“Surely place induces poetry…” – Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” 1957

“I looked across the football stadium and saw 56,000 enraptured Spaniards, pumping their fists in the air in fervent unison and bellowing at the top of their lungs, “I was born in the U.S.A.!”[1] In this 2012 opinion piece for the New York Times titled “The Power of the Particular,” columnist David Brooks describes his fascination with the pull Springsteen’s music has for European audiences. Springsteen’s songs are rife with imagery of post-industrial New Jersey, and Brooks argues it is the specificity of these references that gives Springsteen’s music its power: “the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes.”[2] This short column stuck with me. I too am drawn to Springsteen’s music for its anthem-ready portrayal of life rooted in a distinctive place. Novelists and songwriters alike craft a sense of place in their work to tap into our imaginations and amplify nostalgia, even for worlds far different from our own. In her 1957 essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty outlines why place is so crucial for good writing. She muses, “feelings are bound up in place. The human mind is a mass of associations—associations more poetic than actual.”[3] Songs are inextricably linked to our personal memories. When these associations are layered with the worlds lyrics evoke, music transports us.

Lucinda Williams outside of Los Angeles in 1988. Photo by Greg Allan.

Lucinda Williams is not yet the international icon Bruce Springsteen is, but her songs are inextricably linked to another America: the South. She pulls you along the flat highways of the Mississippi Delta, into juke joints, and across Lake Pontchartrain. Before I moved to the South, I visited by listening to her songs, which so often include the musical names of southern cities: Greenville, Little Rock, Jackson, Lafayette. Williams released her first album thirty-six years ago and still defies the boundaries between country, rock, Americana, alternative rock, blues, and folk. Her voice is both vulnerable and fierce, and she sings with longing that undulates between intensely visual descriptions. Her music is a poignant and evocative portrayal of the South. Her lyrics, together with the manner in which she draws together and expresses her layered influences, make her a southern writer.  To begin, I will introduce Williams and the world she grew up in. I’ll elaborate on two key influences, the poetry of her father and southern documentary photography. Using examples from her albums Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998) and Essence (2001), I will demonstrate how her music reveals these roots while crafting—as Brooks would put it—an evocative story landscape of the South. Finally, drawing from an audience question-and-answer session with Williams at the Carolina Theater in Durham, North Carolina, on January 26, 2015, I will zero in on her song “Get Right with God” and unpack its rich layers.

The Southern Education of Lucinda Williams

Folklorist William Ferris argues that the oral, visual, musical, and literary traditions of the South are deeply intertwined and that artists within each medium continually draw from one another.[4] For example, the giants of southern writing, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Ernest Gaines, were deeply influenced by photography that tried to capture “the beauty and untamed spirit of the South.” [5]  Each of these writers also took photos of their own. Photography is a means to document and open up the richness of the everyday, moments which are given voice in writing and in songs. In struggling to evoke the South in all its painful and beautiful complexity, Ferris continues, writers “listen, and the cage in which they contain [this] voice may be the novel, short story, poem, or play.”[6] By looking closely at the connections between southern creatives, a tightly interconnected web of influences, friendships, and parallels is revealed. Lucinda Williams is also part of this conversation. In her case, it is her songs which give voice to South. 

Courtesy the Miller Williams family, via the LA Times.

Print by Julie Belcher. Pioneer House Letterpress.

Williams was born on January 26, 1953 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and grew up moving across the South. Her father, Miller Williams, was a renowned poet best-known for delivering his poem “Of History and Hope” at President Clinton’s second inauguration. During Lucinda’s childhood, her father moved her and her two younger siblings almost yearly as he pursued new teaching assignments in college English departments. By 1971, the family had lived in Vicksburg, Mississippi; Atlanta and Macon, Georgia; Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Mexico City, Mexico; and Santiago, Chile.[7] These moves provided Williams with a vernacular southern education and her father—who she grew close with following his divorce from her mother—filled their home with both literary and musical influences. Miller’s father was a Methodist minister and Lucinda’s mother’s father was a devout Methodist—who acted more like a Baptist. [8] Her early years were full of gospel and hymns. Miller, who was agnostic himself, was a devout Hank Williams fan who also introduced his daughter to the Delta blues. She cites Skip James, Bukka White, and Robert Johnson as inspirations.[9] Williams also loved the music of the folk revival, and she listened to Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie—even John and Alan Lomax’s “Folk Music USA.”[10] Her childhood was saturated with music and literature; her father brought authors such as Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, and Charles Bukowski by the house.[11] As a young girl, Williams remembers writing often. Today, she writes constantly, saying, “I’m always writing, my mind is going all the time…When I start writing songs, I’ll get all my notes and spread them out. When I get in that mode I’ll write for ten days straight.”[12] For Lucinda, hearing Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was akin to an awakening. As music scholar Buzzy Jackson describes, “It was Dylan who showed her that the literary tradition she loved…could be wedded to the music that moved her.”[13]

