Griffith, Nanci

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Nanci Griffith

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

In Sing Out!, singer/songwriter Tom Russell related that he first encountered Nanci Griffith at a folk festival in 1976. One evening around a campfire, with people spread out on a grassy hill into the darkness, guitars and wine being passed around, a gruff voice yelled from the darkness, “Let her play one.” From the edge of the campfire light came a waif-like young girl. She began to play and sing in a voice Russell said possessed “a wild, fragile beauty.” When she finished and the echo of the applause drifted away, the voice spoke again: “That was Nanci Griffith. She writes songs.”

In the contemporary music world, where the drum machine is the musical backbone, dancing is the answer to social problems, and lyrics speak only of vacuous, pubescent angst, Nanci Griffith stands at the edge of light. At a time when popular music is, as Detroit News music critic Susan Whitall observed, “bankrupt of inspiration,” Griffith offers songs of love, stories of broken dreams, observations of people living lives that are neither heroic nor pathetic. “The people residing within the lines of her songs,” Connoisseur reviewer Jared Lawrence Burden stated plainly, “are the salt of the American earth.” According to Stephen Holden of the New York Times, Griffith “sings lyrics redolent of the American landscape.”

Southern literature and folk music inform Griffith’s vision of this landscape. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1954, she grew up reading various writers and listening to jazz, folk, and country. But more than others, the fiction of Eudora Welty, the voice of folk singer Carolyn Hester, and the songs of country singer Loretta Lynn imbued her with a passion for struggling human relationships, dreams, and a sense of place; with, in the opinion of Peter Nelson of Rolling Stone, a “forthrightness and clarity of heart”; and with, as Griffith explained to Holden, a desire to tell “incredibly vivid stories that hit their subjects right on the nail’s head.”

The combination of these influences has given rise to a unique Griffith style, which she terms “folkbilly,” and which the New York Times defined as a “songwriting style steeped in the rich mixture of Southern literary tradition, folk music, and country.” But Griffith is not just a songwriter, “she writes songs,” and her songs are stories. Russell explained the difference: “Nanci’s musical roots are based in folk music, but her writing style always carried evidence of a prose writer’s skills. She has a poet’s eye and a novelist’s sense of time and place.” Griffith told James Ring Adams of the Wall Street Journal that the venerable Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard, with whom she studies, said to her: “You’re a writer. You’re a writer first. You just happen to be a writer who can sing.”

As a result, Griffith’s lyrics and themes are reportorial

For the Record…

Born 1954 in Austin, Texas; daughter of Griff (a printer and publisher) and Ruelene (in real estate) Griffith. Education: Education major at University of Texas at Austin.

Began playing bars in Austin, Texas, at age 14; taught kindergarten and first grade in Austin school system briefly during mid-1970s; first recorded for small Texas-based label, B.F. Deal, 1977; recording artist, 1978—; began musical collaboration with band Blue Moon Orchestra on third album, Once in a Very Blue Moon, 1985.

Addresses: Residence —Nashville. Management —Vector Management, P.O. Box 128037, Nashville, TN 37212. Record company —MCA Records, Inc., 70 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608.

and realistic. Stereo Review’s Alanna Nash pointed out how Griffith crafts songs “with a more conversational feel, focusing more on character development than outside events.” Burden offered a panorama of the focus in her songs: “There is a black middle-class woman living in Houston, caught at a moment of pride and wonder about her marriage. There is a couple arguing at the airport about their lost love. In one of her strongest and best-known songs, ‘Love at the Five and Dime,’ two lovers’ romance is rekindled by memories of the days when they were courting.” The aim of these songs is not self-aggrandizement. In the best literary tradition, Griffith gives a voice to the inarticulate, the uninspired, the unheard. She told Paul Mather of Melody Maker, “I want to celebrate the South again.… There’s a dignity and beauty there that’s not often pointed out.”

Her celebration of life is not confined only to songs. When Griffith is not on the road, she writes stories and novels. So far she has completed one manuscript, Two of a Kind Heart, spanning three generations of a Texas family, and is working on a second, Love Wore a Halo Before the War. There is no division between the focus of Griffith’s songs and her prose. Often she turns a story into a song. “Love at the Five and Dime” was originally a short story while “Love Wore a Halo (Back Before the War),” which appears on Little Love Affairs, is drawn from the corresponding novel.

In concert, Griffith combines both mediums. She tells stories both through and between her songs. “Her stories,” Mather said, “are sometimes ordinary, sometimes magical, invariably enchanting.” He went on to add that “despite the often upbeat seduction, the lasting memory is of a beautiful sadness.” A reviewer for Variety was left with the impression of “an unusual talent, a winsome, almost strangely pure-voiced singer whose style and sound bear little taint of commercialization or contrivance, marked instead by a quirky, honest individuality and soulfulness that connect in gentle, often bewitching ways.”

Some critics, however, do indeed consider Griffith’s individuality to be contrived. According to Nash, there are some who deem her material “overly sentimental and precious, as affected as the white cotton anklets she wears with the old-fashioned dresses she makes from prints bought on sale from Woolworth’s.” Griffith’s devoted following, on the contrary, feels she is more affective than affected. Mather explained: “Nanci Griffith gives us dreams . . . that affect because of, rather than despite, their traditionalism. There’s no urge here to reinvent, to introduce a new pop vocabulary, simply a pure joy in her own ability to make music that touches all those places that make you sigh and stuff.” In the end, perhaps all that matters is Griffith’s ability to step into the light and touch her audience. Burden observed: “As she talks, the young men in the audience are wishing that Nanci Griffith were their girlfriend, the older men are wishing she were their daughter, and the women are wishing that they, too, could play guitar and sing.”