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Event Preview: Williams family values Gifted country-rocker and the 'Hank Williams of American poetry' share an evening of words, songs and Southern hospitality Friday, March 30, 2001 By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette
Poet Miller Williams provided his daughter with everything she would need to grow up to be one of the finest singer-songwriters of her generation. Lucinda Williams was instilled with an appreciation for poetry and language, indoctrinated with music from Hank Williams to John Coltrane and introduced to a stream of legendary writers who passed through their household.
"House guests when she was growing up were people like Allen Ginsberg, John Ciardi, Johnny Cash," Miller says. "She knew Flannery O'Connor when she was a child. She lived on a farm near where we lived in Macon, Ga., and had scores of peacocks. When Lucinda was 5 and 6 she would chase her peacocks. She couldn't catch them."
Chasing Flannery O'Connor's peacocks and growing up with a father who's published 14 books of poetry and won numerous awards would tend to create expectations for a child, however young she may have been at the time. Lucinda responded, winning Grammy Awards and racking up the kind of critical acclaim for songwriting that seemed reserved for her musical heroes, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
This evening, Lucinda and Miller will take the stage together for a father-daughter session at the International Poetry Forum, where they will swap songs and poetry.
"I have my book in my hand, and she has her guitar in hers," Miller says, from his home in Fayetteville, Ark., where he is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas. "We chat back and forth a bit, for the benefit of the audience. I start with a poem that I wrote when she was about 5 and she gave me the last line to. Then, she answers with a song that has some connection with our family and her childhood. We simply toss them back and forth, getting more and more into the present."
It's a casual format they've engaged in many times, but the Poetry Forum is providing a twist to the proceedings, using a backing ensemble to add arrangements to a few of Lucinda's songs and one of Miller's poems.
Oddly enough, considering he usually writes with jazz playing in the background, it will be the first time he has ever read poetry to music.
"It's interesting to me because I played clarinet and saxophone in a jazz combo. I had been on that side," he says. "But I never thought about having music behind as I read it. I have heard a tape of the piece, and I think it's going to work OK."
The Miller Williams poem getting that musical boost is called "For Lucinda, Robert and Karyn," a piece that addresses the formative years of his three children.
It was an unusual upbringing by any standard, peacocks and all. Lucinda was born in 1953 in Lake Charles, La., the oldest of the three, and started writing poetry in grade school. It's no wonder her first record would be called "Ramblin," because in his pursuit of tenure, Miller, who got custody after his divorce, moved the family around like nomads, stopping in New York, New Orleans, Atlanta, San Diego, Chile and Mexico City. Their transient lifestyle gave Lucinda a broad canvas for her writing, and that's reflected in the strong sense of place in her songs.
"Some may think it ironic," Miller says, "but I believe no one has a stronger sense of place than a person who has not stayed in one very long -- because a need for a recognizable, identifiable context becomes intensified when one has moved around a great deal."
"I think for me I figured it was the normal way things were," says Lucinda, talking with a sleepy Southern drawl from her home in Nashville. "I don't really remember feeling bad about it. When you're a kid, you just adjust to things. If that's what you've always done, it's not like this big traumatic thing. It might be if you lived somewhere for 10 or 15 years and built a base and then you had to move. If you start out moving every couple years, you just bounce around."
For years, Lucinda says, she carried around the line "Car wheels on a gravel road," unsure of where it belonged. It became the title track of her latest and most acclaimed record, a road song that refers to "Hank's voice on the radio," "a dusty suitcase" and concludes with her singing "Child in the backseat, about 4 or 5 years old/ Lookin' out the window/ Little bit of dirt mixed with tears/ car wheels on a gravel road." She says it didn't occur to her the line was autobiographical.
"I wrote that song and I didn't realize that I was writing about myself," she says. "[My father] said when he first read the song, that he recognized me in it. I hadn't even been aware of that. Sometimes my writing comes out in this stream-of-consciousness thing. That's why writing is such a good form of therapy. It helps sort things out, get things out of your system and down on paper."
Along with the many geographical points, Williams exposed his kids to an unusually broad mix of music when they were growing up.
"We had it around the house all the time," Lucinda says. "He was always listening to country music like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn and a lot of jazz, Coltrane and Chet Baker. And blues, a lot of country blues like Lightning Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt. Then I got into the folk and folk-rock stuff of the '60s like Dylan and Joni Mitchell. That was more my thing, but I think he appreciated it."
Sparked by Dylan's fusion of rock and poetry, Lucinda started playing guitar when she was 12 and just a few years later was bold enough to get up in front of her dad and his friends and play her songs. In the end, she chose the tougher musician life over the academic, dropping out of the University of Arkansas in 1971 after a brief stay.
