Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

The South, and its music, held a deep fascination for me long before I visited the place. Whether it was the thought of that mystical confluence of southern soul, country and blues, the sound of Steve Earle singing “agin” when he meant “again”, or the creepy and tragic dreams and memories of Jim White, the Jayhawks and the rest, I knew that one day I had to get there and find out for myself what it was all about. I had to discover and experience the relationship between the compelling and yet ugly side of the area’s politics, the wonderful music of the area, and the American Dream. But if anything really provided a concrete base for my desire to explore, an anchor around which to make the dream a reality, it was none of those things. It was Lucinda Williams’ musical journey through the details and dramas of the South - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was released in 1998, right in the middle of the second great stage of alternative country – just as Ryan Adams was tiring of Whiskeytown, Gillian Welch was discovering a peculiarly modern way to make mountain music, and as Alejandro Escovedo was half-way between the extremities of emotions of With These Hands and gearing up for the Americana strains of A Man Under the Influence. But if country music is rooted in the South, then it was the record that Lucinda Williams release in that period which made sure that however ‘alternative’ this group of songwriters were, they were still country singers.

The album starts with a warm guitar sound and unified feel, and if this is the South, then first impressions of the area are of a happy and a reassuring friend. Over the course of this song and a dozen others, this feeling will unravel…not to the extent that the South is unhappy or threatening, but using individual stories and what seem at first to be typical songwriter stories, Williams manages to draw out many of the tensions and complications inherent to taking a positive view of the South. But to begin with, she starts us off with the gut homely pull that she feels.

So that musically influential and virtually mythical region of North America – is it exciting? If this is the South, is it as enthralling as somewhere with so many stories to tell and songs to sing must be? For all of the impact its upbeat tempo can have, Right In Time unwinds slowly. For the first verse and chorus, Williams sits squarely on the fence which divides her famous gritty drawl from a sweeter, more plaintive (although no less genuine) tone more typical of, say Gillian Welch. So we start with uncertainty and with a sense of growing anticipation, especially as the lyrics become more direct – moving from “Not a day goes by…” to “Pierce the skin, and the blood runs through”. Resolution comes at the ed of the second verse, for as she sings the simple word “baby”, either by accident or design her voice breaks up, and the second chorus seems a world away from the first despite its musical similarity: the message is a positive one, you and me, when we move together, it feels good, it feels right; but the tone is angry and bitter, and along with the loss which is obviously implicit, there is a sense of abandonment and fatalism. And all of this comes from that voice and way it metamorphosises so precisely. Williams is virtually shouting, drenched with feeling surely inspired by the breadth of her own experience as well as the history of country blues singers – those men and women who sang about their day to day lives so as to express their woes. As the initial complacency in the listener breaks down as Williams’ experience and blues inspired vocal becomes more menacing and worldly, what of the story? It is of everyday things, but they’re turned off, tuned out of her consciousness, as something more fundamental must have its day.

It is interesting that on the way to creating an album which says so much about the South, Williams uses country and blues in such different ways. The ‘country’ comes from the feel of the music – the big picture that is developed of the landscapes and played-out scenes. Narrowly defined country music, with banjos and harsh harmonies, isn’t really present (if anything, the vocal reverse is true – the lead vocalist sounds harsh and the harmonies, by comparison, are sweet). Car Wheels is no less a country album for those facts, but musically speaking, it owes a much heavier debt to blues. Time and again, you can hear so many of the classic trademarks of the acoustic blues singers from much earlier in the century that Car Wheels closes out. Can’t Let Go serves as the record’s set-piece jam. Williams’ band live it up with infectious riffing and some irresistible slide work underneath her realisation that in this particular relationship she is out of place, everything good has gone, but she just cannot bring herself to leave:

Says he's sorry then he pulls me out
I got a big chain around my neck
And I'm broken down like a train wreck
Well it's over I know it but I can't let go

These lyrics resonate so strongly because they come surrounded by songs of the narrator’s life in the South, and it is difficult to get away from the feeling that she’s not just singing about a man. All around Lucinda Williams and her peers, there are sad people, people who have lost, people who are down on their luck, and these are the subjects for their songs. So does Can’t Let Go represent a feeling about the South – you’re flawed, your history is chequered, but here we are and I cannot quit you. Listen to the jamming and soling in this song, so typical of Southern music, and you begin to see one reason why songwriters might not want to base themselves anywhere else. This place is musical heaven.

