The Epic Return of Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams doesn’t remember a lot about that afternoon.

It was November 17, 2020, and the acclaimed singer-songwriter and her husband of eleven years, Tom Overby, had been quarantined in their East Nashville bungalow since March. Williams was using her newfound downtime to work on her memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, and record a series of performances called Lu’s Jukebox that would become tribute albums. She also had a number of songs left over from her most recent album, Good Souls Better Angels, that she wanted to develop. In just a week, she’d be nominated for her sixteenth and seventeenth Grammy Awards.

But when she tried to take a shower, Williams began to feel… exhausted. Her head swam; her legs wobbled. All she could think about was lying down. She grabbed some towels and curled up on the bathroom floor, where Overby found her minutes later. He helped her back to bed and kept an eye on her for the next hour. She asked him not to call the doctor. “I regret this,” Overby tells me. “I should have called right away.”

When Williams tried to get up again and couldn’t, Overby knew something was seriously wrong. Soon Williams was in an ambulance headed to the intensive care unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she learned that a blood clot had formed in the right side of her brain, leaving the left side of her body partially paralyzed. She and her husband didn’t come home for five weeks.

“Before I had one, I didn’t even know what a stroke was,” Williams, who is now seventy, says. “I heard about people having them, but I didn’t know you could die from one.”

She spent almost five months in a wheelchair. Two physical therapists worked with her every day, taking her through a series of strengthening and stretching exercises, first at a rehabilitation center, then at home. Gradually, with the help of a walker, then a cane, Williams learned to walk again. Her doctors were optimistic about her recovery, but none knew precisely how much function she might regain, or when. “I really didn’t think about how long it was going to take,” she says.

Most days, Williams tried to approach her condition with curiosity, not fear. “She was fascinated,” Overby recalls, almost as if she planned to conduct research inside her own body. Other times, the enormity of it overwhelmed her. “Am I ever going to be able to go sing again?” she asked Overby through tears one day. “You absolutely are,” he told her. The stroke had not affected her voice.

It had, however, sapped the strength from her left hand, meaning she couldn’t work the fretboard of her guitar, which she’d used to figure out the melodies on every song she’d ever written. Without it, she wondered, who was she as a writer, as an artist?

A future without music—her life, her comfort, the core of her identity since she was twelve—was no future at all. But “if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life with Lucinda,” her tour manager and close friend Travis Stephens says, “it’s to never f **king underestimate Lucinda.”

Lucinda Gayle Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the eldest of three children, but she grew up everywhere, or nowhere in particular. Her family moved a dozen times by her eighteenth birthday, mostly to cities and small towns around the South, but also to places as far away as Santiago and Mexico City. Her father was the renowned poet Miller Williams, who in 1997 read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration. Her mother was Lucille Day, an avid reader and talented pianist who loved Judy Garland and Ray Charles.

Lucille, whose dreams of playing music professionally had stalled, later drifted in and out of mental hospitals, battling depression and alcoholism. “Anything could happen, beautiful or horrible, at any given moment,” Williams writes in her memoir, including Lucille locking Lucinda in a closet because the three-year-old was crying. The singer looks back on her mother’s illness now with sympathy, not anger. “I could tell that everybody was trying,” she writes of her family. “And that seemed normal, the trying.”

Miller Williams became his daughter’s primary nurturer and protector. He wrote constantly, always carrying index cards in his shirt pocket to work out his poems. In the late 1950s, he befriended Flannery O’Connor and began visiting her home, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia. When he brought a young Lucinda with him, O’Connor let her chase the peacocks that roamed the property.

“What I learned was that every artist needs a mentor,” Lucinda Williams tells me. “Everyone needs someone that they feel like is a little bit better than they are—something to aspire to. For my dad, it was Flannery O’Connor. For me, it was my dad.” Even as a child, Williams paid close attention to the care and precision her father brought to his craft. He taught her about the importance of finding the right word for a poetic line, not just any word that will do. The difference between the two, as Mark Twain famously said, was the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Williams got her first guitar, a Sears Silvertone, when she was twelve. One of her father’s graduate students taught her the rolling fingerpicking style that would become her signature. It was 1965, the height of the folk music era and Beatlemania, the year Bob Dylan went electric. “Poetry was suddenly merging with kick-ass rock and roll on this album,” Williams writes of hearing Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. “I knew this was what I wanted to be.” That was also the year that Miller began a relationship with an eighteen- or nineteen- year-old woman who would later become Williams’s stepmother, and the year Williams began to struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Music offered her another way of coping—“my therapy for dealing with many of the traumas I suffered as a child,” she writes.

Finding her voice took time. Williams first tried to sing “high and pretty” like Judy Collins; then she discovered the lower, plaintive vibrato of Bobbie Gentry. Within a few years, she was writing her own songs and performing them for the writers and poets who attended her father’s raucous literary parties.

In her teen years, Williams developed a rebellious streak, especially in matters of social or political conscience. Her New Orleans high school kicked her out twice, first for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, then for ditching class to attend a protest against racism. She enrolled at the University of Arkansas, where her father settled in 1971, but dropped out after a semester to pursue music full-time. For good luck, her mother gave her a butter bean blessed by a priest in New Orleans; she carried it in her pocket when she played.

