A Freight Train Ride Through Lucinda Williams’ Artistry at ACL Live

Lucinda Williams and her band at ACL Live on Jan. 19 (Photo by Isabella Martinez)

Given Lucinda Williams’ spring 2023 memoir Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, the singer’s reception at ACL Live at the Moody Theater on Friday night felt a bit like seeing the movie adaptation.

Her throaty narration and funny details, alongside archival photos onscreen, reintroduced the characters of her life – sparked with the interest of them not quite matching your mind’s eye. The generally chronological set list, tapping the 70-year-old’s most regarded records, felt hand-picked to specifically soundtrack the read-along.

Coming off a big year for re-bundling concerts with other forms, like Taylor Swift’s career-recapping Eras Tour film, the conceptual continuation of Williams’ memoir into a weighty two-hour-and-twenty-minute live show makes a smart fit. Though her road dates stretching back to last July were billed around latest Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart, the album provided only two tracks in this new book-focused tour run. Her life story, and its spongy alignment with many facets of American music history, led the show. No opener needed, just her fourpiece Buick 6 band, now including guitarist Marc Ford from the Black Crowes.

Photo by Isabella Martinez

Of course, this historical trajectory energetically peaked early around the turn of the century, making some track choices a little obligatory. Long spoken introductions, “the stories behind the songs,” walked a similar path from the Louisiana-born singer’s memoir with funny, live-wire additions from a decades-developed orator. Like when she moved from Austin to Los Angeles in 1984, as she wrote, her Texas friends taunted that she’d be back with her tail between her legs – but she didn’t write that they also warned of California Mexican food topped with sour cream.

Back in the Austin stomping grounds of her early singer-songwriter days, she returned to the Moody Theater for the first time since 2019. Not long after, in 2020, she suffered a debilitating stroke.

The set list’s only unreleased track, opener “Blind Pearly Brown” paid tribute to a preacher who would sing gospel blues downtown during her childhood in Macon, Georgia. She detailed her current status as singer and storyteller: “I’m not playing right now due to this stroke I had, but it’s just temporary. I’m planning on getting back out.” The winter wear/Western-wear-donning crowd – who had already cheered as she padded, with assistance, up the stage stairs in Converse high-tops – didn’t need any consolation.

Photo by Isabella Martinez

The night’s only run of covers detailed her early totems: Elizabeth Cotten’s folk blues (“Freight Train”), Bob Dylan’s blues rock (“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”), and Hank Williams’ country blues (“Jambalaya [On the Bayou]”), the last of which appeared on her debut all-covers LP and ushered in her own rambling Eighties barroom sound onstage. Prior, the first notes of the Dylan track, and a meaningful look at her aiding stagehand, brought her to her feet. She never sat back down for the next two hours, which felt victorious enough.

Beloved breakout “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” came early, made a little more zydeco/psych-ish as her band treaded gingerly on the night’s most recognizable hits, keeping time with whichever way Williams’ rugged and still-beautifully-standing voice threw the lines. (While home for Christmas, I recently realized this song was ingrained in me early via my mom’s Williams-Sonoma-produced compilation CD called Backyard Barbecue.) Freeway lines kept flying on “Bus to Baton Rouge,” where granular lyrical detail and pedal steel best displayed that she’s been retelling her childhood in song since the very beginning. Tonight’s speeches just upped the context.

Shifting gears to a structure mirrored in her memoir, the show’s most successful run skipped through stories of “misfit” men in her life, pinpointed ultra-openly with old pictures onscreen. “Little Angel, Little Brother” showed her sibling, “Pineola” the poet Frank Stanford, and “Lake Charles” her onetime boyfriend Clyde Woodward III. We’re lucky Williams isn’t the type of artist who doesn’t want to say exactly what a song’s about.

Photo by Isabella Martinez

Before the Austinite highlight of Blaze Foley remembrance “Drunken Angel,” she said Charlie Sexton – due for his own ACL Live gig with Elvis Costello the next night – visited her backstage in Dallas the day before. She only stayed vague before the sharp lines of “Those Three Days.” Summary of the evening: “You can find out more in my book.”

Fans didn’t seem as jazzed for slow ponder “Fruits of My Labor,” Williams’ most currently embraced song in millennial covers by national acts like Waxahatchee and Rostam. Locally, it’s easy to absorb her sustaining influence on the indie scene in recent memory: Lomelda and More Eaze took on “Lonely Girls,” On Being an Angel recorded “Metal Firecracker,” and Keeled Scales label head Tony Presley covered “Six Blocks Away” at the Cactus Cafe last summer. Only hitch in the chronological sweep, those kinds of Nineties/2000s bright spots felt sorely unrepresented.

She touched on current preferences after the bare-bones burner of “Heaven Blues,” asking, “Do y’all think that song goes over OK? Is it too repetitive?” After admiring the Black Keys and the White Stripes, the final stretch pulled Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart’s title track and “Where the Song Will Find Me.” Finally breaking her own rules, “Joy,” which she performed on the Austin City Limits TV show in 1998, jumped all the way back to Car Wheels.

The determined roots rollick fit right in with her latest songs, bringing home that, for Lu, it’s always been the blues.

Photo by Isabella Martinez