Two years after her death, reissued records and a tribute album remind us to revisit Nanci’s remarkable voice, which could only ever have been from Texas.
By Nadine Smith
Texan songwriters often address the linguistic alienation native Texans can experience upon leaving home. Countless Lyle Lovett songs play off the trope of the awkward country boy overwhelmed by the big city. On the epochal “London Homesick Blues,” Gary P. Nunn is taunted by unfriendly Englishmen who tell him, “You’re from down South / And when you open your mouth / You always seem to put your foot there.” But it was Nanci Griffith who spoke most directly to how I sometimes feel, tripping over my words like a third left foot as a county girl up north: “How I miss my native tongue / ’Cause New York City sorta brings out the stupids in me,” as she put it on “Spin on a Red Brick Floor.” Nanci never realized how twangy her voice was until after she left Austin: she once said that she never thought she had much of an accent until she listened to her 1988 live album One Fair Summer Evening: “And then I could hear it. I sound just like my great-aunt out in Lockney, Texas.”
That song serves as the euphoric coda to Nanci’s 1984 album Once in a Very Blue Moon, one of four of her early records recently reissued by Craft Recordings after having long been out of print. Alongside the new Working in Corners box set comes the tribute album More Than a Whisper: Celebrating the Work of Nanci Griffith, from Rounder Records, which features friends and disciples alike—from Lyle Lovett and the late John Prine to younger acolytes like Billy Strings and Sarah Jarosz—honoring the words and stories of the singular poet, who died in 2021 at the age of 68.