Among the 78 bands performing for thousands of fans at San Francisco’s 25th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, our nation’s foremost Americana festival, in October of 2025, one of the largest audiences had gathered for Lucinda Williams. She took the main stage in the afternoon clad in a leather suit, studs on the hem of her pants. The groove from the band and her lyrics landed with resonant pounding, like the drop of a heavy set of books on a table. After more than 50 years of performing, her sound still hits.
Lucinda Williams grasped brilliance in 1998 with Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, but this was not some isolated incident. She has pursued the craft of album-making expertly for her entire career, and fans flock to her because there is always something more to scratch up. The singularity of her writing rings at a higher frequency today in our shallow digitized world. I see her current position in our culture to be similar to that of poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen in his final chapter. When she sings, we listeners get to grasp at something real, and we crave what Lucinda offers; intimate corporeal love, the palette of Southern backroads alongside broken-down juke joints, honest bewilderment at the state of the world while still loving it.
When I was 26, I set out on a road trip to trace Lucinda’s origins. Being a songwriter, I wanted to determine what I could do to strive and bloom, like she did. So I left California driving my 1995 Ford F-250. From Texas to Tennessee, I dug up characters from Lucinda’s early days. I was most interested in finding people who had worked with her in the beginning of her career.
In Jackson, Mississippi, I spent a day at Malaco Studios where Lucinda made her first record Ramblin’ On My Mind. While listening to outtakes, I happened upon the first-ever originals she recorded but never released. In those reel-to-reel tapes that had been sitting untouched in a concrete vault, I heard a voice from four decades ago that was clear and bold. Wolf Stephenson was the engineer from that session and he told me that in 1978 Lucinda was a resolute and present woman: “[In] day-to-day life, she was just as footloose and like she was on stage. And really there wasn’t much difference in sitting here talking [with her] or being on stage, very natural.”
In Austin, Texas, I was shocked to learn that well-known guitarist Charlie Sexton had played with Lucinda when he was just 11 and she was 26. At the Hole in the Wall where a booker once cancelled Lucinda’s gig because there were “too many girl singers that month,” Charlie and I discussed how he has learned from Lucinda as a writer. He reflected on his early impressions of her and told me, “…There’s no doubt that Lucinda was always going to be unique… I mean, she’s like a regional writer in a way… she’s the Flannery O’Connor of that era of singer-songwriter.”
Lucinda’s parents raised her in an extraordinary community. Her father Miller Williams was a professor, a translator, and a poet. He and his wife were descendants of humble traveling Methodist ministers with meager finances, but by the time their first daughter Lucinda was a teen, the family sat in the company of Nobel Prize-winning authors. Miller’s genuine passion for literature gave him the conviction to invite figures like Charles Bukowski and indeed Flannery O’Connor into his circle of friends and acquaintances. He hosted literary parties in the family’s Arkansas home. After drinks were served, Miller read some of his new poems out loud, and a young Lucinda sat and strummed her latest songs. Writers of the highest caliber listened at attention. Some of these writers gave Lucinda feedback. Perhaps just as important was that these writers also imparted genuine encouragement to Lucinda and told her that in spite of all of the suffering and uncertainties involved in being an artist, it was still a worthwhile pursuit in life.
Along my road trip I also discovered how committed Lucinda has been to her art over the decades. I spoke at length with some of the musicians and engineers that worked on Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. I learned from Lucinda’s recollections that when you have that itching worry that a sound just isn’t right on an album, you have to wrestle with the process to find the right timbre, the right soundscape that will thrill you. I found that a songwriter has to embrace change, even if they’re unsure of the career consequences. I found that artists can’t just make the same album over and over again. Well… they can, but they probably shouldn’t. A songwriter has to keep seeking out that sound, that story that pulls at their soul’s musical corners, like Lucinda did.
Lucinda’s latest release, World’s Gone Wrong, is a continuation of the directness I’ve known her for. She conveys her truth with her language of simplicity. So often in our era, bathed in a slurry of news and trends, opinions from artists can feel glued-on. But that’s not the case with Lucinda. She conveys her frustrations with the state of the world from a genuine and honest place and, when she sings, I believe her. As with so much of her writing, in her latest album I feel like I’m reading a book, inhabiting the imagined place of the viewer and the subject.
The characters in Lucinda’s songs are alive, bleeding, imperfect, and desirously wanting. We benefit from the chance to continue paying attention to the words she writes.
If you’d like to learn all about how I retraced the roots of Lucinda Williams, check out Finding Lucinda, my podcast released in partnership with the BGS Podcast Network. You can also watch the documentary film Finding Lucinda on AppleTV, Youtube and more.
Stay tuned as BGS and Good Country celebrate Lucinda Williams as Artist of the Month throughout March. Enjoy our Essential Lucinda Williams playlist below and check out an exclusive interview with Williams here. Plus, we’ll be diving into the BGS archives for all things Lu and exploring our favorite covers of her songs by other artists, too. Follow along right here on BGS and on social media for more.
Photo Credit: Mark Seliger