While still a teenager, Williams dropped out of the University of Arkansas and moved to New Orleans, where she started a regular gig singing at Andy’s, a bar on the folk music circuit. She developed her voice and her sound while trying to emulate her heroes. She released her first album when she was twenty-six in 1979 on the anti-commercial Folkways Records label. Ramblin’ was primarily covers of traditionals and blues songs, and with this album, Williams was surely hoping to enter the good graces of the (dwindling) folk music scene. Her following release, Happy Woman Blues (1980), was all original songs. On this record, we are introduced to a young artist exploring her muses while living outside of the South. In “Happy Woman Blues,” she sings, “Tryin' to find lightness in the dark/Tryin' to live my life, tryin' to get satisfied/My mind is in the city but my heart is in the countryside.” In the following years, Williams further distinguished her sound by moving away from Folkways and releasing Lucinda Williams (1998) on Rough Trade. Her music continued to be genre-defying and she had a perfectionist’s vision, which led to clashes with label executives. While working on her early albums, Williams moved between New York City, Austin, Nashville, and Los Angeles. Today, she lives in Los Angeles and has released eleven studio albums.

Lucinda Williams. Photo by Michael Wilson. 

Despite sporadic recordings and artistic changes, her voice captivated listeners from the start. In a 1998 feature in Rolling Stone magazine, critic Chris Mundy declared Williams “is possessed of one of the most distinct voices in music.”[14] Pained, strong, gritty, and sweet, her singing draws you in and pulls at your heart. While you feel the hurt she sings of, she also soothes you—her songs relatable and her expertly chosen words assure you that joy will return. Williams’s lyrics often recount loves lost and friends taken away too early, and even her happier songs are sometimes marked with the awareness that these moments are fleeting. As she told the Alanna Nash of Rolling Stone in 2014, “A lot of times, I just write about the eternal sadness that never goes away.”[15] Years earlier, she explained to Mundy, “It might be a wistful nostalgia for something that once was.”[16] I can’t help but infer that Williams’s wistfulness must be tied to her transient childhood. I grew up moving every couple of years myself, and these phases of discovery and departure accumulate into a self-aware and bittersweet perspective on life. Her father sensed this too, telling the Rolling Stone, “She was raised restless and rootless, in a sense—rootless in terms of geography. I don’t think she was ever rootless in terms of the heart.”[17]

William’s heart undoubtedly lives in the South. She now records for her own label, Highway 20 Records, named in tribute for the interstate that connects her childhood homes in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia.  She’s been called “a southern obsessive” with “one foot in Faulkner’s South, and one foot in Garth [Brook’s].”[18] When describing her voice, music scholars and critics fall back to southern imagery: Chris Mundy writes her songs are “dripping with swampy Southern blues and country” and Buzzy Jackson writes her “voice was pure in a deep Southern way, its drawl curling around the edges of lyrics like blotting paper on a hot, humid day.”[19] Williams is acutely aware of her southernness—perhaps even more so having lived in both California and New York during her early career. She has said, “I’ve been defensive about being a Southerner…Any time anyone deals with those kinds of barriers or prejudices or stereotypes, it makes you want to delve into that area more…”[20] Through writing songs, Williams confronts her identity and revisits the homes of her childhood. She also pays tribute to her formative influences.

