This issue of Music Regular actually predates the newsletter. I’ve been thinking about it since the summer of 2017. I’ve orated versions of it in passenger seats, on barstools, outside venues, and at countless dinner parties. If I’m being honest, the past year-and-change of this project has effectively been a trojan horse for this sole purpose: getting you, dear reader, to listen to Nanci Griffith.
Nanci Griffith (1953-2021) was a Texas singer songwriter who glided between country, folk and Appalachian influences. Throughout her 30+ year career, her balance in regards to notoriety and fame was always a little uneven. Obituaries and adjoining comment sections that appeared in the wake of her passing often paint her as being too folksy (ew), too genuine (ok) or too open-hearted (hell yeah) for the bright lights of commercial success. Despite major outlets like The Guardian, Rolling Stone and New York Times publishing said obituaries, it’s still a little unclear to me the degree to which she’s known in 2022.
Most listeners in my world(s) have never heard of her, save for a couple people from the US who both recall their mothers listening to her music in their childhood. She won a Grammy in ‘93 for an album of covers, and scored her first bonafide hit in Ireland in ‘87 with a cover version of Julie Gold’s ‘From A Distance’, four years before it became an international chart topper for Bette Middler. Conversely, her own songs have proven more popular when other people sing them: Kathy Mattea scored a Top 10 hit with Nanci’s ‘Love At The Five And Dime’ in ‘86 (the same year the original was released) and Suzy Bogguss had a Top 10 in the early 90s with ‘Outbound Plane’.
But I digress…
We don’t care for charts and awards here at The Regular, we just want the good stuff, no matter the glitz and glamour. So below you’ll find some personal notes and nostalgia on my favorite Nanci album, 1986’s Last Of The True Believers, a real Late Summer Classic™.
click on the cover to listen or go your own way ~~
Nanci Griffith - Last Of The True Believers (1986)
The first time I came across Nanci felt truly miraculous. I stumbled upon her music on an endless scroll, bleary-eyed in the wee hours. I was on a typical research mission: certainly a little bit stoned and listening to countless obscure, experimental projects in preparation for another year of curating EVERYSEEKER. I’d like to say I can remember exactly which blog it was but, alas, I cannot. What I do remember is the image of the embedded youtube video: Nanci in a white dress with acoustic guitar leading an incredibly dorky looking backing band beneath a bandstand so rustic it seemed as though they were performing underneath the actual stage. The clip is from BBC’s New Country: Gettin’ Tough and it features a few performances along with an interview with Nanci behind the wheel of a Ford Econoline. It stood out especially because it was the only non-noise entry on the blog (the inclusion of which was chalked up to a lingering love of her music that outlasted the blogger's childhood and bucked his current inclinations for the harshest of gnars).
I return to this idea of Nanci’s music reaching both back to and beyond childhood because I really feel it touches on what makes her music great. The America of her music is admired with a certain earnest naiveté felt foremost through her wide-eyed, tallgrass vocal stylings. But in her songwriting and the songs she chose to cover, it’s also scrutinized and cracked open to show its complications. Take for example Trouble In The Fields, or Eric Taylor’s Deadwood, South Dakota, the compositional equivalent of a revisionist western commenting on colonialism.
Last Of The True Believers is sung largely from this first place, this wide-eyed love, and its necessary counterpart: heartbreak. Across the album, Nanci romanticizes her characters (who dance down the aisle of a Woolworths, pictured so dreamily on the front cover) while teasing out their pain and hardships with empathy and acute detail (as Larry McMurty did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that Nanci clutches on the back cover). The one exception to this rosey/thorny bouquet of feelings is ‘Lookin’ for the Time (Workin’ Girl)’, a decidedly political song sung from the perspective of an empowered sex worker.
My personal fave on the album is ‘Banks Of The Pontchartrain’. I felt instantly drawn to its rollicking mood; the way it balances hope and longing, mixing the measured stasis of the present and the momentum of nostalgia. The summer I discovered this music, I went roadtrippin’ from Halifax to New Orleans with a dear friend. We spent the better part of a week taking secondary highways, soaking in the views of the Blueridge Parkway, swimming in motel pools and hanging with banjo playing crustpunks in the hills of North Carolina. Our arrival in NOLA was marked by a passage across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, a 24-mile bridge that takes you over the famed estuary and into the north of the city. And you better believe we had this song cranked to eleven as the lake came into perspective. A perfect song about a longing for place/belonging anchored by a body of water.
I’m super interested in feedback / dialogue / suggestions. If you have ideas about the newsletter, want to share music with me, have specific questions / requests, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And please: share this newsletter with a pal if you feel so inspired!
Yrs.,
Andrew P.
andrewdanielpatterson [at] gmail [dot] com
grew up listening to nanci <3 thanks for this