The bluesy feel to the album is present even when the songs themselves aren’t what you call blues numbers. Another scene-setter, the album’s title track I in some senses quintessentially alt-country, as it manages to nail that genre’s trademark blend of electric and acoustic guitars and organic harmonies. But it also uses the sparse, gap-filled qualities of acoustic blues to good effect: as the music gives the song space to breathe, the lyrics take the time to fill us in on every detail, whether it is the smell of breakfast cooking or Loretta Lynn gracing the radio. And again, Williams takes her time in letting the song’s point and message reveal themselves, and however much the song rumbles along, the story takes its time, as the characters travel through a typical Southern scene: “Cotton fields stretching miles and miles”, Hank Williams now on the radio. Having driven the length of Mississippi, I can see how this song rings true – it’s a slow place, where people take the time to get know visitors, space out their days so as to enjoy whatever comes their way. And it is a place where for long stretches, the scenery remains unaltered, unbroken and the same. But don’t mistake it for a place where nothing happens. The stories and goings-on of Mississippi aren’t immediately obvious, like in the big cities, but they are there – this song is designed to hint at the stories to come, stories which, as Williams sings, “nobody knows”. They’re hidden in the faces of people living in the broken down shacks, they’re somewhere inside the minds of the people peering over engine parts, and only by experiencing those lives and meeting those people will their stories be known. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is some sort of guide book, pointing you in the right direction – in the case of this song, Jackson, Mississippi – but you have to do the rest.

However, Car Wheels as a guide book does give us some hints and tips – most of which use fantastic music to point you in the direction of places which, on the surface at least, seem less than remarkable. The heartbreaking Greenville is a real Southern track, and not just because of the presence of Emmylou Harris singing harmony vocals. In this song, Williams is more accepting of the fate of whichever relationship she is singing about – a fate which is, of course, an unhappy one. The deliberate placement of the chords gives the story the dignity it so deserves, and Harris matches her voice so well to Williams that it doesn’t seem like there are two women telling the story – it is more like one woman, with the harmonies representing the depth and layers of her sentiments. This song is arguably the emotional focal point of Williams’ entire recording career so far. And what is fascinating for me is that upon visiting Greenville, I found absolutely nothing of any interest. A small town which does not even claim to have a burial ground of a blues great within its borders (even though there are far more such sites than there were blues greats!), this is clearly the town which you have to absorb into your soul in order for the song to resonate completely. If Williams herself had never experienced the town in that way, the she could never make such a musically simple song sound so emotionally complex. And this complexity comes through in some of the lyrics:

Busted down doors and borrowed cash
Borrowed cash oh the borrowed cash
Go back to Greenville just go on back to Greenville
Looking for someone to save you
Looking for someone to rave about you
To rave about you oh to rave about you
Go back to Greenville just go on back to Greenville

Who is the subject here, who is searching for someone to rave about them? In the first instant, sure, it’s the man she is singing to. But with all of its busted down doors, with the shacks and industrial gaps, the South could easily be the subject here. If it wasn’t for music, for country and blues, who would rave about the place? Seen by so many as a slightly backwards region, lacking in a sense of progress and still holding – implicitly if not officially – some very old attitudes, the South relies on music to remind me people of its qualities, whether they be everyday life or deep tales. Such music humanises the South, and as country and blues have filtered into so many types of music, it is alternative country singers like Lucinda Williams who have taken primary responsibility, most recently, for carrying on this work.

Although Car Wheels was only Lucinda Williams’ fifth album she had been a recording artist for 20 years by the time it was released. Her first two albums, Ramblin’ (1978) and Happy Woman Blues (1980), were full-on blues albums. The former was made up of covers of blues classics – like Robert Johnson’s Ramblin’’ on My Mind, Memphis Minnie’s Me and My Chauffeur, and Hayes and Rhodes’ Satisfied Mind. It is clear from one listen that even then she had something special. She didn’t develop that abrasive vocal style deliberately so as to emphasise her feelings about the subjects of her song; this was her style as soon as she was a singer, and the way she fits herself to those old standards confirms this – there is no artifice here. Ramblin’ demonstrates her familiarity with blues and her right to call herself a blues singer – whatever else she was and would become – right from the outset.

