Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You - Lucinda Williams

 

I first became a big fan of Lucinda Williams music after stumbling upon some of her early recordings. I remember being immediately taken by her stunning voice and phrasing. Back then her music was hard to find, but I put together a decent collection of her LPs and CDs, and then after I learned that Williams had deep roots in my part of Louisiana, and that she spent some early, musically formative, years around Houston and Austin, I wanted to learn more about her. My digging around, however, usually left me with more unanswered questions than I had when I started digging for answers. Now via her Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,  Lucinda Williams fills in most of the blanks for me. 

Because she had lived in twelve different cities by the time she was eighteen, lots of places can lay claim to having played a significant role in the life of Lucinda Williams. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Williams lived in Mississippi, Utah, and Georgia before she was five years old. She then spent a year in Santiago, Chile before returning to Louisiana for her pre-teen years, and even lived for a few months in Mexico before bouncing around for the next two decades between New Orleans, Fayetteville (Arkansas), San Francisco, Houston, Austin, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Nashville. 

Lucinda Williams was born to an academic father and a mother who suffered from mental illness all of her life because of the horrible sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Williams's father would eventually become a well respected writing teacher and poet, and he recognized his daughter's rebellious spirit early on, even to supporting her when she decided never to return to high school after being expelled for skipping school in order to march in peace and racial justice protests. As a result, Williams educated herself by sitting in on many of her father's creative writing workshops and befriending some of the most famous and creative writers of the day. 

"When I say, "I'm a southerner," many people think, "That must mean you're racist, you're this, you're that." There are all these stereotypes associated with being southern, which is a whole problem in and of itself. I think that's why my dad instilled in me, 'We are southerners, and we have to fight the people who think that all southerners are racist, all southerners are hicks, all southerners are stupid.' That's how I was raised. That's my South."

Nowhere is this influence more apparent than in Williams's poetic song lyrics. As confirmed in Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, her songs are largely autobiographical in nature, most of them being based on real life emotional experiences she was having with the men who were in her life at the moment (she has been happily married to Tom Overby since 2009). In the memoir, Williams includes the lyrics to many of her most personal songs and explains their often surprising origins. 

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You offers an intimate look into the mind of a creative artist not afraid to her expose her feelings to the world. It is an honest look at who Lucinda Williams considers herself to be today at 70 years of age and how she got to be that way. My only regret is that the memoir does not address the stroke that Williams suffered in 2020, a stroke severe enough to rob her of her ability to play guitar for three years. Maybe that's another book. But she's back and she's healthy now, and I'm grateful for that.

Lucinda Williams (wikipedia photo)