One of her most important teachers was her father. Williams and Miller were very close. Her father’s guidance was a constant presence in her life and their relationship tightened when he won sole custody of her and her siblings. In Williams’s words, “I wouldn’t be who I was without my dad. It was almost like an apprenticeship. When I was living at home I was always showing him things I wrote and he would critique them. I learned from trial and error.”[21] Miller was dedicated to his craft. He was celebrated for the simplicity and power of his poetry—eventually earning the National Arts Award in 1997. His work is referred to as “poetry of the particular,” the title of a 1991 compilation of critical essays. In the poet’s John Ciardi’s words, Miller wrote “about ordinary people in extraordinary moments in their lives. Even more remarkable, doing this, is how perilously close he plays to plain talk, without ever falling into it.”[22] Avoiding obtuse vocabulary or stuffy meter, Miller’s poetry is both approachable and unforgettable. He writes with the dry wit of an intellectual, on subjects ranging from philosophy, to religion, to personal ads, and everyday conversations. Sadly, Miller passed away on January 1, 2015, from complications related to Alzheimer’s. When Williams appeared in Durham, it was just over three weeks after his death, and she spoke tenderly of his influence on her:

He influenced my writing a great deal. I wouldn’t be who I was without my dad. It was almost like an apprenticeship. When I was living at home I was always showing him things I wrote, and he would critique them. I learned from trial and error….He taught me about the economy of writing. Once you have it written down, go through and trim the fat….. One important thing I learned from him was on descriptive words. I was describing a woman in a song, a woman in a dress—and he said instead of saying a dress, or a blue dress, why not say a sad blue dress—that was the best thing he taught me. [23] 

Miller taught Williams to use as few words as possible and to increase her writing’s impact with carefully chosen visual details—details that conjure up entire landscapes of experience.

Williams was also greatly influenced by southern documentary photography, including the work of Birney Imes. Imes lived in Columbus, Mississippi, for his entire life, photographing the prairie lands of northern Mississippi and the Delta—anywhere he could travel to by car. In 1990, Imes published Juke Joint Photographs, a collection of photos of the interiors of these Delta roadhouses. Williams loved these photos: so much so she made Turk’s Place, Leflore County (1989) the cover of her “magnum opus” Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998).[24] In the lilac twilight, brightened by colored lights, a simple, white, one-story home sits at the end of a curved road, devoid of people and hinting of unknown possibilities within. You can almost hear the crunch of stone under rubber tires, the distant thump of muffled music. In his foreword for Juke Joint Photographs, the writer Richard Ford writes, “what we like about these pictures fortifies how we feel about the place—its people, its rooms, its glimpsed green fields with trees in the distance. There is a Mississippi out there. Once it looked like this, and we like it.”[25] By this, Ford implies that Imes’s photos capture both the real, complex, everyday Mississippi, but also the Mississippi of our imaginations: a limitless and timeless region we visit only in our minds, persisting in the details we choose to see.

Birney Imes, Turk’s Place, Leflore County, 1989.

By drawing inspiration from the work of Imes, Williams imbues her songs with this same sense of nostalgia for an irretrievable reality. She occasionally pulls lyrics directly from photographs, zeroing in on subtle details masterfully framed by the camera. For example, the third track on Car Wheels, “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotton” (a title surely inspired by bathroom graffiti), is a string of images of a mythical juke joint:

There’s no good there’s no bad
In this dirty little joint
No dope smoking, no beer sold after twelve o’clock
Rosedale, Mississippi, Magic City Juke Joint
Mr. Johnson sings over in a corner by the bar
Sold his soul to the devil so he can play guitar…
House rules, no exceptions
No bad language, no gambling, no fighting
Sorry, no credit don’t ask
Bathroom wall reads, “Is God the answer? Yes.”

Photos from Birney Imes's Juke Joint Photographs.

Most of these house “rules” are pulled from Imes’s photo Ferry Club, Lowndes County (1989) and rearranged and transformed into a melody. As lyrics, these words spill out in Williams’s soulful drawl over a steady drum line punctuated by controlled guitar chords that move the song forward. In the background, an accordion rounds the sound out and again roots us in the Delta. This song is simple, like the poetry of her father, and packs its punch with carefully crafted details. Listening to “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” we are both transported to the Delta and encouraged to invent our own narrative within this space rebuilt by Williams. In the words of RJ Smith in a 1998 article for SPIN magazine, these details “add up to a sense of place that’s passing into dust beneath your scrutiny.”[26]

