Nanci Griffith, a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter with one foot in folk and the other in country and blessed with an aspiring voice who was equally at home in both genres, died Friday. She was 68.
Her death was announced by her management company, Gold Mountain Entertainment. The statement did not specify where she died or the cause of death, only: “It was Nanci’s wish that no further formal statement or press release be made a week after her death.”
While Ms. Griffith often wrote political and denominational material, her most popular songs were closely watched stories of small town life, sometimes with painful detail in the lyrics but typically sung with a deceptive beauty. Her song “Love at the Five and Dime”, for example, traces a couple’s romance from its teenage origins when “Rita was 16 / hazel eyes and auburn hair / she made the Woolworth counter shine” to old age when “Eddie traveled”. with the pub ribbons / until arthritis took his hands / Now he’s selling insurance on the side. “
The song was a country hit in 1986 – but for Kathy Mattea, not Ms. Griffith. While Ms. Griffith was the first person to record “From a Distance” by Julie Gold, the song later became a huge hit for Bette Midler.
Ms. Griffith sometimes displayed a folky nonchalance towards mainstream success. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that she didn’t mind that Ms. Mattea had the hit version of “Love at the Five and Dime”: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing this for the rest of her life and I not T. “
Nanci Caroline Griffith was born on July 6, 1953 in Seguin, Texas, about 35 miles northeast of San Antonio, to Marlin Griffith, a book publisher and singer in barbershop quartets, and Ruelen Strawser, a real estate agent and amateur actress. “I come from a basically very dysfunctional family,” she told Texas Monthly in 1999. “I had very, very irresponsible parents.”
When she was a child, her family moved to Austin; her parents divorced in 1960.
When she was 12, Ms. Griffith wrote songs and played in Austin clubs. A formative experience was when, as a teenager, she saw a performance by the melancholy Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt; She particularly identified with his song Tecumseh Valley, about a doomed young woman named Caroline, and it became an integral part of her songbook.
In 1988 she told the New York Times, “When I was young, I listened to Odetta records for hours. Then when I started high school, Loretta Lynn came with me. Before that, country music hadn’t had a guitar-playing woman who wrote her own songs. “
After attending the University of Texas, Ms. Griffith stayed in Austin. She worked as a kindergarten teacher while devoting herself to music and performing alongside artists such as Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. She put aside finger paints when she won a songwriting award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas; In 1978 she released her first album “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods”. It was the first of four folk albums that she released for tiny labels in eight years, during which she also toured continuously.
In 1985 she moved to Nashville, where she was rewarded with a major label contract. Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 1987 praising her signing with MCA Nashville as a positive harbinger for the country music industry, calling her “one of the most gifted writers to carry on a southern country version of denominational singer-songwriter mode.” that dominated Los Angeles rock in the early and mid-1970s. “
She put together a band, the Blue Moon Orchestra, that stayed together for over a decade, and spiced up their finely crafted songs with country pop muscles, a mix she called “folkabilly”.
However, her record label was confused by her. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that “the radio person at MCA Nashville told me I would never be on the radio because my voice hurt people’s ears.” After two albums targeting the country market received positive reviews but only sold mediocre sales, she made two albums trying to reach pop fans, an effort that was successful in Ireland but not in the United States States. Her breakthrough came when she switched the label to Elektra and returned to her folk roots.
Her 1993 album “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (named after Truman Capote’s debut novel) included 17 versions of songs by her folk ancestors, including Malvina Reynolds and Woody Guthrie. Hailed by critics as a homely delight, it won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and was awarded gold for sales of more than 500,000 copies.
Ms. Griffith followed in 1998 with the album “Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful)” and the book “Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices: A Personal History of Folk Music”, which was less successful, however.
Ms. Griffith was a living link not only with previous songwriters, but also with the music of Ireland (she played with the Chieftains) and Texas (she toured with the surviving members of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets).
She repeatedly played through two cancer attacks and a painful case of Dupuyten’s contracture, an abnormal thickening of the skin on the hand that severely restricted the mobility of her fingers.
In 2008 the Americana Music Association presented her with the Lifetime Americana Trailblazer Award. In 2012, the year in which she released her 18th and final studio album “Intersection”, she explained her motivation to the New York Times: “I put things into music and words that have annoyed and hurt me. Suddenly they were there and ready to come out. “
Mrs. Griffith was married to the Texan singer-songwriter Eric Taylor from 1976 to 1982. Complete information on the survivors was not immediately available.
In 1993, at the age of 39, before she had won a Grammy and her commercial prospects were uncertain, Ms. Griffith told Rolling Stone what motivated her:
“Longevity – that’s probably the brass ring for me. I still want to hear my music come back to me at 65. “
Jordan Allen contributed to the coverage.