"He didn't want me to quit school right away, like I did," Lucinda says. "I went for about a year of college and didn't continue. He was concerned maybe because he wanted me to have something to fall back on. He would have preferred if I had stayed and gotten a degree in something, 'cause it was a struggle."
Lucinda kicked around for years, working as a folk artist in New York and Austin, Texas. She recorded a pair of records for Folkways: "Ramblin," a timid collection heavy on folk and blues covers in 1979, followed by the more realized "Happy Woman Blues." In the mid-'80s she moved to Los Angeles and hooked up with a band for the first time, preparing for a rocking comeback called "Lucinda Williams," on the soon-to-be-doomed label Rough Trade, in 1988. It featured one of the most vivid and most ridiculously bitter breakup songs of all time, "Changed the Locks," along with "Passionate Kisses" and "The Night's Too Long," big hits for Mary Chapin Carpenter and Patty Loveless, respectively.
The accomplished "Sweet Old World" followed in 1992, but her masterpiece is considered to be "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," a record with a long, troubled history. The production began in 1995 under the helm of guitarist Gurf Morlix, but Lucinda didn't like the way it turned out. A year later, Steve Earle and producer Ray Kennedy came in to revamp it, and ultimately she brought in Roy Bittan, of the E Street Band, for a final swirl of B-3 organ and accordion.
Says Williams: "It was just one of those things."
A sweltering, country/blues-drenched trip through the South, "Car Wheels" was released in 1999 to critical somersaults and a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
"From the beginning, I've been interested in the attempts to put a label on her music," Miller says. "It's been called everything from country-rock to folk. In fact, her record won a Grammy for best folk album. 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' is not folk music. But they didn't know what to call it."
"Car Wheels" was packed with enough substance to sustain Lucinda fans for a good long time. As it turns out, it's not going to be another seven-year wait. Lucinda is treating us -- shocking us -- with a new record in June.
"If you had asked me back in the spring of last year if I could get a record written and recorded by the end of the year, I would have said no way," she says. " 'Cause I didn't have any of the songs finished. All of a sudden I just got into this writing frenzy and it didn't stop till I had it all done."
Recording with a bunch of guys from Dylan's band, she describes the record as being less narrative and a little more introspective and personal than the last one.
Are we to assume by the haste of this record that Lucinda isn't as big a perfectionist as we thought?
No, she laughs. "I'm still a perfectionist."
When Lucinda talks about her youthful fascination with '60s folk-rock, she says she saw the worlds of music and poetry converge.
But, she's quick to note, her father always saw them as distinct crafts.
"There was poetry," she says, "and there was songwriting."
Miller Williams is a poet. In fact, the Harvard Review would add he's "one of our finest poets." Although his academic career begin in the biological sciences -- "I only had three hours of freshman English" -- he has published 14 collections of his own work, numerous translations, textbooks and even a history of railroads. His honors include the prestigious Poet's Prize, the Amy Lowell Award for poetry, the Prix de Rome for literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Arts Fund Award for Significant Contribution to American Letters and the Henry Bellaman Poetry Prize. For seven years he was a member of the poetry faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. And the journal Visions International named him one of the 20 best poets now writing in English.
In 1996, he was called to Washington to compose and read for the second inauguration of Bill Clinton.
"Of course, I was deeply honored," Miller says. "I never felt more pressure in my life than the six weeks in which I was writing that poem. Sitting there in the stands behind Billy Graham and his son, I suppose I was as nervous as I've ever been about anything. Once it was my turn to go on, I walked down and stood at the microphone, I was simply giving another reading. The fact I has reading to 240 million people had no bearing at all on the way I felt."
With all those prizes and honors, Miller sounds just as proud of what was said in a recent review.
"One critic just last year referred to me as the 'Hank Williams of American poetry.' What he meant is that anybody can understand me, I think, I hope. I deal with the nitty-gritty of things."
He refers to his poetry as an "effective illusion of natural speech." It's an element he also finds in Lucinda's songs, but in a different context.
"I don't want to confuse poetry with song lyrics," he says. "They certainly have something in common in that they both are language. Poetry has to have its rhythms and its lyricism built in. You don't have the music to tell you how fast to go, how slow to go, how high and low to go. The poetry on the page has got to have the ability to say all that to the reader, so the language of poetry has to do a lot more than the language of songwriting."
Not that he puts one above the other.
"Not at all. I'm just saying that you cannot read all song lyrics as poems because most of them need the music, because they were written like that. It's just a different kind of art form."
Despite his association with a group of poets, Miller doesn't think he belongs to any particular movement in poetry.
"I pretty much go my own way and I think Lucinda does, too," he says. "If we have anything in common, I think it would be that."
As for that line the young Lucinda added to one of his poems, Miller says, "I don't want to give away my punch line. I'll save that for the audience."
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