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is often described as Williams’s masterpiece, and it is during this period of her artistic career her writing is the most evocative. The album won accolades in the Village Voice (newspaper of the folk scene Williams so dearly wanted to be a part of) and it also earned her a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1999. Called a “heartbroken country classic” and a “masterpiece that resounds with immediacy,” the songs on the album take the listener on a journey through Williams’s South—with titles including “Lake Charles,” “Greenville,” “Jackson,” and “Down the Big Road Blues.”[27] During this same period (Car Wheels took over three years to finesse and finally release), Williams wrote songs which were released on her subsequent album, Essence.[28]

“Bus to Baton Rouge” is one of these songs and is a beautiful example of the way in which Williams powerfully evoke places through carefully chosen vignettes. The song opens with the soft, circular rhythm of brushes on a drum set. Williams sets the scene in spring: camellias and honeysuckle are in bloom. She takes us into a humble childhood home, “built up on cinderblocks” on “soft swampy land” with closed front rooms and a “company couch covered in plastic [and] books about being saved.” The home is empty; it lives in her memory and she conjures it in our mind’s eye. Regardless of whether or not the listener has visited Louisiana, we can imagine walking through the rooms of this home. Her sweet, sad singing signals to us that this is a painful homecoming, as do the lines: “Ghosts in the wind that blow through my life/Follow me wherever I go.” This song is a poem, and by singing it with her signature soulfulness, Williams elevates these rooms into a stage where our own childhood memories can unfold. This is what Eudora Welty described in “Place in Fiction.” Welty claims, “Surely place induces poetry, and when the poet is extremely attentive to what is there, a meaning may even attach to [her] poem out of the spot on earth where it is spoken, and the poem signify the more because it does spring so wholly out of its place...”[29] “Bus to Baton Rouge” is the work of a Southern writer with the ability to infuse her words with the voice of her region, drawing from lessons learned from her father and the perspectives of legendary documentarians.

The Many Layers of “Get Right With God”

Lucinda at the Carolina Theater in Durham, January 26, 2015.

To further my argument, I want to focus on Williams’s song “Get Right With God,” also part of Essence. This past January, Williams participated in the Carolina Theater’s “Film Acoustic,” a series in which musicians select a favorite film, play it, and answer audience questions following the screening. For her event, Williams selected John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), based on Flannery O’Connor’s debut novel. Tickets were just $15, and I was not even sure she would appear in person—it seemed too good to be true. She was there and came onstage dressed in all black, holding a glass of wine, and joking that it was, after all, her birthday. Her hair, walking the line between gray and blonde, was tousled in her signature tangled mane, defiantly framing her face. She seemed skeptical of the first questions, but as she spoke of her father, growing up, her love for other songwriters, and O’Connor, she eased into her chair and treated us to four acoustic performances. One of the songs she performed was “Get Right with God,” which she said was directly inspired by O’Connor and this film. From this conversation, and with additional investigation, I have pieced together the many sources of inspiration for this song. The lyrics for “Get Right with God” are deceivingly simple. This song was written in conversation with southern literature, photography, and Williams’s own understanding of the region’s vernacular spirituality.

Flannery O'Connor's 1949 novel was made into a film in 1970 by Director John Huston.

Flannery O’Connor is often called a “Southern Gothic” writer and her work figures largely in Williams’s world. Her writing is full of themes of the grotesque, of violence, and of redemption. Rather than writing on southern belles, O’Connor chronicles the experiences of fanatics, eccentrics, and outcasts. As Melvin J. Friedman said in an early portrait of the author published in 1962, “She seems always intent on first disenchanting us—mainly through a systematic puncturing of the myth of southern gallantry and gentility.” [30] Perhaps it was O’Connor’s interest in cutting to the truth that attracted Miller Williams to her work. O’Connor was one of Miller’s greatest mentors. When the family lived in Macon, Georgia, Miller would take his daughter to nearby Milledgeville to visit her. As a child, Williams remembers chasing the great author’s peacocks around the garden while she and her father waited to be welcomed into the house.[31] It was O’Connor that encouraged Miller to write poetry and turn his back on his biochemistry degree.[32] In the liner notes of her latest release, Williams writes to her father, “As Flannery O’Connor was to you, you were my greatest teacher.”[33] Years later, when she was sixteen, Williams rediscovered O’Connor on her own terms “and fell madly in love with her writing.”[34] Journalist David Hadju penned my favorite description of Williams. In his words, she is a woman who “gives the impression that she would take you home in a blink, if she thought you wouldn’t bore her, and that you would bore her if you haven’t read Flannery O’Connor.”[35]

