My Tribute to Nanci Griffith

(And the Stories Behind Her Songs)

	Above:  My tattered and well-traveled "Other Voices" book, by Nanci Griffith.

My heart broke on Friday when I read that Grammy-winning artist Nanci Griffith had passed away at age 68.  She was an endearing and influential singer-songwriter who for many decades created music that touched the lives of millions of people around the world, including me. 

I never met Nanci.  To be honest, the closest I ever got to her was sitting 20 feet from the stage at one of her concerts.  But her powerful, sincere and intelligent songs were an important part of my life for many years and always will be.  Although I hadn’t listened to Nanci’s music in a while, after reading the sad news on Friday I’ve been playing her albums and watching some of her old music videos.  Then I decided to create this webpage so I could pay tribute to her and share her story with others, wanting in my own small way to help preserve her extraordinary legacy.

Along with sharing her story, I also wanted to share some of her music.  Nanci had a passion for sharing great music with her listeners and it didn’t matter if they were her songs, or written by an aspiring songwriter, or written a hundred years ago.  On each of her albums she almost seemed to say, “Here’s some great music I think you should hear.”  She cared less about selling albums and making scads of money, it seemed, than about passing great music along to others.

In her spirit of sharing rather than selling, therefore, I decided to do the same here on my (non-monetized) website.  But in this case, it’s HER music that I want to share.  So as Nanci might say, here’s some great music I think you should hear, along with the story of how I fell in love with it.

––  Click on any blue bolded songs below to hear them and see the lyrics.  ––

My First Taste of Her Music

	Above:  That's me (left) listening to our family's hi-fi stereo in the 1960s with my older brother, Dwight.  This is where my love affair with music started.

Music, as you know if you’ve been reading my websites, has always been an important part of my life.  I listen to music constantly:  at work, at home, in my truck, and just about anywhere I go.  Being single I can do that, since I don’t have to argue with anyone about the “when," “which album,” or “how loud.”  From the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, I listened to artists like James Taylor, the Eagles and Emmylou Harris, first on eight-track tapes and vinyl, then on cassettes and, ultimately, CDs (this was long before MP3s and iTunes).  And though I’ve always lived alone, I’ve never been lonely because music has been my constant companion through life.

But my life changed forever one Saturday evening in 1991 when I watched an episode of “Austin City Limits."  That night, the venerable TV music show featured a lively young folksinger from Austin, Texas, with a powerful voice that belied her diminutive size.  Her name was Nanci Griffith and she captivated me with personal songs that described her life’s experiences and, in other songs, a range of vivid characters.  I recognized some of the songs she sang but didn't realize she had written them.  The song that stuck with me the most from that show was Ford Econoline, the story of a Mormon wife who split from her family and went traveling across the country in her van because she wanted to sing.  I mean, who writes songs like that?  I decided that this Nanci Griffith was my kind of artist! 

A few weeks later, as I was walking through the music department of the nearby Fred Meyer grocery store, I happened to see one of Nanci’s CDs.  It was called “One Fair Summer Evening" and was a live recording of a concert she had performed in a Houston nightclub in 1988.  I bought the CD, then took it home and listened to it.  Then I listened to it again, and again.  I loved Nanci’s lyrics and edgy voice, and the more I listened to her music, the more I liked it.  The country singer Iris Dement once said the same thing:

“Years ago, a friend gave me a tape that he’d made of this person, Nanci Griffith, so I listened to it and I liked it.  It seemed the more I listened to it, the more I liked it.  And then I got to where I liked it so much I couldn’t turn it off.”

I listened to Nanci's CD more than a dozen times over the next few weeks and got hooked.  Then I bought another CD of hers and then another, and then I started looking for everything she had ever recorded.  This was back in the pre-Internet days of the early 1990s, long before Amazon or music streaming when, if you wanted a CD, you had to find it either in a store or through a mail-order record club (remember those?)  Over the next few years I cobbled together every CD that Nanci had ever recorded, even her earliest recordings, which were rare and hard to find. 

