The Wise Blood of Lucinda Williams

A year later Williams encountered Blind Pearly Brown, a street singer who strolled the streets of downtown Macon with his black suspenders, beat-up acoustic guitar and a sign that read, “I am a blind preacher. Please help me, thank you.” He often sang hymns from his mentor, the legendary bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, and 6-year-old Lucinda was entranced. In a sense, her career has been an attempt to combine the power of O’Connor’s literary fiction with the power of Johnson’s gospel blues, as passed on through their acolytes Miller Williams and Blind Pearly Brown.

To do that, she has had to marry the violent passions and controlled economy of O’Connor’s language to the matching qualities of Johnson’s music. Williams has often managed that alchemy, but on Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone and The Ghosts Of Highway 20, she does it more consistently than she has since the brilliant 1988-98 trilogy of Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World and Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. Those three albums established her reputation after her first two records in 1978 and 1980 had been more or less ignored.

She recaptures that old mojo by allowing the songs’ themes to rise naturally from the imagery and storytelling rather than drawing the conclusions for the listener. She does it by collaborating with two master guitarists, Frisell and Leisz, who also appear on jazz master Charles Lloyd’s new album. And she does it by remembering her father’s lessons.

“One of my favorite sounds in the world was hearing my dad on the typewriter,” Lucinda recalls. “He was very into the craft of writing, of working on the poem after you get the idea — to not just throw a lot of words out there, but to refine it. He always talked about the economics of writing, of using as few words as possible. When I told him I took lines from one song to use in another, he said, ‘We call that cannibalization.’ He had a word for everything.

“‘Rather than just saying, ‘A picture of a woman in a dress,’’ he’d tell me, ‘say ‘A woman in a sad blue dress.’ That’s what I learned from him: the importance of painting a picture and imagining yourself as the listener. When I was working on ‘Drunken Angel,’ it was pretty much finished, and I had this line, ‘blood flows out of a hole in his heart.’ He said, ‘I think it would be better if it was ‘the hole in his heart.’’ I never took a writing course, but I had him as a teacher.”

Lucinda not only took the title for Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone from her father’s poem “Compassion,” but also set the poem to music and made it the album’s opening track. Recorded as a slow blues with just her acoustic guitar and world-weary voice, the song asks us to have sympathy for everyone, even those who are conceited, ill-mannered or cynical because no one knows “what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”

That admonition to give people a break applies not just to strangers but also to one’s own family. Perhaps the key song on The Ghosts Of Highway 20 is “Louisiana,” a frankly autobiographical song about Lucinda’s fraught childhood there. Once again the sad, wistful guitars of Frisell and Leisz set the mood, while the singer’s imagery paints a picture: “Swatting at a fly, hearing the neighbors talk, it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.”

But this is not sentimental nostalgia; she’s determined to recapture both the “sweetness” and the “rough” of life with her mother Lucille who would make her kids “sweet coffee milk” on a good day and scream about the smallest infraction on a bad. But taking the advice of her father’s poem “Compassion,” Lucinda strives to understand the roots of her mother’s suffering in the harsh discipline Lucille received from her own father, a fundamentalist preacher.

“That was my life growing up in Louisiana,” she says. “My mother suffered from pretty severe mental illness. My father took the kids when they split up; that gives you some idea. In the song, I’m giving you some of what she experienced growing up. Her dad was a fire-and-brimstone preacher, while my dad’s dad was very liberal. All that stuff about not sparing the rod and the blood, that was her family.”

Lucinda had a hard time with the song; she worked on it for a long time before she was willing to let it go. And when it came time to record it, she had trouble getting through a take without breaking down.

“I wasn’t sure I should be so bold with it,” she confesses; “it’s so dark. But in the end I’m a writer like my dad. One of the things he always said was, ‘Never censor yourself.’ It bothers some people, but that’s what art is supposed to do. I remember when I was in Nashville once, sitting in the back room of Tootsie’s. This kid asked me about how to become a songwriter, and I said, ‘You can’t be afraid to reach down deep and show what’s down there.’ He said, ‘Oh, I could never do that.’ It was one of the saddest things I’d ever heard.”