O’Conner published Wise Blood in 1954 and in her author’s note to the second edition, she writes it is “a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.”[36] Wise Blood is certainly a dark comedy: dark in its portrayal of blind faith and comic thanks to the antics of its characters and O’Connor’s cunning descriptions. The novel follows Hazel Motes, who left Eastrod, Tennessee, for the army when he was eighteen, carrying only a bible (the only book he reads) and his dead mother’s wire-rimmed glasses. Returning after four years of service, “Haze” finds nothing in Eastrod and moves on to the city Taulkinham. He is consumed by a fear and hatred of Jesus, which in turn amplifies his existential guilt. Haze was terrorized by his grandfather preacher and fire-and-brimstone revival culture as a child, but “he knew by the time he was twelve years old he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild figure…”[37] Haunted by this nightmarish Jesus, he chases down Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ. Desperate to rid himself of his spiritual guilt, Haze first insists that he believes in nothing, and then founds the “Church of Christ Without Christ.” He does so in defiance of Asa, who he later discovers is a lying crook. Enoch Emery, who claims to have “wise blood,” helps his friend Haze by stealing “a new jesus:” a shrunken mummy from the city museum. When Haze realizes his efforts are in vain (his one parishioner only wanted company for a brothel visit), he takes up self-mutilation and blinds himself with quick lime. Wise Blood is rife with liars, sinners, the earnest, and the hopeful. O’Connor builds a critique of oppressive, revivalist religion by exposing her characters as ridiculous, selfish creatures.

Wise Blood—O’Connor’s novel and the later film—resonated with Williams. After the screening, she wrly joked, “Wise Blood is such a realistic depiction of the South. I know y’all know what I’m talking about.” She continued, “There’s humor, it’s dark, it’s depressing. My life had a lot of that growing up...I identified with this movie because it confronts religion. I had two different Methodist grandfathers. My dad became agnostic.”[38] Miller wrestled with religion in his poetry, notably in, “Why God Permits Evil: For Answer to This Question of Interest to Many Write Bible Answers, Dept. E7 (ad on matchbook cover).” Miller takes this matchbook ad as a launching point to question faith and our human willingness to believe. Dept. E7 is just one of many rooms he imagines in “an old shirt factory” on the “South Side of Chicago” where “there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman/upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown/holding in one hand a handwritten answer/holding in the other hand a brown/plain envelope.”[39] Her envelopes go un-mailed. Our questions are unanswered, and yet faith persists. Like her father, and like O’Connor, Williams admits, “I’m fascinated with the idea of God and Satan, good and evil.”[40] Southern gothic literature and Wise Blood feed this fascination. Williams says, “I identified with [this writing]. I saw it in real life. And it was dark. There’s just something mysterious and beautiful about it. A lot of that deals with the Pentecostal, deep South biblical stuff. I grew up riding down the highway and seeing those signs that said, “Repent! Repent! Jesus Saves.”[41]

Photo by William Ferris, 1977. Courtesy the Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The phrase “Get Right with God” is drawn from a photo of one such sign, a hand-hewn cross painted with the same words in red and black, taken by William Ferris in 1977. Ferris, who was documenting the blues culture of the Delta in the 60s, saw the cross driving down Highway 61—that infamous backbone of the blues. Pulling over on what he remembers as a rainy, nasty day, Ferris stopped to take a few photographs. Jutting out from the surrounding stark fields, the cross stood as a warning, a threatening voice breaking the silence. Ferris found the scene both “beautiful and frightening.”[42] It could be from a page of Wise Blood. As Haze attempts to leave Taulkinham he sees words painted in white on a large roadside boulder: “WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP?” Passing the rock, Haze looks more closely and sees “two words at the bottom of the sign. They said in smaller letters, Jesus Saves.”[43] Ferris’s photo later became part of a Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (“SITES”) exhibit on folk arts and crafts of the American South, organized by the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.[44] No doubt Williams came across the promotional materials for the exhibit, which included a postcard of this particular photo. When she released the eponymous single in 2001, the cover prominently featured this cross. 

