William Dart looks over the career of American country-folk singer Mary Gauthier leading up to her recent release Rifles & Rosary Beads.
Mary Gauthier Photo: Mary Gauthier website http://www.marygauthier.com
Mary Gauthier (say "Go-shay" y'all) is one of the more individual voices in that slippery groove between country and folk music. She mightn’t fill stadiums but her sharp-witted, big-hearted songs have been bringing in followers for 21 years. All the way back to her very first album, Dixie Kitchen, named after a Cajun restaurant that she opened in Boston, an eleven-year stop-gap between dropping out of university and becoming a musician.
Songs like "Ways of the World" suggested that, all along, she veered more towards the k d lang camp than Dolly Parton’s.
You don’t get many breezier snapshots of childhood than that, one of the first of many songs in which Mary Gauthier lays out her heart, soul and life for all to hear.
But that first album was not entirely carefree. The track "GD HIV" considers the ravages of AIDS in the States through the 80s and 90s. While others made quilts in remembrance of lost friends, family and lovers, Mary Gauthier penned this harrowing song, taking on the character of Michael Joe Alexandry.
"I Drink" is another Mary Gauthier song taken from life — her own, in fact — remembering a desperate childhood, deserted by her birth mother, put in an orphanage and then adopted, only to find she had an alcoholic, abusive father.
It's a song that was picked up by several other artists including Blake Shelton, who gives it straight off the Nashville assembly-line.
Singing it herself on her 2005 album Mercy Now, you hear and feel the pain. A pain that would temporarily derail her as a teenager, running away from home and being caught up in a life of drugs and desperation.
With her voice sometimes sinking to a laconic drawl, she stirs up speech and song into one potent mix, both of them on the lean side.
In the audio programme (click 'Listen' above'), we play that album version, but here's a very affecting live performance with Tania Elizabeth on fiddle.
Five years on, in her album The Foundling, the phantoms of her past are still with her but she puts her life into a more focused context. She announces the set with the simplicity of a folksong, followed by a melancholy ballad in waltzing triple time. Fiddles and accordions give it the ambience of old Europe, with a whiff of klezmer and the tang of boulevard café.
The Foundling is an exorcism of sorts, as Gauthier works through the history of a life lived and still being lived. It’s remarkably and evocatively scored.
To experience these songs at their most chilling however, search out the follow-up disc of the same set, The Foundling Alone, released in 2011, presenting the music with just her own guitar. The key track, "March 11, 1962", in which she rings up her birth mother only to find out that the woman wants nothing to do with her, is a soul-barer.
One senses a new personal freedom in Mary Gauthier’s latest album, Rifles & Rosary Beads. Escaping from herself and her own life, in a sense, she’s been involved in songwriting workshops with veterans from the armed forces. Eleven songs have been created, and let’s not forget that the medium of the song, according to Gauthier, will always be the most direct way to the heart.
Rifles & Rosary Beads is a powerful portfolio of images from the battleground and beyond. The images come with stories, such as this one of a helicopter downed during a medical delivery. It's caught in a dramatic setting that sees Gauthier’s guitar supplemented by the chop of blades, drums of doom, ghostly piano and poignant trumpet.
Listen to these songs and more by clicking on 'Listen' above for the full programme.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Mary Gauthier' (Marhoefer) – Paul Marhoefer
Raw Cuts Vol Two – The Muscle Shoals Sessions
(Paul Marhoefer)
'Ways of the World' (Gauthier) – Mary Gauthier
Genesis (The Early Years)
(Proper)
'GD HIV' (Gauthier) – Mary Gauthier
Genesis (The Early Years)
(Proper)
'I Drink' (Gauthier) – Blake Shelton
Blake Shelton's Bar and Grill
(RCA)
'I Drink' (Gauthier) – Mary Gauthier
Mercy Now
(Lost Highway)
'The Foundling' (Gauthier) – Mary Gauthier
The Foundling
(Proper)
'March 11, 1962' (Gauthier/ Rose) – Mary Gauthier
The Foundling Alone
(Proper)
'Goodbye' (Gauthier) – Mary Gauthier
The Foundling
(Proper)
'Soldiering On' (Gauthier/ Marina) – Mary Gauthier
Rifles & Rosary Beads
(Proper)
'Morphine 1-2' (Gauthier/ Marina) – Mary Gauthier
Rifles & Rosary Beads
(Proper)
'Brothers' (Gauthier et al) – Mary Gauthier
Rifles & Rosary Beads
(Proper)
