Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs

5. Mary Gauthier: Outsider Art

109 ✻ ✻ ✻ Mary Gauthier Outsider Art 5 A folk-country singer-songwriter respected for the quality and heft of her work, Mary Gauthier unflinchingly—and not at all unfeelingly—speaks of and to people on the social margins, identifying with them particularly through her own experience of being orphaned. In a way, Mary Gauthier seems very alone onstage as she shushes the people conversing over by the bar. Though there is a fiddler with her, contributing sparse, shadowy bow strokes, she stands with her acoustic guitar at the microphone as a soul confronting feelings of profound alienation and reaching into the void, grasping for eyes and ears that will reflect back to her a shared sense of humanity. With a mixture of sternness and humor, she corrals the attention of everyone in the room: “If the people talking are bothering anybody in the audience, you have my permission to tell them to shut up.” It matters not that she is in a rock club, decidedly not the quietest of venues. 110 ✻ Right by Her Roots ✻ Gauthier has just played a steely, haunting number titled “Snakebit” that plunges her, with jarring, first-person narration, into the dark inner dialogue of a person who has careened over theedge.Sheopenswiththesong—thefirsttrackonherBetween Daylight and Dark album and one she cowrote with Texas country singer-songwriter Hayes Carll—because its misanthropy, its chilling burst of violence toward targets both human and spiritual owes much to one of southern author Flannery O’Connor’s best-known short stories and most notorious characters: the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”1 The occasion of the performance is a tribute to O’Connor and a benefit for the decaying Georgia farm, Andalusia, where O’Connor did the lion’s share of her writing. Though they are hardly contemporaries—Gauthier, a Louisiana native, was born in 1962 and O’Connor died just two years later—there are sympathetic impulses in their work. Both go places that are too isolated and dark for delicate tastes. And more importantly, they go there with a sense of deeper purpose. During one of our phone interviews, Gauthier laughs as she reads aloud O’Connor’s wry response to a reader’s unmet expectations in an excerpt from the essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” O’Connor writes, and Gauthier quotes, “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read.”2 Gauthier weighs in, “That sums it up, you know. At the end of the essay she says, ‘I hate to think of the day when the southern writer will satisfy the tired reader.’3 That’s not the job. . . . The job is to crack the illusions, and to break the delusions and denials, and to show the truth.” Gauthier is amused especially because she knows a thing or two about this matter of being asked to do things that fall outside of her job description, as she conceives of it. And she has written her own bitingly witty retort to the askers with in-demand ✻ Mary Gauthier ✻ 111 Nashville cowriter Liz Rose, in the form of a New Orleans–style, trombone-laced stroll titled “Sideshow,” and included it on her sixth album, The Foundling. “‘Sideshow’s’ a little bit of a jab,” she admits. “Because people, I go to these radio stations and I sit down, and they smile at me and I smile at them, and right before they turn on the mic to go live on the air, they say, ‘Play something happy.’ I just want to whack ’em with my guitar.” Happy-ondemand is not a quality Gauthier has cultivated in her repertoire. “You can either get mad,” she concludes about such misunderstandings , “or you can find the humor in it.” Having a healthy sense of humor, she chose to do the latter. Beyond being wickedly funny to those in on the joke, “Sideshow” and the dozen other unfunny songs on The Foundling are a watershed. Because they represent a pivotal step in her spiritual journey. Because, through them, she has worked out a way to close the distance between her radically alienating experience of being orphaned, of confronting life without...