One reason I loved her music was because she often sang about other people's lives, and usually from perspectives I’d never considered.  Through her songs, she paid tribute to Dust Bowl farmers (Trouble in the Fields), revealed the lonely life of a troubadour (Workin' in Corners), sympathized with an aging rancher (Montana Backroads), lauded a hard-working streetwalker (Lookin' for the Time), and on the other side of the coin, disparaged an arrogant yuppie (One Blade Shy of a Sharp Edge).  Each of her albums was a whirlwind of people, places and emotions.

Nanci strongly supported her fellow musicians, so on her albums she seamlessly included songs (like Roseville Fair and St. Olav's Gate) from lesser-known songwriters, not because they would boost her sales, necessarily, but because they were great songs that she wanted to share with people who might otherwise never hear them.  By doing that, she opened the doors of the music industry to many struggling songwriters, including Lyle Lovett.  She also opened her heart to her listeners more than any singer I knew, with her intimate tales of personal love and loss.  Some people wear their heart on their sleeve, but Nanci SANG with her heart on her sleeve.

In Nanci I had found a new favorite artist.

Nanci’s Early Life

Nanci Caroline Griffith was born in Seguin, Texas, near San Antonio, in 1953 into a family with deep Texas roots, her ancestors having arrived through the port of Galveston in the 1800s before moving to west Texas.  When she was very young, Nanci and her two siblings moved to Austin with their parents.  Her father was a printer and her mother was a real estate agent, but both parents embraced the beatnik counterculture and were "hippies" of their day.  However, as Nanci admitted later, they were not the best of caregivers when she was young. 

Although her family was largely dysfunctional, as she admitted later, she was comforted by the music that surrounded her as she grew up.  At their home in Austin, her dad frequently played traditional Appalachian and folk music, including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.  He also occasionally sang in a barbershop quartet.  And her mother, who embraced the Beat lifestyle more than her father, loved playing jazz and big band music on the family’s hi-fi stereo.

Nanci’s parents had divergent political views and grew apart, however, and they divorced in 1960 when Nanci was seven years old.  It was a dark time in young Nanci’s life, but she found solace in writing poetry.  She bought a Yamaha acoustic guitar when she was nine and learned how to play it by watching a PBS show while developing her own unique fingerstyle method, not having a teacher to show her the traditional way.  She started writing songs at the age of 12 by putting her poetry to music – her first song, which she wrote in 1965, was called "A New Generation" – and two years later she began performing professionally, at the Red Lion coffeehouse in downtown Austin.  Owned by a family friend, the Red Lion on Sixth Street was the first Beat coffeehouse in Austin.  The original act had cancelled that night, so the owner called Nanci:

“I did my first professional gig at the age of 14 on a Thanksgiving evening downtown at the Red Lion Cabaret.  I made $11.  It was a great evening.  Nobody came, I was terrible – but I made 11 bucks  <smiles>.”

	Above:  An early performance.

Though her parents were divorced, they strongly supported and encouraged Nanci’s musical aspirations.  Her dad once gave Nanci advice to “never become complacent with your art” on a handwritten note that she kept and cherished for years afterwards.  Her parents drove her to different clubs in Austin, a city that was a hotbed of live music then and now, so she could hear her favorite artists and, occasionally, perform. 

She attended a Catholic high school in Austin, left home at 16, then enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin in the early 1970s with thoughts of perhaps becoming a kindergarten teacher.  She continued performing music in her spare time, though, and dreamed of being a songwriter, not a singer.  However, people seemed to like her voice. 

In the mid-1970s, she decided to give up her teaching plans and instead focus on music, then she traded in her small Yamaha guitar for a Martin D-28 that was almost as big as she was.  Her new guitar would become a lifelong companion.  She recorded her first album, “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods,” in 1978 on a small label.  To produce the album she used her savings with help from a personal bank loan, then she used the album's sales proceeds to produce her second album in 1982 with help from another personal bank loan.  She released two more albums over the next four years, both also self-financed, using bank loans and the proceeds from one album's sales to produce the next. 