Williams looked to other photos of the South when writing “Get Right with God.” At the Durham event, she described her captivation with the work of Shelby Lee Adams. Adams is best known for his black-and-white photographs of the isolated communities in the mountains of Kentucky. Like Williams, he grew up moving across the region, fueling an interest in its peoples and culture: "I grew up in the back seat of my parents' car…every year we lived in a different city."[45] His photos of Appalachia are often portraits that forefront the region’s poverty. For this, Adams is sometimes criticized for freezing his subjects in time or exacerbating existing stereotypes.[46] Williams was struck by his photos of holiness religion, saying, “I was taken aback that it was contemporary photography.”[47] A series of this work was published by Adams in Appalachian Portraits in 1993 (just three years after Imes’s Juke Joint). These photos, with titles like “Holiness Boy with Serpent Box and Poison Jar,” “Snake Hunter,” and “Holiness Hands with Serpent and Bible” render the most extreme measures of the faithful on paper. In the last photo, a serpent rests its head on scripture, momentarily still, cradled by hands willing to take this risk. In Adams’s work, as in Wise Blood, evil and pain are part of the path to salvation. Aware of this strong connection, the editors of Appalachian Portraits included an excerpt by O’Connor as a preface to the book. This page includes the line: “To know oneself is to know one’s region.”[48] Sense of place is once again center stage, and Williams’s influences come full circle.

Shelby Lee Adams, Holiness Hands with Serpent and Bible, Happy, Kentucky, 1987.

I would risk the serpent's bite
I would dance around with seven
I would kiss the diamond back
If I knew it would get me to heaven
'Cause I want to get right with God

Its name taken from a roadside cross, her song “Get Right with God” ties together the darkness of Wise Blood, the visuals of Adams’s photos, and Williams’s distinctly rooted writing style. In this song, she takes up the more sinister side of southern faith and plays the role of a believer willing to risk death and inflict pain in exchange for spiritual cleansing. This is a turn of genius—rather than critiquing this world from the outside, Williams puts herself at its center. Over a catchy rolling blues beat layered with electric and slide guitar, she sings, “I would risk the serpent's bite/I would dance around with seven/I would kiss the diamond back/If I knew it would get me to heaven /'Cause I want to get right with God/Yes, you know you got to get right with God.”  In the last verse, Williams sings, “I asked God about his plan/To save us all from Satan's slaughter.” As in Wise Blood and “Why Does God Permit Evil?” her questioning goes unanswered. In the end, those willing to tempt death are no closer to learning the truth of human existence. “Get Right with God” is bound deeply in a complex web of southern influences, and in addressing and questioning faith it skirts the usual pop song subjects. And yet, it is also catchy and raucous, and you do not need to know the depth of its layers to enjoy the song. It was a hit, and won a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal in 2002. “Which is odd,” says Williams, “because it’s not a rock song.”[49] Regardless, it is an excellent example of her skill as a songwriter, lyricist, and her deep sensitivity to her home—even the more challenging and complex worlds of the South.

Conclusion

As Lucinda Williams defies tidy categorization in a single music genre, she also looks to a complex variety of southern art to fuel her distinctive songwriting. Raised on church music, the blues, Hank Williams, and songs of the folk revival, she eventually developed her own sound. Some of the best examples of her songwriting are on her albums Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Essence. Trained by her poet-father, Williams writes lyrics that are whittled down to the most essential parts, and her carefully chosen details conjure the American South in a powerful way. Regardless of your own experience, you are pulled into the worlds of juke joints, long highways, humble homes, and devout belief. The “story landscapes” Williams crafts are the backdrops for emotional narratives that unfold in her songs. In her acclaimed song “Get Right with God,” Williams layers influences including the writing of Flannery O’Connor, documentary photography, and vernacular spirituality. Williams is a southern writer and her work needs to be included in the discussion of this region’s art, music, and literature.

(Left) Birney Imes, The Social Inn (detail), Gunnison, 1989. (Right) Williams's latest release.

In 2014, Williams released her latest album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. In many ways, she has returned to her roots across its two discs and twenty tracks. The first song, “Compassion,” is a musical interpretation of one of her father’s most moving poems. The album name is drawn from the last line. This poem is a lesson for living, and as Williams says, she learned from her father how to “never lose my sense of wonder at the world and about compassion.”[50] Williams sense of wonder of the South is as strong as ever. The cover of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is pulled from another photo in Birney Imes’s Juke Joint Photographs: a heart pierced with a knife, painted in luminescent colors. This time however, Williams’s name is added to the wall in hand-painted letters. It’s fitting. Having drawn so much from the American South, we can only hope that the mark of Williams’s songwriting—and her position as a southern writer—becomes a permanent contribution to the region’s creative landscape.

