Deixa-me rir...

Caros Audiophiles, I went last night to an intimate concert by the Texan country/folk singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith.

In song and in life she is a storyteller. Indeed sometimes her introductions to her songs seem longer than the songs themselves. But she is charming and engaging and honest and funny.

Her songs are about love and family and place, are personal and political. They may be true stories, either autobiographical or first-hand observations, other songs are fictions of imagination. She tells an anecdote about a fan who approached her to ask: "So did you write these songs or did you just make them up?"

Perhaps still best known for the earliest version of From A Distance, made globally famous later by Bette Midler, she has recorded some sublime albums of her own material and songs by artists who inspire her. Two of my favourite songs are presented here, the first written and co-sung by fellow American country writer John Prine, and the second by herself:

The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go 

I am a backseat driver from America
They drive on the left on Falls Road (Belfast)
The man at the wheel's name is Seamus
We pass a child on the corner he knows
And Seamus says, "Now, what chance has that kid got?"
And I say from the back, "I don't know."
He says, "There's barbed wire at all of these exits...
And there ain't no place in Belfast for that kid to go."

It's a hard life, It's a hard life, It's a very hard life
It's a hard life wherever you go
If we poison our children with hatred
Then, the hard life is all that they will know
And there ain't no place (in Belfast) for
These kids to go

A cafeteria line in Chicago
The fat man in front of me
Is calling black people 'trash' to his children
He's the only trash here I see
And I'm thinking this man wears a white hood
In the night when his children should sleep
But, they slip to their window and they see him
And they think that white hood is all they need

I was a child in the sixties
Dreams could be held through TV
With Disney, and Cronkite, and Martin Luther
Oh, I believed, I believed... I BELIEVED
Now, I am the backseat driver from America
I am not at the wheel of control
I am guilty, I am war,... I am the root of all evil
Lord, and I can't drive on the left side of the road

A proxima.

PO