Nanci Griffith Sang Stories About Love and Texas

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter was 68
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Aug 13, 2021 5:35 PM CDT

Nanci Griffith, the Grammy-winning folk singer-songwriter from Texas whose literary songs like "Love at the Five and Dime" celebrated the South, has died. She was 68. Her management company said Griffith died Friday but did not provide a cause of death, the AP reports. Griffith worked closely with other folk singers, helping the early careers of artists like Lyle Lovett and Emmylou Harris. Her singing was effortlessly smooth, with a bit of a twangy Texas accent, as she told stories about Dust Bowl farmers and empty Woolworth stores. Griffith's recording of "From a Distance" later become a well-known Bette Midler tune. The song appeared on Griffith's first major label release, Lone Star State of Mind, in 1987. Her 1993 album Other Voices, Other Rooms, earned a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.

In 2008, Griffith won the Lifetime Achievement Trailblazer Award from the Americana Music Association. Griffith often wrote social commentary into her songs, such as the anti-racist ode "It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go," and "Trouble in the Fields," which addressed the economic plight of rural farmers in the 1980s. Her songs became increasingly political over time, per the Guardian. "Artists don't choose to be artists, writers or singers,” she said in 2010. "It's just something you know you have to do." The songs "The Last of the True Believers" and "Love at the Five and Dime"—"a story collection with multiple characters and settings about those finding love or connection"—alone put Griffith "in the pantheon of important Texas singer-songwriters," Andrew Dansby writes in the Houston Chronicle.

(More obituary stories.)

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