Gig review: Nanci Griffith, Queens Hall– SIMPLICITY is a much underrated quality in music but it’s what Nanci Griffith specialises in. Her simple tales of simple people, simply sung, have a power to lift the audience and a warmth and intelligence that many over-produced pop warblers can only dream of having and members of last night’s packed crowd at the Queens Hall were more than happy to let her transport them to her uncomplicated world… read entire story HERE.

–INSPIRATION doesn’t run on tap. Just ask Nanci Griffith, the Grammy Award-winning Texan songwriter, who went through something of a writerly slump before returning last year with her 19th album, The Loving Kind… read entire story HERE.

NU Country Australia– When Nanci Griffith read the New York Times obituary of a black woman jailed for an inter-racial marriage she spent an afternoon in tears. But Griffith soon channelled her torrential tears into lachrymose lava in a powerful song about the couple’s battle for their love to be legalised… read entire story HERE.

How Rounder Records went from minor to major
Started by three students with $125, the record label is still quirkily independent, despite being home to huge talent… read entire story HERE.

Performances from Nanci Griffith, Dick Gaughan and The Transatlantic Sessions were among the many highlights of the 11th annual BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, hosted by Mike Harding… read entire story HERE.

One of the top events on Belfast’s musical calendar takes place next month as the Guinness Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival comes to town… read entire story HERE.

Review: Nanci Griffith, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London–More twang for your buck… read entire story HERE.

The Atlanta Botantical Gardens
8:00 PM
Buy Tix HERE

And check out the Atlanta-Journal Constitution interview wth Nanci HERE:

Nanci Griffith gets feistier, more political
‘It just all came flowing out.’ Singer-songwriter to perform at Botanical Garden.

By Bob Townsend
For the AJC
Sunday, June 21, 2009
On her new album, “The Loving Kind,” Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith takes on some big topics.

The title track is a story song about Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman who were the subject of a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that ended the ban on interracial marriages in the U.S. The rest of the recording includes a heartfelt meditation on the death penalty, tunes about a couple of former presidents and a bittersweet tribute to Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt.

But there’s also some swinging honky-tonk music and an ode to artistry and inspiration.

Griffith will perform with her band at the Atlanta Botanical Garden on Friday.

“We love playing there,” she said during a recent call from Nashville. “It’s such a great gig. It’s so beautiful, and we always get to spend some time in the gardens before the show.”

Here are few of Griffith’s thoughts on “The Loving Kind”:

Q. This album is quite politically outspoken. Was that a conscious decision or are you just feeling feisty these days?

A. I think it’s a combination of both. So many things came up for me over the past eight years that it just all came flowing out.

Q. The title track is a poignant story song. Is it also meant to address the subject of same-sex marriage?

A. That was an accident, because I was inspired to write that song from reading Mildred Loving’s obituary in The New York Times. I just sat in tears and the song just wrote itself. It all came at once, and it didn’t occur to me until later about the same-sex marriage issue.

Q. “Across America” is a rousing, Woody Guthrie sort of song. Where did that come from?

A. That’s another song that just wrote itself. I really like that song, even though it’s probably one of the more commercial things I’ve ever written. I can hear it in many voices. I can hear someone like Brooks and Dunn doing it.

Q. Along with the serious stuff, you also have a couple of good old rowdy Texas songs by Dee Moeller and a boozy song by Edwina Hayes. Are those fun to sing?

A. Yes. Dee Moeller was my hero. She was rocking during my teenage years in Texas, and “Party Girl” and “Tequila After Midnight” are real honky-tonk songs. Edwina has been such a friend over the years, and she’s such a great writer. “Pour Me a Drink” is certainly a different one for me, in terms of what people are used to me singing, but it’s almost like Edwina wrote my life down.

Q. In the liner notes you talk about writer’s block. What did that feel like, and how did you finally get past it?

A. I spent the whole Bush administration with my pencil in the sand.

I couldn’t get over the direction my country was going in, and I just couldn’t get inspired. I spent most of my time touring abroad because it was just too frightening for me. Getting past that, with the election, really opened my heart and my mind, and set me free to pull my pencil out again.

Q. You have a birthday coming up in July, when you’ll be 56. How are you feeling about that?

A. I feel 33. Everything is just fine with my health, and I feel good. I’m a lucky girl.

HUFFINGTON POST

I had never been to the relatively new (December, 2008) Grammy Museum in Downtown L.A. until Monday night. I went to see Nanci Griffith speaking about the making of her new album, The Loving Kind…

USA TODAY

Nanci Griffith, The Loving Kind
* * * VELVET GLOVE

Wielding a clear, insistent voice and a soft acoustic guitar, the folkie star tackles a host of weighty topics, including interracial marriage, capital punishment and the second Bush era. But this is no tedious polemic: A crack backing group renders sweet country-inflected arrangements, and Griffith tosses in a couple of honky-tonkish weepers and a tender ode to Townes Van Zant. — Jerry Shriver

>Download: The Loving Kind, Party Girl, Up Against the Rain>Consider: Tequila After Midnight, Pour Me a Drink

DALLAS NEWS

Nanci Griffith, The Loving Kind (Rounder) – Respected Texas singer-songwriter returns with nine originals and four covers that revel in a signature blend of folk, country, pop and even a little bit of bluegrass.

