Lucinda Williams has been writing a memoir in song for over 40 years. In her country blues we hear a woman’s equipoise of thinking and feeling, demanding what she deserves, restless and self-possessed. From rambling Southern songwriter to music-industry misfit, from Louisiana to New York and Little Rock to Houston, she sings of working hard. She changes the locks on men. She throws dirt over the casket of a lost friend. She gives melody to her watery eyes as a child, fleeing an unstable household in a car on a gravel road.
We tend to love our songwriting heroes because their words, tone, and temperament amount to something that clarifies our existence; we then go to lengths to clarify theirs. As plain-spoken and specific as her lyrics, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You magnifies the complete character of Lucinda as narrated in her songs: the wandering woman writer staking out agency, making an art of nursing heartbreak while crisscrossing the country in pursuit of herself. In the book, she writes a lot about the type of guys she was usually after—the “poet on a motorcycle,” she calls them—who often fueled her songs. These boyfriends ultimately sound like Lucinda’s equal: the solitary cowgirl poet with X-ray vision and a cold beer, strong enough to be vulnerable, no one’s fool.
“Can you fall in love with someone you haven’t met?” Lucinda writes of her epiphany, as a 12-year-old, with Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, which hit her “like a bolt of lightning” and changed her life. Good question.
Raised primarily by her itinerant poet-academic father, she lived in 12 cities and three countries before she was 18. She was rejected by virtually every label she encountered in the 1980s, not catching a break until she was 35, when Rough Trade Records, then best-known as a bastion of punk, released 1988’s pitch-perfect Lucinda Williams. Ten years later, the blue-skied travelog Car Wheels on a Gravel Road cemented her stature as a great American songwriter.
Lucinda has never been scared to stare brutal reality in the eye, and that unflinching approach extends to her memoir. She spends the book’s earliest pages recounting the disturbing sexual abuse that her mother, Lucille, experienced as a child at the hands of family members, and the lifetime of mental illnesses that followed, including electroshock treatment and hospital stays. Her mother’s instability gave way to at-times cruel treatment of Lucinda. She recalls being locked in a closet at age 3 and the ceaseless feeling of walking on eggshells. Her father raised her to believe she couldn’t harbor anger towards her mom, since she was unwell, imbuing Lucinda with a mix of compassion and profound confusion.
Her stated wish to avoid writing “a sugarcoated book like you find at Walgreens” continues with her discussion of her beloved dad, Miller Williams, to whom the book is dedicated. A prize-winning poet who read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration and threw literary parties attended by the likes of Charles Bukowski, he was Lucinda’s hero, collaborator, teacher, and North Star. As a small child Lucinda went with him to visit his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, at her home; while her dad spoke with the literary giant, Lucinda chased peacocks in the yard. When Lucinda was suspended indefinitely from a New Orleans high school for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag, her father hired an ACLU lawyer to get her back in. When she was kicked out yet again for participating in a civil rights march, he said, “The hell with that,” and she never returned. In the book we also learn the uneasy reality of how Lucinda’s father divorced her mother and then married one of his students, giving Lucinda a stepmom who was nearly young enough to be her sister.
For all this familial chaos, Lucinda writes of both her parents lovingly. Her mom was a pianist who adored Erroll Garner and Judy Garland; after Lucinda moved away, they “would talk on the phone for hours about psychology.” Flawed as her parents were, they afforded her freedom from stifling status-quo social mores. “I grew up in a family where there wasn’t ageism or sexism,” Lucinda writes, reflecting on her resilience. It’s not hard to see her parents as two pillars of her music: the clear-eyed writerly sensibility instilled by her bohemian dad, and, from her mom, an empathy for complicated people, who would inspire many of her best songs.