Nanci continued recording strong albums through the 1980s, which many consider to be her peak years, with songs that described her experiences of life, love and heartache.  Other songs painted a wide palette of semi-fictional but colorful characters – she really put the “folk” in folk music – including that Mormon wife in her Ford Econoline.

Her First Four Albums:  1978 - 1986

	1978:  There's a Light Beyond These Woods		1982:  Poet in My Window

	1984:  Once in a Blue Moon		1986:  The Last of the True Believers

Her Career Starts Rolling

	Above:  Nanci in her television debut on Austin City Limits in 1985 with her beloved Martin guitar that was almost bigger than she was.

Nanci’s first few albums had a raw, unpolished sound but featured honest and affecting songs.  In a way I like her early albums the most because they were unvarnished and pure Nanci without embellishments.  Their sound was clean and unadorned – mainly because she couldn't afford anything more.

She honed her craft through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s while performing at countless nightclubs and bars throughout Texas and the Southeast, an experience she described in her wistful song, Workin' in Corners.  One of her most beloved venues was the Anderson Fair, a barn-like structure in the arts district of Houston, which had opened in 1969 by its two founders named Anderson and Fair.  Originally intended as a coffee house, the Anderson Fair morphed into a performance venue for an eclectic group of aspiring singer-songwriters, including Nanci and Lyle Lovett. 

The Anderson Fair operated on a shoestring budget for many years and portions of the structure, including its red brick floor, had been built piecemeal from salvaged buildings in Houston.  In the early 1980s, Nanci wrote Spin on a Red Brick Floor to salute Anderson Fair and she performed the song in her 1988 music video, "One Fair Summer Evening," which was recorded there.  The "Tim" she mentioned throughout the song was the Fair's dedicated owner, Tim Leatherwood.  In an interview several years later, Nanci said, "Anderson Fair, in a historical context for American music, is as important as the Grand Ole Opry is to country music."

Nanci was a prolific and profoundly influential songwriter, and although she never had huge commercial success as a singer, many of the songs she wrote in the 1980s became hits for more renown artists.  This included Love at the Five and Dime for country singer Kathy Mattea, Outbound Plane for Suzy Bogguss, and Gulf Coast Highway for Emmylou Harris. 

Many of her songs were intensely personal, being based on her life’s experiences and genuine emotions, one reason that her small-but-devoted group of fans adored her.  As an example, from age 12 until 17, she had dated a boy, John, in Austin who, shortly after their high school senior prom in the early 1970s, died in a terrible motorcycle accident.  It was a traumatic event for Nanci and for many years afterwards she wore a necklace that John had given her.  She never discussed her close relationship with John in interviews later, the loss being too painful, but she expressed her intense and lingering grief by referring to him in several songs that she wrote over the next 20 years. 

Most notably, she mentioned John (twice) in There's a Light Beyond These Woods, the title track of her 1978 debut album.  The touching song described a real-life childhood friend of hers in Austin named Mary Margaret (Maggie) Graham, their dreams for the future, and how their three lives had intertwined.  When Nanci and Maggie were young, they often rode their bicycles up to Mt. Bonnell in Austin in the evenings and flung bottlecaps at the lights of Austin, which they could see through the woods.

In 1984, Nanci covered a song that indirectly referred to John’s death, Ballad of Robin Winter-Smith, which was the true story of a motorcycle stunt performer who had died in an accident in 1979 in front of 10,000 people in England while trying to set the world’s record for jumping over cars.  She included the song on her album "Once in a Blue Moon," the cover of which featured a photo of Nanci sitting alone at a table in a cafe while gazing at a motorcycle helmet across from her on the table.  A year later, in 1985, she made her debut performance on “Austin City Limits,” opening her half-hour set with that song.

Nanci referred to her boyfriend John and his death again three years later in So Long Ago, a poignant song that appeared on her 1988 album, aptly called “Little Love Affairs.”  A few years later she admitted that writing the song was cathartic because she had been trying to deal with John's death for nearly two decades without directly addressing it.  She sang the song during her "Other Voices, Other Rooms" tour in 1993 (and sometimes with a tear in her eye) but otherwise rarely performed it in public.

