PHOTO: DANNY CLINCH | A 2020 stroke never slowed the creativity of Lucinda Williams. Rather, it could be argued it has ignited her to do more than before, issuing a new album in last year’s Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, performing a series of live-streamed concerts covering favorite artists that resulted in a half dozen more releases since 2021, writing a memoir in Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You, also out last year, and near constant touring since she returned to the stage three years ago.
Her current outing with her solid band brings one of two different shows—a more conventional concert prioritizing Rock n Roll Heart amid her classics, the other a continuation of her more strictly autobiographical Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets tour.
It was the latter that played the Lincoln Theatre before a hushed, grateful audience experiencing essentially the same as the book-based show she gave at nearby Tyson’s Corner, VA a year ago, that mixes reminiscences with songs, illustrated with home movie type video accompaniment.
In a way, it’s a perfect format for any artist with a long career, telling her story of musical development chronologically through tunes that influenced her before touching on early compositions, career highlights, and a couple of recent tunes that reflect what she’s learned.
With her father a poet and her mother a music major, Williams seemed destined to become a Southern-bred singer-songwriter. To hear her tell it though, a major early musical inspiration was a street blues singer and preacher in Macon she saw when she was five and who she enshrined in the song, “Blind Pearly Brown.”
Acquiring a guitar and fashioning herself a female folkie, she was determined to learn the likes of Elizabeth Cotten, Bob Dylan, and Hank Williams, whose songs she included before turning to her own early songs “Happy Woman Blues” and “Crescent City.”
Throughout her career, Williams has had a knack for surrounding herself with top-notch guitarists. In her current tour she has two—Doug Pettibone, with whom she’s worked for years, who brought a whole different feel when he sat behind a pedal steel guitar occasionally; and Marc Ford, onetime guitarist for The Black Crowes. Backed by the sharp rhythm section of David Sutton on bass and Brady Blade on drums, the two guitarists traded one tasty solo after another.
Williams, for her part, was melancholy that her medical problems still prevented her from playing her own guitar—something she said she hoped was a temporary situation. But sitting or standing (with help of a crew member) her grainy drawl sounded as melodic as ever, as if she had been focusing all her concentration on it in the absence of a guitar.
It was her 1998 fifth album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road that got her the greatest acclaim, and its songs dominated her set, aided by the fact that each came with its own story, often tied to a tragedy—the death of a poet in “Pineola,” an old boyfriend in “Lake Charles,” and the country singer Blaze Foley in “Drunken Angel.”
Her thoughts turned to her parents toward the end of her set—her mother in “Heaven Blues” and her father, whose poem was put to music in “Dust,” and who was remembered in “Ghosts of Highway 20.” The closing “Where the Song Will Find Me” showed a determination to continue what she does—“I’ll ride the whistling train / And I’ll get off at every stop / ‘Cause I wanna be where the songs can find me.”
It was an effort to leave the stage and return for an encore (a performative gesture even Springsteen doesn’t bother with anymore). But when she did, she offered an influence she hadn’t previously mentioned—The Beatles. With the impending December 6 release of her seventh jukebox album, Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road, she sang George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” And she had just the right guitarists to give it full expression.
