Lucinda Williams spent a lot of 2017 and 2018 looking backward. In 2019, she's charging ahead, but not before a quick run of dates including Thursday’s performance at the Hattiesburg Saenger Theater as part of the ‘Burg’s “City Lights Music Nights” concert series.
"I've been on a roll, and I've got a bunch of new songs," she said. "We went in last week and cut a bunch of acoustic demos."
The native of Lake Charles, La., has been making albums for the last 40 years.
Her career took off in the 1990s, when Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover of “Passionate Kisses” earned Williams the first of three Grammy Awards in 1994.
In 2002, Time magazine called her “America’s best songwriter.”
Last year was the 20th anniversary of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, a landmark in Williams’ career hailed by critics as one of the best albums of the 1990s.
The record earned her a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
She has played shows where she performed the entire album, complete with a video presentation illustrating the people and places she sang about.
Backed by her band, Buick 6, that’s what Williams will do when she takes the stage at 8 p.m. Thursday in Hattiesburg.
The first set will include the entire Car Wheels album and after a break, the band will return to the stage to play other songs from throughout her career.
“‘Car Wheels’ was a big leap creatively after ‘Sweet Old World,’” Williams said. “I do pretty much all those songs pretty regularly.”
She also revisited “Sweet Old World,” her fourth album, a quarter-century after its release.
A former record label controls the master tapes for the original record, so Williams decided to remake it — with a few twists.
She reworked some songs, changing a lyric here, adding a verse there and slightly revising the album title: The 2017 version is called This Sweet Old World.
Williams also toured with fellow Americana pioneers Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle in 2018 for a series of shows dubbed the LSD (for Lucinda, Steve and Dwight) tour.
Her 1996 duet with Earle, “You’re Still Standing There,” is one of several memorable ones she has recorded over the years.
Her last album of new songs, The Ghosts of Highway 20, came out in 2016, and she’s ready to make a new album.
But Thursday evening’s performance will most certainly pay tribute to her iconic album, which is steeped in southern culture.
After all, the Mississippi Delta has served Williams as a highly personal, emotional reference library, something she keeps coming back to in her music, for images or metaphors or, sometimes, for its famous twelve-bar arrangements and its flattened blue notes.
Her lyrics from Car Wheels reads like a lyrical roadmap of the Deep South mentioning places like the Magic City Juke Joint in Rosedale, Mississippi, and other cities from the Magnolia State including Jackson, Vicksburg, and Greenville.
In fact, the cover image of the album features a photograph taken by Columbus photographer (and recently-retired newspaper publisher) Birney Imes.
Louisiana is also represented in her lyrics with songs mentioning Algiers, Lake Charles, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Opelousas, Lake Pontchartrain, and Slidell.
In his lengthy and well-written essay from the June 2000 issue of The New Yorker magazine, music critic Bill Buford wrote:
“Her songs are unforgiving because they are so relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible &%$#-up of a man, who has got more charm and charisma than a civilized society should allow, and who never lives up to any of the promises he made when he was drunk, on drugs, in lust, in love, incarcerated, in pain, insane, in rehab, or, in some other essential but frustratingly appealing romantic way, unaccountable.
“He’s usually from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lafayette, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lake Charles, Louisiana (and a bass player), or maybe from Greenville, Mississippi (and a bass player), and the songs come across as both very Southern and also painfully autobiographical.”
As far as the “style” or genre of music goes, it’s not easy to classify.
It isn’t traditional rock-n-roll by any means – if only because they are more written, more preoccupied with the concerns of language and image, than most rock tunes. It’s also not country, although there is an occasional twangy country element.
It’s not folk, even though Car Wheels won a Grammy for the best contemporary-folk record of the year.
And it’s certainly not blues, even though the songs are informed by something that might be described as a blues attitude.
Ironically, Williams never got a high-school diploma; for that matter, she never learned to read music, and although she later passed a college-entrance examination and was admitted to the University of Arkansas, she was bored by the rigors of formal education and was at a loss in harmony class.
After one semester, she took her guitar and left Fayetteville, heading first for New Orleans, then for Austin, before settling in Houston—the folk scene of the early seventies.
By the time Car Wheels was being recorded, Americana music had scarcely existed.
However, it’s safe to say that the album, which gathered up the loose threads of American music in a design that we now recognize as Americana, changed the landscape forever.
A monument to studio craft that aestheticizes blues, country and rock ’n’ roll, Car Wheels took a long time to gestate, since Williams — a perfectionist who seemed to know her fifth album was her shot at immortality — recorded and re-recorded the songs at several studios before finally finishing the record in 1997.
Car Wheels goes beyond such proto-Americana albums, marrying Williams’ imagistic lyrics to allusive, slangy music that came to life through constant experimentation inside the recording studio.
Williams’ perfectionism paid off, since she recorded a masterpiece.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Williams’ favorite expression is “bless your heart.” If a friend says something nice, it’s “bless your heart”; if she is surprised by the kindness of a gesture, “bless your heart”; if someone seems uncomfortable or embarrassed –— “bless your heart.” It is as if Williams takes care of herself by ministering to others.