She wrote dozens of deeply personal songs throughout her career and performed them in front of large audiences, which was ironic because Nanci was known to be a private person when she was off-stage.  On a personal note, I can understand that incongruity because, although I’m private and introverted, preferring to spend an evening alone reading a book rather than socializing with friends in a loud setting, I enjoy writing about my travels in my websites and have described personal events there that I don’t often talk about even with close friends.  My travel websites are one way I express myself and describe my experiences, and Nanci was perhaps the same way when she wrote songs.

In 1976 when she was 23, two years before releasing her first album, Nanci married a singer-songwriter, Eric Taylor.  She recorded some of his songs on her early albums, including Dollar Matinee, which she included on her debut album in 1978 (Eric sang the lead on the song and Nanci sang harmony).  But they divorced after six years of marriage and Nanci never remarried or had children.  Six years after their divorce, in 1988, she released I Wish It Would Rain, a song she had written about her breakup with Eric, referring to "her love from the Georgia pines" (Eric was born in Atlanta) and hoping to "find that love at 22" – the year before they married – "here at 33."  She and Eric remained friends, however, and he sang harmony on several of her subsequent records and occasionally helped her through difficult times for many years after their divorce.  Eric died in 2020 at age 70 from liver disease.

A Move to Nashville

In 1985, and with three albums now under her belt, Nanci left her beloved Austin and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, partly to be closer to the music industry.  She bought a century-old farmhouse outside of town, put in a small recording studio, and by the late 1980s had become well-known in the singer-songwriter community, not just in Nashville but around the country.  But despite being popular among her relatively small group of devoted fans, Nanci never struck it big commercially as a singer.  That was mainly because, while she dabbled in many styles throughout her career, she refused to waver from her fundamental roots in folk music, a genre that was considered passe by the 1980s.  She often referred to her unique musical style as "folkabilly." 

Music executives didn’t know how to market a folkie like Nanci to mainstream audiences and tried nudging her in different directions but, from a commercial perspective, it never quite worked.  She proudly carried the banner of folk music through the 1980s and 1990s, three decades after its commercial heyday had passed, but at times she grew frustrated that her songs never received much radio airplay.  That was partly because her edgy and almost-childlike voice was an acquired taste for some.  One radio DJ claimed that he never played Nanci’s music because her voice “hurt his listener’s ears." 

After having self-financed her first four albums, she signed with a major label, MCA, in 1987, a significant milestone in her career.  Shortly afterwards, Nanci received a song called From a Distance from an aspiring East Coast songwriter she had never met named Julie Gold.  In her letter to Nanci, Julie said she had sent the song to several producers, all of whom had turned it down, so Julie asked Nanci what was wrong with it.  Julie also asked Nanci to change the song however she wanted, if Nanci wanted to record it.

Nanci, however, immediately loved the song just as it was and recorded it on “Lone Star State of Mind," an album that, like her earlier efforts, had a distinct country flair (along with her follow-up album, "Little Love Affairs").  The song became a minor hit for Nanci in Europe and a year later she included it on her video and live CD, “One Fair Summer Evening.”  Several other artists later recorded “From a Distance” and in 1991, it became a #1 hit for Bette Midler.  It went on to win Julie the Grammy award for “Song of the Year” that year and, in her acceptance speech, she thanked Nanci – the two had become good friends by then – for having rescued it.

Nanci toured in Europe frequently through the late 1980s, especially in Ireland where she occasionally performed and recorded music with the traditional Irish folk music band, the Chieftains.  She even maintained an apartment in Dublin for a while, but she had a falling out with the Chieftains later, in the mid-1990s.  As I recall, it was regarding what Nanci perceived to be their implicit support for the militant Irish organization, the IRA. 

