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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: Embrace the blues when necessary.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

Lucinda Williams reminds me of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I was eight years old, traveling across the southern U.S in the backseat of a stationwagon when my family stopped overnight at the town famous for its diamonds. For one buck each, we were allowed to work our way through a plowed field looking for treasure; the diamonds could be picked from the dirt, we were told, if we just looked in the right spot. I remember the bright sun bathing the field in sweat, the smell of the earth, as I bent over, seeking something beautiful, life-changing, my treasure.

Lucinda Williams' voice is like that earth - warm, rich, rough and plowed over - and her songs are the diamonds I didn't find that day. She is an American original, in the mold of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. She watches and writes, finds the metaphors of everyday life to convey the tragedies and loves of everyday life. The range of melodic twists is narrow - she tends to write the same melody over and over - but it doesn't matter. The melodies soar when they need to but are otherwise hypnotically repetitive, sometimes taking on a savage edge as in "You Took My Joy." This is pure poetry - shamanic, cathartic.

In fact, she was performing with a poet, her father, Miller Williams. The two alternated - he reading a poem, she singing a song that sometimes echoed her father's words and feelings. His poetry is carefully observed, insightful, honest, frequently wry, sometimes sweetly sad. Her 'poetry' is lucid, gem-like, sharp as a knife and flat as the plains. They began with poems and songs about a family, their own. He read a poem about watching a caterpiller with Lucinda when she was seven years old. She sang "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and told of singing it for her father soon after it was finished. He'd said "I'm sorry." She'd said, "Why?" He'd said, "For what happened to you," and she suddenly realized she'd written the song about herself without realizing it. She couldn't sing a song about her brother, tried twice but never got past the first couple of lines.

I think the performance lasted about an hour. It seemed longer, maybe because it covered a lifetime. The stage was bare, the lighting was a muddy yellow, nothing fancy. It let the songs and poetry work all the magic. I felt like I was sitting on a back porch listening to Lucinda and her father swap stories. And I remembered a summer twillight in Murfreesboro after a long hot day in the diamond field, finding nothing but dirt but happy to be sitting on the grass with my parents, watching the fireflies blink.

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Read A Brief History Of Love Songs by Robin Frederick at the Sound Experience Music web site.

Copyright 2006 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.