Through her father, Lucinda’s immersion into poetry was total, and hearing about the workshops, parties, and readings she was privy to from birth—in her living room, in classrooms, and at the summertime Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where her dad was on staff—helps explain her preternatural facility with language from her earliest songs, written in her mid-20s. She learned the power of crafting images in sequence, which became a hallmark; from her proclamation, “I wish I had a ship to sail the waters/I wish I had about a hundred dollars” on 1980’s “Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet),” to her description of the maverick singer-songwriter Blaze Foley as a “derelict” in “duct tape shoes” on “Drunken Angel,” her songs play like movies in miniature.
Lucinda’s life played out like one, too, even before fame. A chapter devoted to her months-long teenaged tour of Mexico is a highlight; unable to enroll in high school there, she ended up traveling with her dad’s musician friend, whom she likens to “a young Pete Seeger,” playing folk songs with financial support from the U.S. embassy. Another section details her pivotal relationship with the poet Frank Stanford, also a family friend, who epitomized her romantic ideal—he was a land surveyor and the author of an epic poem called The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You—and whose suicide marked a number of songs on 1992’s Sweet Old World.
Reading about the high school years Lucinda spent wandering the New Orleans streets with her pals, smoking weed and listening to Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and wreaking havoc, or later working at restaurants and health food shops in Austin and Houston while journeying through the cosmic-cowboy club circuit, I felt like an onlooker in a headily adrift Richard Linklater film, where the individual plot points are less significant than the freewheeling ambiance. Bar fights, visits with blues legends, and one arrest for weed possession that threw her in county jail alongside Townes Van Zandt’s bandmates (who would become hers, too)—a lot went down while Lucinda was “stuck between rock and country for 20 years.”
Don’t Tell Anybody is filled with musical revelations, too, as Lucinda weaves a tapestry of influences, from early inspirations like folk musicians Violeta Parra and Elizabeth Cotten, to her ’80s obsession with the Pretenders, to Joan Armatrading’s imprint on “Passionate Kisses.” She also delivers on the doomed affairs and (sometimes hilarious) romantic sharp turns behind plenty of her most cherished lyrics. She fills in the gaps of the tense anticipation (and, sorry to report, immediate disappointment) that led to 1988’s “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” and chronicles her experience writing “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten” while “hungover as fuck” one hazy New Year’s Day. We learn about the outlaw boyfriend at the heart of “Lake Charles” and the womanizer who sparked “Metal Firecracker.” (Brace yourself to hear who inspired 2003’s canonical “Those Three Days,” her gut-punching exorcism of a weekend-long fling.)
Most edifying are Lucinda’s recollections of the men in her life, whom she calls “guardian angels.” That includes friends like Hobart Taylor, a Houston journalist from an affluent Black family who managed Lucinda early on and paid her way at crucial times. Taylor spent $25,000 on a demo Lucinda made in 1983, when she was trying to make music into a career. Soon after, Taylor helped set her up with an apartment in Los Angeles, where she hoped to land a major-label contract. She eventually paid Taylor back every penny.
It was in that Silver Lake one-bedroom, with $35,000 from a Columbia development deal, where Lucinda wrote classics like “Changed the Locks” and “Crescent City” that would fill her self-titled album (which Columbia passed on). Her desk faced a window overlooking avocado trees. She would write on her balcony in the morning sun and continue all afternoon in the sunstruck living room, before working out the songs on stage with her band at night. In the L.A. cowpunk underground, she recalls, “dirty garage music mixed with country”; as she describes her distaste for overly polished music, her antagonism towards major-label goons, and her favored plug-in-and-play approach to recording, it’s clear that Lucinda was her own kind of punk.
