“Now bums just drink and wander round
Tramps dream and wander too
But a hobo was a pioneer who preferred to work for food
He knew how his nation’s doing
By the length of a side walk cigarette butt
Born with an aching wanderlust
Embedded in his gut…
The last free men are hobos
Steinbeck said, and he paid cash
And the stories that he bought from them
Helped write the Grapes of Wrath
But boxcars have been sealed for years
And trespassers do time
And the railroad yards are razor wired
And hoboing’s a crime.” *
Last of the Hobo Kings
A long term Tom Waits fan (see here too), I love songs about misfits, drunks, outcasts and those who don’t fit in with societal norms. Yeah, I know there’s romantic indulgence in such song-writing and story-telling, and that wanderlust has wrecked many lives and relationships. It can be just self-deceiving spin on denial of responsibility, whether that’s responsibility for dependents or for self. Still, in a sense we’re all hobos, all pursuing dreams, all travellers, all relying on our innate abilities for survival, each with our ideas of how the world is and/or should be. And we love to think of the underdog doing OK, being celebrated even.
So I was pleased to be introduced to the writing of American troubadour, Mary Gauthier (pronounced Goh-Shay), who’s currently based in Nashville. According to Wiki, Gauthier was born in New Orleans to a mother she never knew, was adopted by an Italian Catholic couple in Louisiana but ran away from home at 15, and spent the next several years in rehab and half-way houses. She spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell. Struggling to deal with being adopted, and her sexuality, she abused drugs and alcohol. All this informed her subsequent songwriting. (Don’t try it at home, kids). So she shares some experiences with Steve Earle (this post was when Slicer first confessed a [very selective] listening to country). Bob Dylan championed her song “I Drink” on the very first series of his successful radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. It seems to be autobiographical with respect to her adoptive father, but also confessional.
After attending the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston, Dixie Kitchen, which gave her first album its name. Mary ran, and cooked at, the restaurant for eleven years. She was arrested for drunk driving on its opening night, July 12, 1990, and has been sober ever since. After achieving sobriety, she was driven to dedicate herself full-time to songwriting, and embarked upon a career in music. She wrote her first song at 35 years of age.
Her style is firmly in the Americana/country tradition, and she’s won many awards. It pushes up against the limits of my taste but her songs have been covered by such an impressive breadth of singers, stretching from Dylan to Boy George, that I was forced to open my mouth wider. I’m impressed with both the lyric writing and her delivery, and I’m always interested to hear some detail of artists’ songwriting processes. Listening closer, she’s like a blend of Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, and K D Lang, with maybe a dash of Lenny Cohen. As you might have guessed (and as she readily admits), she doesn’t do happy songs – so she’s pushing well into the subject matter of the Blues.
Mary G – don’t let that facial expression fool you…
I went to hear her play the other night in Belfast and she described the “alchemy” of how singing a sad song makes you feel better, and “how some of those happy songs on the radio leave you feeling sad.” As is the case with many great song-writers, her songs tell stories. A good example is the one at the top of this post. Here it is as performed at the Belfast gig:
Mary Gauthier_Last of the Hobo Kings
Another of Mary’s story-telling songs is Karla Faye, from her 1999 album, Drag Queens In Limousines. A bit like Dylan’s “Hurricane,” it tells the story of a prison inmate; unlike Hurricane, it doesn’t plead innocence. In her introduction to it, Gauthier reminded us that Karla Faye Tucker was on death row and was changed after her conversion to Christianity on the jailhouse floor. [When she was put to death by lethal injection in 1998 she was the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War, i.e. 1863]. Such jailhouse conversions often provoke great scepticism but in this instance, because of it and because she was female, her situation prompted substantial national and international pressure – including from Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, the then Speaker of the US House of Representatives (Newt Gingrich), well-known right-winger Pat Robertson, and Pope John Paul II – which called for her sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. In a co-incidental twist, Ronald Carlson, the brother of Tucker’s murder victim Debbie Thornton, also underwent a religious conversion, which changed his view to one opposing the death penalty. Sadly the calls went unheeded by the then Governor of Texas, one George W Bush. Gauthier finished her introduction with the claim “We all need redemption… like Karla Faye Tucker.”
“A little girl lost,
her world full of pain.
He said it feels good,
She gave him her vein.
The dope made her numb
and numb felt like free.
Until she came down,down,down
To a new misery.
A junkie a whore,
living for the next high.
She’d lie cheat and steal,
She forgot how to cry…
It’s an eye for an eye,
Now you’re gonna die
A tooth for a tooth,
It’s your moment of truth.
There’s no mercy here
Your stay is denied
Go on and pray, pray, pray
There’s Mercy in the sky.
Alone in her cell,
no dope in her veins.
The killer’d become,
little girl lost again.
She fell to her knees.
She prayed she would die.
On the cold cement floor,
she finally cried.
And love came like the wind
Love whispered her name.
It reached through and held her
lifted her pain.
15 years on death row,
her faith deeper each day.
Her last words were “I love you all,”
Good-bye, Karla Faye.”
Join in the cheery chorus now y’all:
“Now it’s an eye for an eye,
And you’re gonna die…”
In yet another story song, an alternative Christmas tune (one good at any time of the year), there’s an affection for the freedom of the outdoors, a gentle climate, and references to a benevolent landlord:
“Christmas in paradise under the Cow Key Bridge
Where the warm breeze blows so nice
And the landlord forgives.”
At the Belfast gig, Gauthier clearly demonstrated her love for New Orleans, the town of her birth, with a song she wrote following the devastation caused by the flood. She said that this particular piece of songwriting was prompted by the answer given by a victim of the flood to a stupid question from a journalist: “What does it feel like to lose everything you own?” She explained that his answer was “Well, Sir, I don’t know how to answer that question. All I can tell you is that it sure is sad when you wanna go home and you can’t find the way.”
Mary Gauthier_Can’t Find The Way
One of Mary’s best known songs is Mercy Now. As well as a performance of it, Belfast got an explanation for how it came about:
Finally, I have yet to mention that Mary is currently on tour, and not for the first time, with Northern Ireland native Ben Glover, who is settling in Nashville. (I gather he’s been led astray by falling for an American girl). It was therefore a pleasure to hear Ben on home turf both opening for Mary, and subsequently singing with her. A real highlight was their co-written song, which was only finished just over a week ago. Ben describes his pilgrimage in the legendary steps of Robert Johnson:
If you fancy a view of the performance in the atmospheric venue of the Belfast gig, this just appeared on-line:
This Real Music Club gig in Belfast was a treat for someone like me with antibodies to most country music, and Mary had the huge talent of Italian Michele Gaziche accompanying her on fiddle.
Here in this lady’s back catalogue we’ve got recurring, timeless themes of homelessness, freedom, finding our way home, gettin lost on the way, dreams/hope for the future, and mercy. Hey, we’re all hobos, we’ve all sold our soul at some stage or another.
“Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now.”
*audio and lyrics are posted here under perceived “fair use” – for the purpose of commentary/illustration/charitable cause. No copyright breach intended. Not for profit. Will remove immediately if there is a copyright owner who requests removal.
Slicer's Slivers of Being 