Nanci Griffith Was the Soundtrack of My Childhood
Nanci Griffith was the soundtrack of my childhood. We listened to her album Other Voices, Other Rooms almost non-stop on car trips across eastern Montana to visit relatives in North Dakota, and on one particularly long road trip to Seattle. We later added some of her other albums to the mix, but Other Voices will always be Nanci Griffith in my mind. As a kid, I can’t say I really liked or disliked her music, it simply was. In the same way that you breathe air or drink water, when you climb into the white Chevy Astro van to drive to grandma’s house, Nanci Griffith plays from the speakers. Because my parents (my dad, really) played the album more or less on repeat, starting again from Across the Great Divide after Wimoweh ended for the fourth or fifth time, it did feel like part of the car. No buttons were pushed to make it happen, the CD was just ready to go in the player when the car started, and stayed there when we arrived and the ignition was turned off.
Nanci Griffith didn’t write the music on Other Voices, Other Rooms, but to me they’ll always be her songs. When my sister would sing “Boots of Spanish Leather” on her guitar around the campfire, she was singing Griffith, not Bob Dylan. After requesting “From Clare to Here” from a musician playing at the Dubliner near Union Station in DC in 2015, my parents and I felt we were listening to a Nanci Griffith song, not Ralph McTell or whoever the guy singing thought he was covering.
Watching her live in DC with my other sister in 2006, on the steps of the Kennedy Center, I realized how little of her musical repertoire I actually knew. Which was bizarre to me, given how well I knew a specific piece of her music. Hers was a prolific career, but despite that, Nanci Griffith was hardly a household name. I always assumed that I was the only person who had heard of her, not that it came up much – maybe never – as a topic of conversation. But she worked with a whole host of well-known artists, and was a musician’s musician. She recorded with Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Hootie and the Blowfish, and many others. She was covered by the likes of Dolly Parton, Suzy Boggus, and Kathy Matthea.
Thinking back on those days, there was something special about listening to a CD all the way through. While we could have certainly changed CDs, that rarely happened. If my mom was driving, the Trio (Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton) might sneak into the rotation. Occasionally we’d put in a different Nanci Griffith album, but Other Voices, Other Rooms always found its way back into the CD player, and was played through from start to finish, and then again and again. With the proliferation of streaming apps, it has become all too easy to pick and choose the songs we want to listen to. How often do we listen to a full album these days? It’s too easy to click away from the songs we don’t like. That’s not all bad – now I can just listen to my favorite Nanci Griffith song, “Say It Isn’t So,” on repeat instead of Griffith’s entire Flyer album – but there was something special about the deep appreciation that builds for music that takes its time to find its way to you.
Nanci Griffith died last week. The news left me strangely sad. I don’t know much about her, but I’ve spent more time listening to her music than perhaps any other artist (it’s hard to exaggerate just how many times we listened to her on those long trips to North Dakota). She’s the soundtrack of my childhood, and hearing any song from Other Voices, Other Rooms instantly takes me back to a certain place and time. I know the words to every song without thinking or trying. No doubt her passing leaves a hole in the lives of those she’s left behind in her personal life, but as I sit here re-listening to her music, it’s impossible to miss that she leaves a great legacy, the eternal legacy of artists who create something meaningful and lasting. RIP Nanci Griffith.
