One last shot? Sure, I’m only getting started
She has survived a tornado and a stroke. So can anything stop the legendary Lucinda Williams?
‘When I am flying they get a wheelchair and roll me around the airport’
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams is one of the all-time greats of country rock and Americana. If you’re unfamiliar with her work and need proof of that listen to 1992’s Sweet Old World, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road from 1998 or last year’s Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart. On the song New York Comeback from that 2023 album – which features long-time admirer Bruce Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa on backing vocals – she sings, ‘let me have one last shot, one last swing, one final song to sing’ but even though she is 71 and has had it particularly tough in recent years the lady is not for turning her back on music just yet.
‘No I wasn’t saying that. It was more the feeling of the challenge of getting out there and still doing it,’ she says.
‘There have been so many challenges that prevented us from doing that. In Nashville [where she and her husband live] a tornado swept through town, took off part of our house, the pandemic hit and I had my stroke…’
The stroke, which she suffered in 2020, has meant that she can no longer play guitar. However as evidenced by her gigs here last year she can still give voice to the classic songs in her canon. Tom Petty, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris are among those who have covered her work. Lucinda will play a career-encompassing set this Tuesday night in the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin.
‘I always tell the audience that their presence is a gift,’ she says.
‘Performing is therapeutic. It is healing to just get out there and sing for everybody. It has never occurred to me not to do it anymore. Yes, it is difficult but I have a good support team around me. When I’m flying they get a wheelchair and roll me around the airport. Since my stroke I can do everything I did before but just not as quickly.’
Lucinda has never had it easy. In 1953 she was born in Louisiana with spina bifida, a condition that also afflicted her father. Miller Williams was a renowned poet who gained custody of Lucinda after he and her mother divorced in the mid-Sixties. Lucinda’s mother had severe mental health issues and writing and music were Lucinda’s refuge from a sometimes turbulent household.
‘How I deal with everything is writing about it,’ she says.
‘My mother had to struggle because there wasn’t the help you can get now for mental health issues. I was 12 years old when I got my first guitar. The first album I heard was Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and it blew my mind. That’s when I decided I wanted to write songs like that. It was a lofty idea to have at the age of 12. Bob Dylan took the literary and musical worlds and combined them which I found really fascinating.’
Lucinda’s 2023 book Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You proves she’s also a masterful storyteller in the long form. In the memoir she charts her triumphs and struggles in compelling fashion. Lucinda relates how her father read one of his poems at Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration and how she married her husband Tom onstage after a gig.
‘I wanted to be able to invite everyone we knew to the wedding. We were planning a tour at the same time. The thought just flew into my head,’ she says of the 2009 nuptials that took place at Minneapolis’s First Avenue nightclub where parts of Prince’s Purple Rain movie were filmed.
‘I mentioned it to my father on the phone and he said, “Honey, that’s a great idea. That’s what Hank Williams did”. As soon as I heard that Hank had done it that settled it. Some people there that night knew what would happen but many other others didn’t. We played our normal show then made it part of the encore! My dad read one of his poems before we made our vows. He actually wrote the vows for us which was great. Alzheimer’s, which is a wicked, horrible disease, took him from us. I wrote a song about it called If My Love Could Kill. He got to see a lot of my success but there was so much more I wanted to share with him. I wished he could have been here for my book; he would really have loved that.’
We can witness a true great in action this week.