Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs

Notes

209 ✻ ✻ ✻ Notes Introduction 1 Abigail Washburn, liner notes, Song of the Traveling Daughter. 2 Washburn, liner notes, Song of the Traveling Daughter. 3 Cantwell, When We Were Good, 318. Barker and Taylor, Faking It, trace the increased emphasis on “personal authenticity” from the 1960s through the 1970s—a decade characterized by highly autobiographical songwriting—and into the 1990s and 2000s, during which time the practice of performers writing about their lives in “real” and “honest” ways ascended to a new level of importance. Before the ’60s, this had not been the case. 4 Barker and Taylor, Faking It, 129–30. 5 Frank, “Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony,” 44. As part of his discussion of the artificiality of genre trends, Frank highlights two options available to irony-employing young musicians in the ’90s: either find kitschy cultural artifacts that remained undiscovered by their peers or go the whole hog and—with the ultrairony of seeming to be unironic—feign genuine appreciation for some “bad” earlier fad. Even those who chose to do the latter, he implies, wanted people to get that they were being ironic—that 210 ✻ Notes to pp. 4–22 ✻ they were too sophisticated to actually like whatever stuff they had chosen to emulate. 6 Peterson, Creating Country Music, 154–55. Peterson has shown that pop or “soft-shell” leanings have existed in country, and pre-country, music just as long as styles that are regarded as traditional—or, in his preferred description, “hard-core.” They alternate in popularity, he says, according to “both aesthetic and commercial” forces. 7 Marcus, Mystery Train, 50. 8 Pecknold, “Selling Out or Buying In?” 40. Pecknold’s chapterlength analysis of Americana as an industry, and an industry that in many ways parallels the beginnings of the mainstream country industry—only with more moderate sales expectations—is one of the savviest treatments of the subject available. 9 For instance, the first two aims Latina theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz lays out for mujerista theology are “to provide a platform for the voices of Latina grassroots women” and “to develop a theological method that takes seriously the religious understandings and practices of Latinas as a source for theology” (Mujerista Theology, 1). Also, subjectivity and specificity are at the heart of the ways of thinking, doing, and being elaborated by womanist ethicist Floyd-Thomas: “[A] womanist is radical because she claims her agency and has a subjective view of the world in which she is not a victim of circumstance, but rather is a responsible, serious, and in-charge woman” (Mining the Motherlode, 8–9). Chapter 1: Lucinda Williams 1 Marcus, Mystery Train, 35. 2 Werner, Change Is Gonna Come, 71. 3 Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 24. 4 Williams, “Notes in a Minister’s Hymnbook,” 15–16. 5 O’Connor, “Wise Blood,” 1–131. 6 Frey, “Lucinda Williams Is in Pain.” The writer of the piece did not really entertain the possibility that Williams, in her perfectionistic drive to experiment with different players, producers, and sounds, might have been striving toward a vision, or that her exacting standards might, in the end, yield a masterpiece worth the trouble. The tone of such characterizations might have differed a little if she were a male recording artist. After all, Bob Dylan rerecorded half of his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks at the eleventh hour and more or less got away with it as an artistic move. ✻ Notes to pp. 23–36 ✻ 211 7 Facing critical and commercial risks if she altered her songwriting style, Williams drew courage from watching Bob Dylan make significant changes to his own approach: “[H]e had just come out with Time Out of Mind, and I loved the sparseness of it, the songs and the production and everything, you know. And I remember reading in the paper . . . the reviewer was criticizing it, saying the songs weren’t developed enough and ‘This isn’t the Bob Dylan we’ve known and loved over the years.’. . . And I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute. I don’t agree with that. I like that record; I like those songs; I love the simplicity and the starkness.’” 8 Schlansky, “Lucinda Williams.” 9 Ellison, “Keeping Faith,” 130. 10 Here are three examples: “Lucinda Williams’ Wedding—First Avenue —Minneapolis—September 18, 2009” (Video, 2009), http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVSoUos1Png (accessed July 26, 2010); “Lucinda Williams Wedding” (Video, 2009), http...