Lucinda Williams
The Americana poet and punk rocker, by Sylvie Simmons.
“You can kiss my pretty white ass.” LUCINDA WILLIAMS
OF ALL THE Lucinda Williams concerts this writer has seen, the one that seemed to best sum her up was in Austin, Texas, in 2001, at an outdoor festival by the Cumberland River. Steve Earle played a set, and Cheap Trick. When Lucinda took the stage she started to sing in her sand-and-honey voice the songs from her new album Essence. Pretty downbeat for a festival, but that didn’t bother her. She dedicated one song to Joey Ramone; another to an Austin club owner who’d been jailed for dope; and a third to all the people in Nashville who had put her down, saying, “You can kiss my pretty white ass.” Lucinda Williams has the lyrical skills of a poet and the attitude of a punk rocker.
“America’s greatest songwriter”, as Time magazine called her, was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1953, got her first guitar at the age of 12 and wanted to be Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, preferably both.
She started writing poems when she was six years old, taking after her father, the poet Miller Williams, whom Bill Clinton invited to read at his second presidential inauguration. Miller Williams was also a literary professor and the family lived wherever his work took him – from Macon, Georgia to Mexico City – which prepared his daughter for a peripatetic life. He also introduced her at a very young age to the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt and Hank Williams.
By her own description a “late bloomer”, it took Lucinda some time to find her voice. Falling as she did between the cracks of rock and country, she struggled to find a place to fit in until the Americana movement took off. Not that Lucinda showed any great desire to fit in anywhere. As she told MOJO some years ago, “I’ve always done what I wanted to do.”