By the time of Car Wheels, she was adding other elements to her blues, but it was always blues. So in the song Lake Charles, the theme is similar to that of Greenville. Taking a place in the South as a title and base, Williams explicitly describes the healing power of specific places in Louisiana and the act of travelling between them. As in several other songs, she depicts one place – in this case Lake Charles – as having more power than the others, but Baton Rouge, Lake Pontchartrain and Lafayette all play their part too. Unusually for her, the song is in the third person, and it is someone else’s soul which comes to rest in its spiritual home, Lake Charles. But the message is clear – these places have a healing power, and for their faults, should not be condemned. But the trick to convincing the listener here is to pull them into the physical places as well as the song. So drawing on her blues background, Williams adds a Cajun flavour to that blues base (bearing in mind this song is set in Louisiana and not Mississippi) and, producing a sound not unlike The Band’s Acadian Driftwood, gives the impression that the places she describes and the powers she attributes to them are inseparable.

Happy Woman Blues, the follow-up to Ramblin’, featured Williams’ own songs, though still in that full blues mode. A fascinating comparison can be drawn between that record and Car Wheels, because I Lost It, a stand-out track on both albums, was radically re-created somewhere between the two records. On the earlier record the song is fast and upbeat, so that although she has “lost it”, her plea for more time is hopeful and optimistic. By the time of the Car Wheels interpretation of the song, things have slowed down. The guitar chords ring out, and vaguely grungy picking runs underneath those chords, so that the picking is barely noticeable. This adds to the feeling of loss, and also uncertainty, as it is not clear what has been lost:

Money can't replace it
No memory can erase it
And I know I'm never gonna find
Another one to compare

Although the song goes on to reveal something of what is on the narrator’s mind (“I don’t want no enemies”, “I don’t want nothing if I have to fake it”), the precise nature of the loss is less clear than her realisation that the loss itself is real and permanent.

Just as the listener thinks that no more can be said about the South or about the life of Lucinda Williams herself, or that no more everyday real-life mysteries can be announced and then left unresolved, Car Wheels delivers a twin salute to the music she has in her soul. Joy serves mainly as a taster of Williams’ later work, replete with flamboyant riffing and jamming, overlaid with what is probably, finally, a really full use of her own vocal grit. She is practically rapping as she tells the object of her ire:

I don't want you anymore
Cause you took my joy
I don't want you anymore
You took my joy
You took my joy
I want it back
You took my joy
I want it back

But Williams doesn’t just settle for telling some guy how she feels. She makes it clear what she wants instead – and it is neither another lover or, as in so many other songs, the comfort of solitude (“I don’t need no one…”). No, in order to reclaim her joy, Williams will travel the South, visiting specific places, Slidell and West Memphis. Not the famous places – the real places. Across all this, she laces the search with electric blues, angry and old and new at once. This is country music in the sense of the area it talks of – and surely that is a real, more sustainable definition of country than something which relies on name-checking three musical instruments?

But in any case, having paid that final bluesy tribute to the South, Williams finishes Car Wheels with the country equivalent. Once more, she steers clear of the cliché towns and sings, this time, of Jackson. This is an old-fashioned country song, so over country guitar bends and steel guitar, the vocal style is plaintive and heartfelt, rather than bitter and resentful. But the message is precisely the same as in the previous song. She has lost her love, but once she gets to Jackson, she won’t miss him – well not much, anyway. And as it turns out, it’s not just Jackson – the same is true of Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Vicksburg. The South, finally here, is explicitly described as a magical cure for your ills, capable of taking away your tears, the reality of missing of people, your urges. Everything personal is ultimately submerged by the power of the South, finishing up with Jackson, right in the middle of Mississippi. For the travellers like me, that town, and most of the others Williams names, are mere staging posts between famous studios, big plantations and mighty rivers. But for Lucinda Williams, the South is essential to her well-being, and its central towns are central to her happiness.