Nanci Griffith
Songbird and Activist
“Folk is where I always wanted to be.” NANCI GRIFFITH
BORN 1953
Born in small-town Seguin, Texas and raised in Austin, Nanci Griffith was 12 when she wrote her first song, entitled A New Generation. That same year she made her debut at a little coffee house, accompanying herself on guitar. “Folk is where I always wanted to be,” Griffith said. But aside from the sweetness of her clear-as-water voice, she was no folk purist. Even “folkabilly” – her own hybrid term – doesn’t cover the variety of her 18 studio albums, from There’s A Light Beyond These Woods (1978) to Intersection (2012).
As a kid she loved Odetta, Woody Guthrie, Loretta Lynn, and later The Clash. But her epiphany, aged 14, was a Townes Van Zandt concert she attended with her beatnik dad. When Van Zandt sang Tecumseh Valley, a wrenching ballad about a girl called Caroline – Griffith’s middle name – she took the song to her heart. Some of her own finely drawn story-songs about small-town life share Van Zandt’s literacy and loneliness.
After years on the Texas folk circuit and the road, and a broken marriage, Griffith moved to Nashville in the ’80s. Her major label albums made the country charts; covers of her songs by country singers like Kathy Mattea and Suzy Bogguss (Love At The Five And Dime; Outbound Plane) did better still. But Griffith sang covers too. Her version of Julie Gold’s From A Distance made the Top 10 in Ireland. And her 1993 covers album Other Voices, Other Rooms, featuring guest slots by the songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Guy Clark, Emmylou Harris and John Prine, made the pop charts and won a Grammy.
A committed activist, she worked with musicians including Buddy Holly’s Crickets, Peter Buck, Counting Crows, Indigo Girls, U2 and, for the Grammy-winning An Irish Evening, The Chieftains. Griffith had a close relationship with Ireland and the UK, where she had a devoted following. But Nashville remained her home. She died there in August, aged 68.