Roots 66

Our Saturday Evening Post tonight is the first of two this weekend where, for once, the sausagefest gets shelved and we give some love to the ladies.

Today we have the 66th birthday of someone who has -- astonishingly given that I remember when she first hit when I was in high school -- been around 40 years now. 

That's four decades establishing herself at the forefront of what she helped become this Americana/Roots genre that has 14 radio stations in every town these days.

Her music is, frankly, absolutely and consistently exquisite. Really one of the best songwriters of the era, and somehow well under the radar of many people.

She's always done it her own way, and not according to the album-tour-album dictations of the music industry.

In an era of records where the songs of value swim upstream to spawn amid oceans of filler, none of Lucinda Williams's songs ever sound like placeholders.

One of her albums is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the genre, which is surely a bold statement but not wholly inaccurate when it comes to Car Wheels On a Gravel Road.

When it comes to what Lucinda Williams show to share, there are surely many choices but I settled on this one.

It comes from the tour behind my favorite record of hers -- the follow-up to Car Wheels, called Essence -- and is a nearly-pristine soundboard capture of indeterminate origin, sourced here from a boot CD.

Lucinda Williams

House of Blues

West Hollywood, CA

7.30.2001

01 Metal Firecracker

02 Car Wheels On a Gravel Road

03 Right In Time

04 Blue

05 Reason to Cry

06 Are You Down

07 band introductions

08 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten

09 Out of Touch

10 Drunken Angel

11 Changed the Locks

12 Essence

13 Joy

14 Big Road Blues

15 Get Right with God

16 Lonely Girls

17 Bus to Baton Rouge

18 Come to Me Baby

19 Can’t Let Go

20 Positively 4th Street (bonus track)

21 Essence (bonus track)

22 Blue (bonus track)

Total time: 2:03:10

disc break goes after Track 12

Track 20 is from the Bottom Line in NYC, 1994 (from the "In Their Own Words" CD on Razor & Tie Records)

Tracks 21-22 are acoustic home demos from 2000/2001

Tracks 1-19:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals

Bo Ramsey - guitars

Doug Pettibone - guitars, harmonica & vocals

Taras Prodaniuk - bass & vocals

Don Heffington - drums

Jim Lauderdale - vocals

Track 20:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals
Gurf Morlix - additional guitar & vocals

Tracks 21-22:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals

soundboard recording, possibly sourced from the 2002 "At the House of Blues" bootleg CD on the Turtle label

747 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link

The dumbass bootleggers blew it on the first bonus track -- it was missing the first few notes for whatever reason -- but I managed to get a lossless file of the complete track and substitute it. Otherwise nothing was changed.

I'll be back tomorrow with some more Superwomen, with a post about one of the classic all-time FM shows, which -- coincidentally -- I just remastered.

Today,, however, we celebrate Lucinda Williams -- born this day in 1953 -- and encourage her to please keep making music until age 166.--J.