Notes

• [1] David Brooks, "The Power of the Particular," The New York Times, June 25, 2012, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/opinion/brooks-the-power-of-the-particular.html?_r=2
  
• [2] Brooks, “The Power of the Particular.”
  
• [3] Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays & Reviews (New York: Vintage, 1990), 188.
  
• [4] William Ferris, "Southern Literature: A Blending of Oral, Visual & Musical Voices," Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 141 v. 1 (2012).
  
• [5]William Ferris, "Southern Literature,” 143.
  
• [6] Ibid., 141.
  
• [7] Chris Mundy, "Lucinda Williams' Home-Grown Masterpiece," Rolling Stone no. 792, August 6, 1998, accessed April 18, 2015, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost.
  
• [8] Lucinda Williams, Audience Question and Answer Session at the Carolina Theater, Durham, NC, January 26, 2015.
  
• [9] Chris Woodstra et. al, eds., All Music Guide to Country: The Experts' Guide to the Best Recordings in Country Music (Winona, Minnesota: Hal Leonard Corporation, 1997), 514.
  
• [10] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [11] RJ Smith, “Lost in America,’ SPIN, July, 1998, 80.
  
• [12] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [13] Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 270.
  
• [14] Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.”
  
• [15] Lucinda Williams in Alanna Nash, "Lucinda Williams Talks Renewed 'Spirit' on Double Album," Rolling Stone, October 6, 2014, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/lucinda-williams-where-the-spirit-meets-the-bone-album-interview-20141006#ixzz3Xi6UYQo8
  
• [16] Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.”
  
• [17] Miller Williams in Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.”
  
• [18] RJ Smith, “Lost in America,” 79-80.
  
• [19] Buzzy Jackson, A Bad Woman Feeling Good, 24. Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.”
  
• [20] Lucinda Williams in Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.”
  
• [21] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [22] Michael Burns, ed. Miller Williams and the Poetry of the Particular (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 3.
  
• [23] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [24] "Lucinda Williams Biography," Rolling Stone, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/lucinda-williams/biography
  
• [25] Birney Imes, Juke Joint Photographs (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 11.
  
• [26] RJ Sharp, “Lost in America,” 80.
  
• [27] Mundy, “Lucinda Williams.” "Lucinda Williams Biography," Rolling Stone.
  
• [28] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [29] Welty, “Place in Fiction,” 123.
  
• [30] Melvin J. Friedman, "Flannery O'Connor: Another Legend in Southern Fiction," The English Journal 51 no. 4 (1962): 236.
  
• [31] David Hadju, Heroes and Villians: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009), 128.
  
• [32] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [33] Ben Crandell, "Lucinda Williams Shares a Mentor's Compassion," SouthFlorida.com, January 20, 2015, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.southflorida.com/music/sf-fort-lauderdale-lucinda-williams-20150120-story.html
  
• [34] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015."Lucinda Williams Biography," Rolling Stone.
  
• [35] Hadju, Heroes and Villians, 129.
  
• [36] Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1949), author’s note.
  
• [37] O'Connor, Wise Blood, 22.
  
• [38] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [39] Miller Williams, Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 68-70.
  
• [40] Lucinda Williams in Nash, "Lucinda Williams Talks.”
  
• [41] Ibid.
  
• [42] William Ferris, conversation with Katy Clune, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 25, 2015.
  
• [43] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 74-75.
  
• [44] William Ferris, February 25, 2015.
  
• [45] Shelby Lee Adams, Appalachian Legacy: Photography by Shelby Lee Adams (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 7.
  
• [46] Claire O'Neill, "A Lens On Life In The Kentucky Hollows," National Public Radio, January 26, 2012, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/01/09/144928277/a-lens-on-life-in-the-kentucky-hollows
  
• [47] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [48] Shelby Lee Adams, Appalachian Portraits: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993).
  
• [49] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.
  
• [50] Lucinda Williams, January 26, 2015.