Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams is a three-time Grammy Award-winning Texas singer-songwriter. Her musical style is country-alternative folk with a bit of blues. Some of her more popular songs include Passionate Kisses, Changed the Locks, I Lost It, Jackson, Drunken Angle, and 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten. Her style has been compared to Nanci Griffith, Taj Mahal and Beth Nielsen Chapman, and she has been called the "female Bob Dylan" and "female Townes Van Zandt".[1].
Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1953 but her family moved often as her father took new teaching assignments around Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Mexico and Chile. She was influenced by Hank Williams and especially by artists known for writing challenging lyrics, such as Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She moved to Austin, Texas, in 1974 and joined the Austin and Houston, Texas, music scenes. She released Ramblin' on My Mind (later renamed Ramblin') in 1979 and Happy Woman Blues in 1980. After moving to Los Angeles in 1984, she released Lucinda Williams and was hailed as a major talent by music critics and musicians. Patty Loveless covered her song The Night's Too Long into a top 20 country hit. After touring together, Mary Chapin Carpenter covered Lucinda's Passionate Kisses which shot up to the country music Top Five in 1993 and earned Lucinda the Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year. Other artists followed: Emmylou Harris covered Crescent City and Sweet Old World and Tom Petty covered Changed the Locks for the movie She's the One. In 1995, she and long-time guitarist/co-producer Gorf Morlix parted ways and Lucinda partnered up with Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy in Nashville to produce Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. However, Lucinda felt the album was "overproduced" and she then remixed the album again. After many delays, the album finally came out, earning Lucinda a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop survey. Lucinda won her third Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal for the song Get Right with God.