It would take eight years of waitressing and working odd jobs in New Orleans, San Francisco, Houston, and Austin before she cut her first record, at age twenty-six, and another decade in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville before she broke through. In Jackson, Mississippi, a roach once fell on her head during a set. In Slidell, Louisiana, she played behind chicken wire to avoid getting hit by beer bottles. By the time she won her first Grammy (for the song “Passionate Kisses,” which Mary Chapin Carpenter covered in 1992), she was forty-one.

Williams skipped the awards ceremony. “I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life.”

To a male-dominated, marketing-driven industry that fetishized youth, she didn’t belong—at least not in the way record executives wanted her to. There would be no spangles or shoulder pads; she wore dark eyeliner and leather jackets with her cowboy hats. Her songs blended folk and blues, rock and country, punk and zydeco, with an undercurrent of Southern gothic, as if Flannery O’Connor had joined Tom Petty for a late-night drive. Like traditional folk ballads, most of them didn’t have bridges, and they weren’t easily packaged for mainstream radio. They were songs for people who cared about storytelling: personal and direct, plain and profound, filled with misfits who were still worth loving.

Williams tried not to get “too spiritual woo-woo” about the writing process, but when the music was going well, she felt as though she became “a receptacle or vehicle through which the creativity flows.” Sometimes that happened in a bar, sometimes at a cheap motel. Other songs she crafted from a file of notes she kept in a briefcase. She revised her lyrics countless times, usually seeking her father’s feedback, then worked out the melodies on a ’72 Martin D-28. She was the storm, and her guitar drew the strike.

In life, anxiety and self-doubt plagued her. She dreamed she was trapped in a house filled with dark secrets and locked doors. But in her songs, all the doors were open. She could talk about every feeling, every heartbreak, every toxic—even terrifying—relationship. She went where the silence was and sang.

“Her voice was the most original thing of anybody that I knew,” says the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who met Williams in Texas in the early seventies. “She wasn’t trying to be Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell; she was trying to be Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf.” Her literary worldview combined with her lively rhythm guitar, honed over years of busking on street corners and gigging with blues musicians, granted her entry into what was then very much a “boys’ club.” She and Earle became friends, running in the same circles as the outlaw guitarist Blaze Foley and cult legend Townes van Zandt.

In 1995, Earle wrote the duet “You’re Still Standin’ There” with Williams in mind. Singing on Earle’s record introduced her to Ray Kennedy, a Nashville producer she still works with today, and an even wider audience. By then, she had already recorded the first version of her fifth album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Myths and legends about the making of Car Wheels persist. Over the course of five years, Williams recorded the entire album twice at several different studios and butted heads with multiple producers—including Earle—before nailing a sound that satisfied her. “Working in the studio,” she says, “whatever issues are going on with people seem to bubble to the surface. It becomes like one big therapy session.”

At one point, after weeks of smaller conflicts, Williams complained to Earle that she sounded too slick, too “overproduced,” and asked to rerecord her vocals for the song “Lake Charles.” Earle told her she didn’t need to. She insisted. “It became this long, labored thing, and nothing was getting finished,” Earle recalls. Finally, exasperated, he’d had enough. “When are you going to trust someone, Lu?” he said.

“Looking back,” Williams says, she knows Earle pushed her musically “because he cared, and he loved me and appreciated what I did.” But at that point, she couldn’t trust most other people with her work, and the journalists who wrote about her during this period in the nineties weren’t kind to her about it. They portrayed her as flaky and neurotic, shackling her with the label “obsessive perfectionist” for years.

In truth, Williams was petrified. For more than two decades, she’d been one of only a handful of women making this type of music, which mainstream record labels told her was “too country for rock” and “too rock for country.” She’d crisscrossed America playing small bars while pulling shifts at taco stands and health food stores. She’d lost several talented friends to suicide. Now that her career had finally taken off, she wanted to do her best work, and obsessing over small details became the way her brain tried to protect itself. That pressure built until she broke—or at least until she crumpled to the floor of the vocal booth and cried.

Williams and Earle later smoothed things out, largely because of how much Earle admired Williams’s underdog tenacity and her compassion as an artist; he still does. “This job is empathy,” he says. “People don’t give a f **k what happened to you, they care about what happened to you that also happened to them.” And Williams had a way of writing songs that made listeners feel understood.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was finally released in 1998, when Williams was forty-five. The vision she fought so hard to realize turned out to be the right one. Rolling Stone called it “near absolute mastery of the pop songcraft” and “excellent only when it isn’t superlative.” The album spanned the full emotional scale, from up-beat anthems to brooding ballads; pure silk laced with snake venom. Within a year, it went gold and won Williams a second Grammy, this time for Best Contemporary Folk Album. More important, it influenced an entire generation of younger artists. 

The last piece of the puzzle slid into place in 2009, when, after almost five years of dating, Williams married her manager, the former music executive Tom Overby, onstage at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Overby has coproduced all her albums since. Williams found in Overby, unlike the turbulent poet-on-a-motorcycle types she once fell for, a solid partner she could trust in her most vulnerable moments.

“I could sense she was going through something, and I just instantly cared about her,” Overby remembers of their first meeting, which happened the year after Williams’s mother died. “She’s just a very wide-open person. The most honest, the most loving and caring person. And all those qualities were apparent right away.”

Greg Leisz, a first-call session musician who has played on several of Williams’s albums, including Car Wheels, has seen a distinct shift in her since the early days. “Her songwriting has been of the same caliber since the very beginning of her career,” he says.