And while there was a poignancy and sadness to a lot of Griffith’s songs, she had a joy and verve in performing.
“I think when you play music, you have to love it to continue to play it, and you have to be true to what your main passion is,” she told me in 1993. “Otherwise you will be very unhappy later on.”
I got to see her perform a number of times, from a basement restaurant in downtown Hartford, to proper theaters in New Haven. One Fourth of July, she headlined Tanglewood’s annual concert, taking note of the holiday with Julie Gold’s “From a Distance” (which Griffith had recorded before Bette Midler did) and her own cautionary “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go.”
Her songs sometimes got more traction with other singers. Kathy Mattea had a country hit with her “Love at the Five and Dime”’ Suzy Bogguss scored with “Outbound Plane,” which Griffith wrote with Tom Russell.
The idea of what would become her most successful album, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” she had told me in an interview, went “back to your original inspiration of becoming a writer in the first place. It’s been a great year, not because not only do I get to do this material but I just to find myself writing all the time.”
She had named the album after Truman Capote’s first novel, which she clutches on the cover. It was part of a long tradition dating back to 1978 of holding specifically chosen books on her album covers, giving shoutouts to authors just as she did to songwriters she admired.
Of the Capote, she said “It’s just a beautiful book and it’s about finding your sense of place. And really, this music and these writers are my sense of place.”
So she included songs by John Prine, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie songs on the album as well as songs that had been her parents’ favorites. And its recording provided a kind of folk gathering as well, with Prine, Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, Leo Kottke, John Hartford, Odetta, Carolyn Hester, Guy Clark, the Indigo Girls among the many joining in. Dylan himself lent harmonica to her version of his “Boots of Spanish Leather,” something he later said he wished he had done on his own recording.
“I think Carolyn said it best when she said she felt like she arrived at a private folk festival,” Griffith said. “Anybody and everybody she hadn’t seen in years and was wanting to see again.”
A few years later, in a 1997 concert with The Crickets in New London, she reveled in the songs they had recorded with Buddy Holly, joining the band for versions of “Rave On” and “Well…Alright.”
But there also was an unexpected sense of loss in the show. Townes Van Zandt had died that New Year’s Day; she sang his stirring “Tecumseh Valley” in tribute. She dedicated her final song “The Wing and the Wheel” to her longtime bassist Roy Huskey Jr., who had died just two days earlier.
One spirit she constantly kept alive on her records and in concert was the folksinger Kate Wolf, who died in 1986 at 44.
In concert, Griffith would call Wolf her guardian angel before launching into her “Across the Great Divide.”
Griffith, also gone too soon, will likely be a similar inspiration to those who follow.
“The wing and the wheel, they carry us away,” Nanci Griffith once sang. “We’ll have memories for company long after the songs are gone.”
Beautiful. Thanks, Roger.