She referred to the Irish “troubles” in her 1989 song, It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go, describing in that song the situation on Falls Road in Belfast, a common site of contention between Catholics and Protestants.  Nanci tended to favor liberal causes and her fallout with the Chieftains reflected her growing political outspokenness as her career matured.  That trend increasingly influenced both her songwriting and her actions – including her decision to leave Texas – and prompted a bit of backlash among some of her followers.

In an effort to boost her sales, MCA decided to move her away from country in the late 1980s and towards pop music and a more mainstream audience, and she reluctantly complied.  In 1989, she released "Storms" followed in 1991 by "Late Night Grande Hotel," albums that featured a more polished and lush sound, which appealed to some of Nanci's fans but alienated others.  She decided to return to her folk and country roots in the early 1990s, so she switched labels to Elektra, a move that had an immediate impact.

Nanci's Albums:  1987 - 1989

The mid- to late-1980s was probably her most prolific period as a songwriter.

	1987:  Lone Star State of Mind		1988:  Little Love Affairs

	1988:  One Fair Summer Evening (Live)		1989:  Storms

"Other Voices" and a Grammy

In 1993, and now recording with Elektra, Nanci released her tenth album, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” using the title of Truman Capote’s first novel.  The book was about returning home and, in that same vein, the album featured Nanci’s interpretations of songs that had influenced her when she was young or had been sung by artists who inspired her in her younger days, some of whom joined her on the record. 

"Other Voices" was a dramatic departure from her earlier works, being Nanci's first album to not include any of her own songs, and some critics dismissed it as simply an album of covers.  However, her fans (including me) loved it and it was among her biggest commercial successes, rising to #54 on the Billboard chart and earning her the Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1994.  It was her lone Grammy win among the five nominations she received during her career.  But as much as I liked "Other Voices," (which was arguably her "breakthrough" album), I found it ironic that after spending 15 years writing exceptional songs for herself and others, Nanci had finally received high public and critical acclaim for creating an album that included none of her own songs.  Nevertheless, she had a deep, personal connection with every song on the album. 

Nanci’s first track on “Other Voices, Other Rooms” was Across the Great Divide, a song about the transition between life and death.  It was sung from the perspective of a person who was nearing the end of their life and was written by northern California folksinger, Kate Wolf, six years before she died of leukemia in 1986.  Shortly after Kate’s death and as a tribute to her, Nanci wrote a song I noted earlier, Ford Econoline, which she based partly on Kate’s life.  The concept of "Other Voices, Other Rooms" had been floating around in Nanci's mind for a while, but Kate's passing was the impetus for her decision to record the album after Nanci had discussed the idea in late 1992 with her good friend and near-neighbor in Nashville, Emmylou Harris.  

Nanci had written and sung about her personal experiences often during her career, as I've noted, but she decided to record one of her most personally endearing songs, Tecumseh Valley, on "Other Voices, Other Rooms."  Written by fellow Texan, Townes Van Zandt, the song is about perseverance in the face of extreme adversity and Nanci, who first heard Townes sing it when she was 14, admitted that when she was young, it had helped her deal with her own dark times of personal challenge in the years following her parent's divorce.  Townes later claimed that Nanci's version of "Tecumseh Valley" was the best cover anyone had ever done of any of his songs. 

Nanci’s follow-up album, “Flyer,” released in 1994, was probably her most personal album and the first in which virtually all of the characters and settings were real, including in the title track, The Flyer.  It was also her biggest seller, nudging out “Other Voices, Other Rooms.”  The album and its predecessor would be the commercial pinnacles of Nanci’s career.

She continued recording and touring through the late 1990s and early 2000s, though at a diminishing pace as she battled a growing number of health problems.  That including periodic depression, an affliction not uncommon among those who are sentient and reflective, as she often was.  Nanci was also diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and thyroid cancer in 1998, then she developed a rare syndrome that reduced the flexibility in her fingers.  Along with her physical ailments, and like so many other songwriters, her ability to write songs diminished as she got older and she developed a long-term case of writer’s block, which resulted in a lack of focus in her later albums.  She released her final album in 2012 and stopped touring altogether shortly afterwards, mainly for health reasons.  During her final years, and always a private person, she gradually withdrew from the public spotlight.

