her from her contract in 1991.

Meanwhile, Buziak had become president of Chameleon Records, and Williams lost no time in signing on. With her original backup band restored, she recorded Sweet Old World— the album she had wanted from the beginning. “Williams’s voice on this record is completely immersed in the circumstances of her protagonists,” Thom Jurek wrote in the Metro Times. “She offers us a recording that is not only contemporary, but revealing in its portrait of darkness, melancholy, loss, love, and wanton lust.”

Sweet Old World was as critically praised as Lucinda Williams, but where the first recording offered a sense of hope in dealing with lost love, the second expressed a more empathetic despair in response to the larger losses in life. The darker themes on Sweet Old World reveal the maturation of an artist. “I’m trying to try different material and look at different things and open up,” Williams explained to Don McLeese of Request “I’m trying to grow as a person, and the songs have to grow along with it”

On her 1992 Columbia release, Come On Come On, rising country star Mary-Chapin Carpenter covered Williams’s song “Passionate Kisses,” from Lucinda Williams. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tom Moon felt that although Carpenter sang the song well, she missed its emotional truth: “She’s dutifully reciting lyrics, not tearing a page from her heart. And this song demands personal experience.” This is what sets Williams apart. Even though the sources of her songs are widely varied—places she’s been, books she’s read, people she’s met, things she’s done—she absorbs everything. ’They’re all translated through my way of seeing things, which is small,” she told Jurek. “And it’s done with as much empathy, even sympathy, as I can muster. The emotion comes from my ability to feel those lyrics.”

Selected discography

Ramblin’ on My Mind, Folkways, 1979; reissued, Smithsonian/Folkways, 1991.

Happy Woman Blues, Folkways, 1980; reissued, Smithsonian/Folkways, 1990.

Lucinda Williams, Rough Trade, 1988; reissued, Chameleon, 1992.

Passionate Kisses (EP), Rough Trade, 1989; reissued, Chameleon, 1992.

Sweet Old World, Chameleon, 1992.

(Contributor) Sweet Relief, Chaos/Sony, 1993.

(Contributor) Born to Choose, Rykodisc, 1993.

Sources

Austin Chronicle, August 21, 1992.

Billboard, September 5, 1992.

Country Music, March/April 1993.

Details, January 1993.

Down Beat, November 1991.

Guitar Player, March 1993.

Melody Maker, May 13, 1989.

Metro Times (Detroit), November 4, 1992.

Musician, April 1989; August 1991.

New York Times, March 5, 1989; March 24, 1989.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 23, 1992.

Pulse!, December 1992.

Request, October 1992.

Rolling Stone, January 26, 1989; November 2, 1989; February 18, 1993.

Spin, December 1992.

Stereo Review, March 1989; December 1992.

Washington Post, March 24, 1989; September 2, 1992.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from Chameleon Records press materials, 1992.

—Rob Nagel