Nanci Griffith, a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, whose music straddled the line between folk and country, died on August 13, 2021 at age 68.
Griffith was best known for her colorful, narrative tales of small town life that she sang in her warm, crystalline pure voice with a Texas twang — many of which were covered and recorded by other artists. Honored by the Americana Music Association with its Lifetime Americana Trailblazer Award in 2008, Griffith released her 18th and last studio album, Intersection, in 2012.
Born on July 6, 1953 in Seguin, Texas, Griffith moved with her family to Austin as a child. Her parents divorced in 1960. Five years later, she began writing songs and performing them in Austin clubs. “When I was young, I listened to Odetta records for hours and hours,” she told The New York Times in 1988. “Then when I started high school, Loretta Lynn came along. Before that, country music hadn’t had a guitar-playing woman who wrote her own songs.”
Following graduation from the University of Texas, Griffith worked briefly as a kindergarten teacher before turning to music full-time in 1977. After being named a winner in the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Competition, she released her first album, There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, in 1978. Griffith followed that up with 1982’s Poet in My Window on another regional label and two nationally distributed releases on Philo, Once in a Very Blue Moon and The Last of the True Believers, prior to moving to Nashville in 1985 and signing with MCA, which released her major label debut, Lone Star State of Mind, in 1987. It was also around this time that she put together the Blue Moon Orchestra, with whom she recorded and toured for more than a decade.
Before moving to Elektra Records and returning to her folk roots, Griffith made the country charts with such songs as “Lone Star State of Mind, “I Knew Love,” and “Trouble in the Fields,” and recorded several more albums for MCA. These included Little Love Affairs (1988), Storms (1989), which saw her veer in a more adult contemporary or pop direction, and Late Night Grande Hotel (1991). Her 1993 Elektra release Other Voices, Other Rooms – featuring covers of 17 songs by other songwriters who had inspired her – won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Griffith was also the first artist to record Julie Gold’s “From A Distance,” although Bette Midler later had a big hit with it.
[Here’s a link to listen to Griffith’s recording of “Love at the Five and Dime”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgGG61nQX0w]
A number of notable artists have also covered Griffith’s songs, with a few attaining more airplay and accolades for them than she did herself. “Love at the Five and Dime,” perhaps Griffith’s best-known song, was a 1986 country hit for Kathy Mattea. Griffith appeared to be nonplussed by that. In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, she said: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing that for the rest of her life and I don’t.” For her part, Mattea wrote on her Facebook artist page on August 13: “… We were not close friends, Nanci and me, but our paths were entwined in a very specific way. We changed each other’s lives. And we got to sing together a few times. … I could write about so many songs, but Five-and-Dime was my special connection to her. So I’ll leave it at that. She was brilliant.”
Among the other artists who have recorded Griffith’s songs are Mary Black, Suzzy Bogguss, Emmylou Harris, Maura O’Connell, and Dolly Parton. Bogguss, who had a country hit in 1991 with her rendition of “Outbound Plane,” a Griffith co-write with Tom Russell (a longtime friend, who co-wrote other songs with her) that appears on Griffith’s Little Love Affairs album, was among those very saddened to hear of Griffith’s passing. In an Instagram post, Bogguss wrote: “My heart is aching. A beautiful soul that I love has left this earth. I feel blessed to have many memories of our times together along with almost everything she ever recorded. I’m going to spend the day reveling in the articulate, masterful legacy that she’s left us.”
Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, hailed Griffith as “ a master songwriter who took every opportunity to champion kindred spirits.” In an official statement on behalf of the Nashville-based institution,” he wrote: “Her voice was a clarion call, at once gentle and insistent. Her brilliant album The Last of the True Believers is a template for what is now called Americana music, and her Grammy-winning Other Voices, Other Rooms is a compelling guide to 20th century folk songs. Nanci offered gifts that no one else could give.”
Pete Kennedy, who, along with wife and musical partner Maura Kennedy, was part of Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra for a decade, writes:
“The name ‘Nanci Griffith’ is synonymous with Texas. Not the Texas of the oilmen in their mansions on the hills and long black limousines. Nanci’s voice, sometimes dry like a tumbleweed, sometimes rich and full like the Colorado River after a spring rain, was the voice of the working people–the oil riggers down on the Gulf of Mexico and the red dirt farmers out west. She sang about their struggles, their heartaches, their sun-drenched days and their dark nights of the soul. Most of all, she sang about a small-town Texas girl’s dream to see the world at the other end of the two-lane blacktop that stretched out past the city limits, through the mesquite and the cottonwoods. There’s a light beyond those woods, and Nanci grew up longing to stand in it. Her songs are gems that reflect that longing, and as she once wrote, when the diamonds fall, they burn like tears. She’s finally home now from that long, long road.”
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