Although she lived in Nashville, Nanci always proudly embraced her Texas roots (though perhaps more so earlier in her career than later).  Like the contradiction of being a private person who wrote and performed very personal songs, she was an intriguing contradiction of rural, old-school Texas (with songs like West Texas Sun and Trouble in the Fields) and, on the other hand, unabashed liberalism (with songs like It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go and One Blade Shy of a Sharp Edge).  She had opposed the Vietnam War when she was young, yet at her concerts she often wore a large “LBJ” button, referring to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the U.S. president from Texas whose administration was synonymous with the war. 

Those contradictions perhaps reflected the divergent political beliefs of her liberal mother and conservative father, a growing separation that ultimately led to their divorce when Nanci was young.  It was also a contradiction that perplexed and intrigued me and, I'm sure, many others in her relatively small but dedicated coterie of diehard fans.

Nanci's Albums:  1991 - 1999

After "Late Night Grande Hotel" in 1991, she changed recording labels to Elektra and returned to her folk/country roots.

	1991:  Late Night Grande Hotel		1993:  Other Voices, Other Rooms

	1994:  Flyer		1997:  Blue Roses From the Moons

	1998:  Other Voices, Too		1999:  The Dust Bowl Symphony

My Life "with Nanci" Through the 1990s

Music is probably my greatest passion in life.  I can do without a lot of things – a wife, children, nice clothes, good looks (as I’ve proven) – but I never want to be without music.  And the artist who I listened to the most for over 10 years, throughout the 1990s and well into the early 2000s, was Nanci Griffith.  As I say, I never met Nanci.  Instead, I just enjoyed her music "from a distance."

During those years I listened to a lot of music from a lot of different artists, but Nanci was my mainstay and I played her nearly two dozen albums in a constant rotation.  Her songs were like an old friend and I never tired of them.  One reason Nanci's music connected so well with me was because she was independent and, except for a brief marriage, she spent almost her entire life alone without a spouse or children, having to rely almost entirely on herself.  I'd like to think that I'm the same way.  She preferred doing things her own way – and being an old curmudgeon, so do I.

In May 1995, while I was driving across America on one of my cross-country road trips (solo, of course), I spent a stormy, rain-soaked Saturday evening near Lubbock, Texas.  Nearby was the small town of Lockney, which Nanci had mentioned on her 1988 live album, “One Fair Summer Evening.”  As she described during the introduction to Trouble in the Fields, her ode to the Plains farmers of the Great Depression years:

"Most of my mother’s family came from way out in west Texas in a little town called Lockney, which is somewhere close to Lubbock.  But not too close to Lubbock.  Nobody likes to be too close to Lubbock  <smiles>. 

But I had five great-uncles who were all farmers during the Great Depression.  And after the Great Depression, four of them sold off their family farms and they bought liquor stores and dry cleaning businesses, you know, getting ready for the oil boom.  But one great-uncle, my great-uncle Tooty, never sold his farm and he pushed a plow for almost 80 years.  And he’s still living out there in Lockney, Texas, and the next song is a tune that I wrote for him and his wife, my great-aunt Minnie May. 

And my great-aunt Minnie May said that surviving the Great Depression on a farm was not easy, and she understands why the young farmers nowadays are having such a hard time, because she went through it herself.  The dust blew so hard during the Great Depression on her farm that she was afraid to go to sleep at night, because she was afraid the dust would blow so hard one night that she’d wake up in the morning and find herself living in Oklahoma.  And she, by God, didn’t want to live in Oklahoma  <smiles>."

	Above:  The small town of Lockney, Texas, during my brief visit in 1995.

I had always laughed at that introduction no matter how many times I'd heard it.  But after spending a night close to Lubbock – but not too close to Lubbock, because nobody likes to be too close to Lubbock – I decided to drive over to Lockney the next morning to see it, after hearing her song (and humorous intro) dozens of times over the past few years.

