Eric the Blue

Singer and songwriter Nanci Griffith died on this date, August 13, five years ago, in Nashville. She was 68–my age exactly.* According to her NYT obituary, here, the cause of death was unknown on account of her expressed wish that there be no formal statement or press release within a week of her passing. The article on her in Wikipedia says only that her management team attributed her death to “natural causes.” She had been diagnosed and treated for breast cancer in her early 40s and for thyroid cancer a couple years after that.

She called her parents “very, very irresponsible,” according to a detail in the obit, but her dad, who was divorced from her mom when she was 7, took her to see Townes Van Zandt when she was a young teen. By that time, she had already been performing gigs at coffee shops and clubs around Austin, Texas, where she grew up, and from Van Zandt she learned to make use of her Texas heritage in songwriting. She lived to perform with Van Zandt “Tecumseh Valley,” one of his songs that had made the deepest impression on her when she saw him that night with her dad.

Given her dysfunctional family background and pre-teen initiation into the night music scene, it’s perhaps a little surprising that, at 18, she enrolled at the University of Texas and graduated, four years later, with a degree in elementary education. She then taught kindergarten and first grade in Texas for a couple of years. The obit says she “put aside finger paints” when she began having more success with her music, which to me seems offensively dismissive of kindergarten teaching, but whatevs–she was indisputably doing well with music, though it took a while for her to land a contract with a major label. More than one of her songs became hits when recorded by another artist: Kathy Mattea had a breakout success with “Love at the Five and Dime“; Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson did “Gulf Coast Highway” as a duet; Suzy Bogguss did “Outbound Plane.” Griffith joked that it didn’t bother her and in fact she was relieved that “Kathy, not I, will have to sing ‘Love at the Five and Dime’ for the rest of her life.”

For reasons that are to me somewhat mysterious, being from “the South” seems to mean more to southerners than, say, being from the Midwest means to me. Is it because they lost the war? I don’t know, but something must explain everyone knowing that Nanci Griffith is a Texan, while hardly anyone knows that John Prine grew up in a Chicago suburb. One thing is certain: Griffith, who habitually performed with buttons promoting liberal politicians and causes displayed prominently on her guitar strap, would have been for Talarico. Her song that she said meant the most to her was “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,” which addresses “the troubles” in Ireland and connects them to racial bigotry in America–“if we poison our children with hatred . . . makes it a hard life wherever you go.”

She was the subject of tribute albums after her death, an indication of her peers’ high regard. Here are John Prine and Kelsey Waldon covering “Love at the Five and Dime” on More Than a Whisper: Celebrating the Music of Nanci Griffith:

I said other artists had hits with her songs, but sometimes it went the other way: here she is performing Prine’s “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”:

The girl from the dysfunctional family was married once, for about six years, and had no children. The detail from her obit that seems unintentionally in line with her musical themes is, “Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.”

*In a New Yorker cartoon, a strap-hanger on the subway is reading the obituary page over the shoulder of a fellow passenger. You see on the page not what would actually be there but what he’s thinking: “Just two years older than me! My age exactly!”