It was almost 30 years ago that I asked Lucinda Williams when she was going to write a book.
She told me she didn't think she ever would, that she was not that kind of writer. I remember mildly arguing with her, pointing out how she was able to delineate complex and figured characters with just a few words. How she compressed a novel's worth of story into a three-minute song.
I was thinking of Sylvia, the waitress from Beaumont, tired of the small-town boys who didn't move fast enough. I was thinking about her Frank Stanford song "Pineola" and her Blaze Foley song "Drunken Angel." I was thinking about the woman standing on the side of the road while her lover waits in the car, following "that unbroken line to a place where the wild things grow."
There is an economy and force to her lyrics that I thought could translate into prose; an unhurried directness that never devolved into cliché or sentimentality. They felt observed, honest; I was sure they were drawn from life.
This was before "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" came out, before we knew about the girl in the back seat, "a little bit of dirt, mixed with tears." This was before Williams understood that an awful lot of her songs were autobiographical.
I went looking for that story in our archives the other day and found it. Sort of. Only the back end of the story--what we call "the jump"--made it into our files. I don't have the first few paragraphs. If you want to find it on microfiche, it ran on May 16, 1993.
I don't think my question about her potentially writing a book made it into the newspaper, so I can't say what I asked. I was thinking about a novel, but I might have used the more generic "book." Anyway, she had just moved back to Nashville, and said that it was strange to encounter Billy Ray Cyrus in Kroger.
Looking in the archives, I noticed I'd written more than 100 stories that mention her. But there's a good reason I never interviewed her again.
A year or so later, I became very close with Lucinda's father, poet Miller Williams, one of the founders of the University of Arkansas Press. Miller was very good to me; he published a couple of my books and we became close friends. We talked about writing a lot and talked about Lucinda a lot. I won't say that Karen and I became part of their family, but Miller and his wife Jordan, Lucinda's stepmother, were like family to us.
I don't pretend to be a simple person, but sometimes clear lines are useful. I didn't want to take advantage of my relationship with Miller. I didn't want there to be any awkwardness between us. Some things I could write about, but I also knew family things.
Not that they were bad things, or even secrets. But there are lines.
So I contented myself with writing about Lu's work, which I'd adored since the mid-1980s, before I had any idea who her father was or any biographical information about her. Her 1988 album "Lucinda Williams" is in my all-time Top 10; a couple of her other albums are in my Top 50. With the possible exception of Tom Petty, she's the artist that's had the most play around our house over the past 30 years. I would argue for her place in the songwriting pantheon, that she is one of the greatest American artists of the past 50 years.
I've never suggested I can be completely objective about a Lucinda Williams project; aside from my connection to her father and stepmother, her experience has several points of identification in common with my own.
Our childhoods were not dissimilar. Her South is to a great degree my South. I never chased Flannery O' Connor's peacocks, but I can tell similar stories. (For one, Rod McKuen once babysat me.)
Over the years I've chatted with Lucinda a few times, but we are not more than acquaintances, at least in part because I am a shy person and I believe she is too, and I have this prideful thing about not wanting to appear over-eager in the presence of artists I admire. I've watched her perform a dozen or so times; a couple with Miller interspersing his poems between her songs. She has, on a couple of occasions over the years, sent me kind notes. I have her email address but don't use it.
Still, I regard her highly. I am proud of her and ready to defend her.
I know there are some people who think she's somehow inauthentic, that she doesn't sound or write like the daughter of a great poet and esteemed academic. Some think she's affected and "pretentious" (a word that had become an all-purpose term of obliteration).
For instance, the critic Greil Marcus, whose writing on (especially) American music informs and influences the way I look at most things, has at times been shockingly nasty towards her.
OK, we don't all like the same things.
But I get Lucinda Williams in a way I get very few other artists. I know the people she sings about, and understand the attitudes her characters adopt. I know where she came from, and it's not all that different from a lot of Southerners of our generation.
Lucinda Williams finally got around to writing that book she never thought she'd write. It's a memoir titled "Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You," which comes from a line in a song of hers called "Metal Firecracker," that was on her remarkable 1998 album "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," that made her nearly a household name in 1998.
I got a copy of the book on its publication day and read it in a few hours. I knew most of the stories.
It's a great book--straightforward and honest in a way few books manage. I can feel her voice in it, although she's careful to give credit to the North Carolina-based writer Sam Stephenson, who worked on the project with her and her husband Tom Overby for four years. But it's her words. I'm certain of that--if nothing else, her famous stubbornness wouldn't let it be anything else.
I don't know Lucinda, but I care for her. Sometimes it does seem like she's a cousin or something. I remember how happy I was for her when she married Tom in 2009.
And I remember how proud her father was when he played an early version of her "Car Wheels" record for us a year or so before it came out. How proud he always was of her.
And how contagious that pride was.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com