It was sunny the next morning and, after driving 15 miles across the high plains of west Texas, I arrived in Lockney.  Then I popped in a cassette tape (remember those?) of Nanci singing “Trouble in the Fields" and drove through the sleepy town while trying to imagine what living there during the Great Depression must’ve been like.  So yes, you could say that I got the entire "Lockney experience," which I think Nanci would've appreciated.

Nanci battled occasional depression later in her career, as I mentioned, and four years after my visit to Lockney her music helped me through my own difficult time.  My mother died in 1999 and in the weeks afterward I shut down quite a bit, just wanting to be alone with my thoughts.  I even stopped going to work for a stretch.  Holed up in my apartment, I listened to Nanci’s music often during that dark time and her words, songs and voice comforted me and helped me through it.  I never had the opportunity to thank Nanci for that, which is one reason I decided to create this webpage.  So Nancy, wherever you are, thank you.

And while I was never a Nanci "groupie," I did see her in concert – three times, in fact.  I’ve attended dozens of concerts from a myriad of artists over the years but, usually being too cheap to spring for a ticket, I prefer going to free concerts from local artists.  Once in a very blue moon, though (as she might say), I fork over money to see a touring artist like Nanci Griffith.  In fact, I’ve seen her in concert more than any other singer – even more than the previously-mentioned James Taylor (twice), the Eagles, and Emmylou Harris (once each).

The first time I saw Nanci in concert was during her 1995 “Flyer” tour when she came to Oregon and played at the sold-out Schnitzer Concert Hall, a grand old theatre in downtown Portland.  It’s been over 25 years but I vividly remember sitting there during the middle of the song, Speed of the Sound of Loneliness – one of my favorites from Nanci – and thinking, “Life can’t get any better than this.”  During a break between two songs, Nanci saluted Oregon for having recently rejected Measure 9, an anti-gay referendum (she was a long-time supporter of the LGBTQ community even before it had a name).  It was a wonderful concert. 

Four years later, during her “Dust Bowl Symphony” tour, she played an unforgettable outdoor concert in a beautiful winery vineyard a few miles south of Portland.  Of the many concerts I’ve ever attended, that was my absolute favorite.  It was a wonderful evening in July with perfect weather, and I arrived early and grabbed a great spot on the grass just 20 feet from the stage.  A few thousand of us sat on a lovely, gentle hillside overlooking the beautiful Willamette Valley on the grounds of the winery and there, amidst the vineyards, Nanci and her small band played for two hours as the sun set and then into the evening.  It was absolutely perfect and one of my very favorite memories.

The next year, in the summer of 2000, I attended what would be my final Nanci Griffith concert, at the recently-opened Oregon Garden in Silverton, south of Portland and another beautiful setting.  Her final song that evening, as it was during many of her concerts, was The Wing and the Wheel, which is about separation and loneliness, and a song that had been inspired by two of her friends.  The blissful memories of those three wonderful concerts will live with me forever.

	Above:  The historic Paramount Theater in downtown Austin, where Nanci's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" video was filmed in 1993.  I took this picture in 2001 during one of my cross-country road trips.

Nanci released fewer albums through the early 2000s and stopped recording altogether after 2012, so I gradually shifted my listening to other artists.  I hadn’t heard her music in a few years when I learned on Friday of her sudden death.  A thoughtful, intelligent and feeling person with a heart as big as Texas, Nanci left us much too soon at age 68. 

Nanci was the great friend and compadre who I never met (I'm sure many of her fans feel the same way about her).  But rather than dwell on my sadness of her passing, I wanted to celebrate the joy which Nanci brought to me and so many others around the world with her wonderful music, so I’ve posted some of her songs on this webpage.  I’ve also posted two videos of her concerts that I bought many years ago on VHS videotape, "One Fair Summer Evening" and "Other Voices, Other Rooms," which I digitized so I could share them with others.

I hope you enjoy the songs of Nanci Griffith as much as I have.  May her wonderful music and spirit live forever.