Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams began her career interpreting country, folk, and blues standards with a cool, almost academic reverence for the music. After a second album of original songs, she seemingly vanished for eight years. In 1988 she returned with a vengeance with Lucinda Williams, her highly praised singer/songwriter album that marked a critical turning point in Williams' career. She reached even greater commercial heights with 1998's masterful Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, her first gold album.

The daughter of a father who was a poet, college professor, and Hank Williams fan, Williams grew up listening to classic country. She was born in Louisiana, but her family relocated several times during her childhood to spots across the South, as well as Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. At 16, she discovered the writing of Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, whom she cites as a major influence on her songwriting. Williams attended college for a short time but dropped out in 1971 to devote herself to music.

Folkways signed Williams in 1978 and released her first two albums without fanfare. Between 1980 and 1988 she worked a series of odd jobs, moving in mid-decade from Austin, Texas, to L.A., where she took voice lessons to learn how to sound like Joan Baez, and married and divorced Greg Sowders of the Long Ryders. Much of the biting material on her self-titled comeback album dealt with her marriage.

Rough Trade collapsed in 1991, and Chameleon released her 1992 album Sweet Old World. Relocating to Austin, then Nashville, Williams kept busy into the ’90s. In 1993 she contributed a track to Sweet Relief, the benefit album for singer Victoria Williams (no relation), who suffers from multiple sclerosis, and lent her signature vocals to “Reunion” on Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s Spinning Around the Sun. Williams’ songs have also been covered by others: Patty Loveless scored a Top 10 country hit with “The Night’s Too Long,” Mary-Chapin Carpenter recorded a Grammy-winning version of her “Passionate Kisses,” and Tom Petty’s recording of Williams’ “Change the Locks” appears on the soundtrack to the 1996 movie She’s the One.

In 1994, after Chameleon Records became defunct, Williams briefly joined Rick Rubin’s American Recordings roster. That deal fell through, and Williams wouldn’t put out a new album for another four years. Meanwhile, there was considerable discussion in the press and among fans about the extent to which Williams’ perfectionist tendencies might be hindering the record’s progress.

The luminous, blues-steeped Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (#65, 1998), proved a triumph. The record not only boasted contributions from Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan, it won Williams widespread critical acclaim, including top honors in the Village Voice’s annual critics poll. Car Wheels also earned Williams a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and became the first commercially successful record of her career, going gold within a year of its release. Williams toured extensively after the album came out, both as a headliner and as an opening act for Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. Currently signed to the new subsidiary of Mercury, Lost Highway, Williams released Essence, which debuted at #28, in June 2001 to more tempered reviews.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)