A colleague from Texas introduced me to Nanci Griffith’s work decades ago, and I was hooked. She wove great stories with her songs, and she caught me just as I started getting into what would eventually become known as “alt-country” – or, as she called, it, “folkabilly” music.
She provided the soundtrack of my first couple of years out of college – along with performers like k.d. lang, Lyle Lovett, and Van Morrison and the Chieftains. Her whole Texan thing made me want to end up in Austin.
Alas, a job opportunity I had hoped for in Austin fell through, only to surface days after I accepted another job. But Nanci Griffith’s music stuck with me.
(She got more overtly political, and honestly a little more sappy, for my taste after a while. But she still represented an important and less complicated time that I wish I had appreciated more.)
Nanci Griffith died Friday; she was 68 years old. Feels like that part of my life – when “folkabilly” was a big part of my soundtrack during that early 20s period of growing up – died a little, too.
I’m so tired of death’s shadow right now.