Her narration of the time spent alone in her Silver Lake sanctuary has an almost holy charge. As her thoughts flow on the page in the unmistakable cadence of her dry, deliberate Louisiana drawl, she talks straight to us. By her mid-30s, Lucinda had finally managed to stop working odd jobs, clawing out the time and space to access and architect her vision. The relief she felt at getting to breathe and dig deeper is palpable. She was crafting lyrics that would form a social vocabulary in the lives of generations of listeners, no doubt many of them women: “I want to know you’re there, but I wanna be alone,” she sings on “Side of the Road,” desiring both love and work. She longs, in this song, to feel the sun and wind on her skin and “follow that unbroken line/To a place where the wild things grow,” evoking the transcendental nature of solitude from a woman’s point of view. Half a century on from Virginia Woolf’s testament that a woman “must have money and a room of her own” in order to create works of genius, Lucinda was living proof.
We have Rough Trade’s Robin Hurley and Geoff Travis to thank for recognizing Lucinda’s brilliance. “I almost fell on the floor,” she writes of the day Hurley called her up at the Silver Lake apartment and offered her a deal on the spot.
But even as she gained a foothold in music, new challenges emerged, like the rampant, misogynist characterizations of her during the Car Wheels era: “difficult” to work with, “insane,” a neurotic perfectionist. “Making records can test the limits and boundaries of everyone involved,” Lucinda writes. “I now understand that is normal.” That she survived so much male ego with her artistry intact is one of the great feats of rock history.
There are moments where I wished she’d gone deeper, like on the writing of her first album of original songs, the feminist string-band ballads of 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. What underpinned the liberated audacity of “One Night Stand” and led her to project its ideas so unapologetically? What became of the titular “Maria,” the restless would-be rodeo queen trapped in New York, who compelled her to ask, “Are the songs we sing worth a broken heart?” And we don’t hear much about 2003’s “Fruits of My Labor,” which has arguably become her signature song. Still, Lucinda’s eye for detail makes the subtext of all her work that much richer; as the specifics of her adventures accrue, the book helps us answer some of these questions ourselves.
Among Happy Woman Blues’ highlights, for me, is “Hard Road,” on which Lucinda addresses her down-and-out buddy Bill by name. Like many of her songs, it’s a treatment for a little movie, with characters who appear in your head: the busker Bill, at loose ends, singing on the corner; Lucinda, observing in the sweltering Texas heat. “They think you’re one of the nameless,” she sings, “’Cause you’ve got no record, and you ain’t famous.” So she invites Bill into the bar to unload. “If you need a friend, give me call, I got your picture on my wall,” the tune goes on. Don’t Tell Anybody makes it apparent that the titular Bill is likely Bill Priests, a confidante and fellow musician who she often shared bills with in the ’70s, as a hungry troubadour herself with neither fame nor a record.
I’ve always found this sweet, simple-enough deep cut to be overwhelmingly moving, though it was only in reading Lucinda’s memoir that I fully understood why. When you’re scraping by, trying to cut it as an artist for years, broke and broken-hearted—a dilemma central to the Lucinda mythology—it’s your friends who sustain you and offer respite, who create a skylight to climb through. For all the hardship in Lucinda’s songs, here is one about trying to comfort a fellow struggling musician, because she knew the other side of it; she, too, played for nickels and dimes. It’s illuminating to read about the people who lifted her up on her path, whether it was her pals in the Texas scene, or even the Neil Young records she put on as a reminder that it was OK to write songs without bridges, when a record exec told her that her songs seemed “unfinished.” To be an independent artist and woman bandleader defying genre conventions in the ’80s and ’90s required finding your people. Don’t Tell Anybody is evidence of how Lucinda found hers.
Toward the end of the book, she reprints a poem her father wrote about her as a child. “The Caterpillar” lucidly describes a 5-year-old Lucinda observing the titular insect looping around the edge of a bowl, waiting to bloom. “I hold the words she said to me across the dark,” Miller Williams wrote. “I think he thought he was going in a straight line.”
Life rarely does. For all of the tortuous turns and wild characters inhabiting Don’t Tell Anybody, it’s Lucinda’s voice—irreverent and eloquent, blunt and soulful—that defines the book. The perseverance of her voice, alive on every page, is its ultimate story.
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