Drinks with Bobby and Nanci Griffith

Me and Bobby Rymer ran into Nanci at my current favorite Nashville "happy hour" place, Sportsman's Grill a few nights ago. It's kind of a pub crowd where regulars stop in on their way from work to home. Me and Bobby were just catching up and talking about the Almo Irving days and our days since when Nanci walks up to the bar to get a "dinner to go" and a glass of white wine which turned into two. We'd all met while she wrote and we'd worked for Almo Irving years back. I really never knew Nanci that well but was a BIG fan of some of her records over the years. "One Fair Summer Evening" being my favorite! Great, GREAT "live" record. Also, "Late Night Grande" (apologies for the ad on the intro of this vid) from her '91 record being a song that still kills me every time that I listen to it. Also, a few years back she had also invited me to famous Abbey Roads Studio (while I was in London for work) to watch her record sides with the London Symphony Orchestra which ended up being the "Dust Bowl Symphony" album (INCREDIBLE record!). That being one of those lifetime memories. Anyways sitting there we talked about Texas (her home state) quite a bit, seeing as I spent a coupla months there this past Summer on my bloggin journey.  She loved, admired and looked up to the Texas writers like Townes, Guy and the writers from that era. She was a predecessor and/or contemporaries to the Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen group of artists. It was interesting in her take on the whole music scene now and she seemed to be honestly pretty positive about it all. She talked about how talented Taylor Swift is and how there are really talented new people out there making new music. This coming from a woman who's achieved a lot of hard earned success over the years (including a Grammy or two along the way) but had started out in a car working her way from Austin to Boston finding and making enough money in the clubs like "The Down Home" in Johnson City,TN (which is where she first met my favorite singer of all time, Keith Whitley pre-Nashville) to make her way on to the next town headed north. I asked her how she knew where to play (being in the new towns) and she said that the artists that came through Austin would tell her of the cool places (kind of an early "internet"). Her contemporaries read like a like a wall of Hall of Famers: Guy Clark, Harlan Howard, Emmylou Harris, The Crickets, Jimmy Webb and on and on. We all talked for a coupla hours maybe and though she says that she's trying to take a year off to write she says that she's finding herself booking shows for this year (she'd just returned from Belfast, Ireland). Sounded like she was sincerely excited about being in the "writing mode" though. We ended up talking about things like poverty in the south (specifically in Mississippi) and how real and over looked it all is nowadays. She talked and was really excited and was honored for a song that she'd written about Mildred and Richard Loving. They were plaintiffs in the landmark "Loving vs. Virginia" in the U.S. Supreme court which protected mixed raced marriages (in the end). Nanci has been really serious about social issues over the years. Of course we did talk about fluffy stuff like her love for "the soaps", dislike of beer and her love for wine, as well.

   Another afternoon in a Nashville bar with a brilliant singer/songwriter sitting down and having a drink or two and giving her wisdom and stories to people like Bobby and me. I'm lucky to have gotten to work with both. Thanks Bobby for the beers :)