THE REPUBLICAN

Nanci Griffith, “The Loving Kind” (Rounder). 3 stars.

Her sound will always be built around lilting folk and country-traced balladry, though Nanci Griffith has frequently laced that music with simmering lyrics about social injustice…

AUDIOPHILE

The Texan’s little-girl soprano voice has suggested naivete or innocence, yet she has a literate and sophisticated expertise, with lyrics that can be pointedly on-target…

FOLK ROOTS

This new album, I think, is Nanci’s best set of mostly original material since The Last of the True Believers and her best album, period…

AMERICAN SONGWRITER

Songwriters feel the same way about writer’s block as werewolves do about silver bullets. Country/Folk artist Nanci Griffith tells Reuters that the accursed condition kept her from penning new tunes after releasing Hearts in Mind in 2005…

UNCOMMON MUSIC

More than two decades after her first record, Nanci Griffith is still making beautiful, honest and relevant music. Her latest album, The Loving Kind, has nine original songs and a small handful of covers.

Using a blend of folk, country and a tiny bit of pop, she tells vivid stories about the lives, loves and losses of the characters she creates…

Read full story here

MONDAY, JUNE 8

THE NANCI GRIFFITH SHOW

If you caught the always-lovely Nanci Griffith at the Acoustic Music Festival on the Santa Monica Pier yesterday, you won’t want to miss this super-rare chance to hear the country-folk singer/songwriter speak about her swoon-worthy new album, The Loving Kind, at the Grammy Museum. The museum’s new series, called “The Drop,” puts artists in a chair on the Grammy Sound Stage for a little interview about the creative process, followed by questions from you, the well-prepared, reverential audience. Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., dwntwn.; Mon., June 8, 8 p.m.; $14.95. (213) 745-6800.

—L.M.

Bruce Springsteen plays in DC tonight. I had to laugh when I read how over a dozen Republican members of Congress are throwing fundraisers at the sold-out Verizon Center show. Lobbyists were buying scalped $100 tickets from the congressmembers for $2,000 a pop. I hope right-wing kooks like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Dave Camp (R-MI), Baron Hill (Blue Dog-IN), Tom Petri (R-WI) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) aren’t expecting any nostalgia for the good ole Bush days. Like most artists– and most Americans– Springsteen has come to detest all Bush stands for and was very outspoken about his feelings that Bush was unworthy of the presidency.

In preparation for hosting a Crooks and Liars live blog session Thursday afternoon with Nanci Griffith I spent some time with her on the phone talking about her soon-to-be-released new album, The Loving Kind. It didn’t take long before Bush’s name came up. Nanci was active in Nashville’s Music Row Democratic Club and worked actively to defeat him in 2004. On the new album a song she wrote with Ricky Ross, “Still Life,” sums up her feelings about the ex-president:
You need to change
You don’t know how
Your life could use a reformation
If you could see you
As I see you now
I know you’d change the situation

The contretemps that was engineered by Bush allies to hurt the Dixie Chicks careers didn’t even come close to shutting Nanci up. “I never stopped saying whatever I was saying against the Bush administration abroad. I don’t care what those people who crucified the Dixie Chicks… they’re not my fans anyway.” Nanci’s a Grammy Award winning artist and it wouldn’t surprise me if some tone def Republicans are fans of hers. I hope they wind up coming by Crooks and Liars Thursday at 4pm (PT) to hear what she has to say about the issues that mean most to her…

Read full article here

Nanci Griffith has a new album coming out in early June, The Loving Kind. I’ll try to remind you about it when Rounder releases it. The record is spectacular but today I just want to say a few words about the title track. It’s a really powerful song about a couple in Virginia, Richard and Mildred Loving. Despite Virginia’s anti-miscengenation law which prevented mixed-race marriages– something that more the half the states in the country had when I was growing up– the young couple got married in June, 1958 in Washington, DC. She was 19 and he was 25. The police broke into their home and arrested them in bed. They were found guilty and sentenced to prison sentences which were suspended on condition of them leaving Virginia. At the time of the sentencing (in 1959), Judge Leon Bazile read this excuse for bigotry from the 1700s:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Judge Bazile, or any like-minded Republican today would have to find a different excuse for denying gay people the right to marry. Last week we saw the Iowa Supreme Court strike down that state’s anti-gay marriage law. Obsessed and hysterical, the far right will fight it– just the way they fought against interracial marriages.

In 1964 the Supreme Court of the United States didn’t have any hack rightist judges like Scalia or Thomas or Alito or Roberts. The court unanimously overturned the convictions and declared that Virginia’s and other states’ laws denying equality for people to marry regardless of race were unconstitutional. It changed the law for every single state in the South (although Alabama kept their own anti-miscegenation laws on the books until… 2000!) From the decision:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Mildred Loving died on May 2, 2008. A year before she died, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that made her marriage legal, she issued a public statement that has inspired many gay people fighting for their rights to marry:
Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Nanci Griffith’s beautiful and inspiring song and I want to urge you to listen to it and play it for your friends and family…