Back in 2000, Mary Gauthier was little more than a rumor to anyone outside the Boston area, one among hundreds of acoustic-guitar-strumming singer-songwriters trying to get some attention at the annual North American Folk Alliance conference. It was held at the Sheraton Hotel in Cleveland that year, and the February wind razoring off Lake Erie discouraged any thoughts of going outside. One didn’t have to, though, because dozens of performers and their representatives had turned their hotel rooms into miniature nightclubs—often with the bed between the performers and the audience and sometimes beneath the audience.
There are a lot of singer-songwriters in the world with whom one wouldn’t want to be trapped in such intimate quarters, but Tony Sica, a Baltimore DJ, gave me a tip. “Her name is spelled G-a-u-t-h-i-e-r," he told me, “but it’s pronounced go-shay." So I found myself sitting on the corner of a stranger's bed as Mary sat in a hotel chair five feet away. As soon as she started singing “I Drink” from her latest, second album, “Drag Queens in Limousines," she had me.
Every music lover has had that experience—that shock of recognition when one discovers a major artist for the first time—and, let me tell you, it’s even more intense when you’re five feet away from the singer in a hotel room. It’s hard to tell what happens in that moment of skin-prickling, adrenaline-flushed alertness. Maybe it's that instinctive sense that you’re finally being told what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Maybe it's the sense that the music as well as the words have captured not just the world as it is, not just the world as it should be, but both at the same time and the heart-wrenching gulf in between.
Hunched over the guitar resting on her right thigh, the gangly woman with short, spiky hair sang the opening lines, “He’d get home at 5:30, fix a drink and sit down in his chair, pick a fight with mama," in a thick drawl that hinted at the Louisiana roots that had preceded her move to Boston. The melody had the sturdy structure and inviting lilt of traditional country, a welcome break from the amorphous artsiness filling the hotel that weekend. Her delivery had an off-handed, conversational quality, as if she were just telling you what happened back then, and you could listen or not; it was all the same to her. She could afford to be casual, because her songwriting was so well crafted that it needed no compensating theatrics.
The first time she reached the chorus—“Fish swim; birds fly. Daddies yell; mamas cry. Old men sit and think. I drink.”—several people in the hotel room giggled at its echo of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and its blunt minimalism. No one was laughing by the third time she sang the chorus. It was clear that this character wasn’t going to fall down and be amusing nor sober up and straighten out; she was just going to stay in that apartment full of stale smoke, TV dinners and empty bottles. It was a sad song made sadder by the character's refusal to ask for our pity.
“I Drink” is Mary's best known song; she recorded it again on her breakthrough fourth album, 2005’s “Mercy Now," and the tune was covered by Australian legend Bill Chambers (Kasey's dad) in 2003 and by mainstream country star Blake Shelton in 2004. But “I Drink” is in no way an exception to the songs she was writing and singing at the beginning of her career. It’s just one of many gems scattered across her first three albums on small Massachusetts labels before she graduated to the Nashville major label, Lost Highway. Those jewels are now gathered in one handy pouch on this collection.
A few weeks after that first encounter, Mary and I got a chance to talk, and I wanted to know how she managed that balancing act on “I Drink” and similar songs—neither romanticizing nor condemning life at the margins, describing it with neither sentimentality nor cynicism.
“It's a fine line you have to walk,” she agreed, “because you don’t want to glorify that way of life. The song strikes some people as funny at first, but then they realize the character's not coming out of it; she’s a miserable, hopeless person drinking herself to death. I can write about it now, because it's not my life anymore. I don’t think I could write about it if I were still in the middle of it. It's so hard to understand what's happening while it's happening, but when you can look back, you get some perspective on it. `Drag Queens' is another example.”
“Drag Queens in Limousines” is the title track of Mary's second album. At the Sheraton Hotel in Cleveland, she sang the autobiographical tale with the detachment of an anthropologist observing the strange customs of adolescence: “I stole mama's car on a Sunday and left home for good and moved in with my friends in the city in a bad neighborhood.... Drag queens in limousines, nuns in blue jeans, dreamers with big dreams, poets and AWOL Marines, actors and bar flies, writers with dark eyes.”
“My family's from down in Thibodaux, Louisiana,” she explained, “a town that’s just as unspellable and unpronounceable as my name. I was hell on wheels growing up. I was the kind of teenager parents pray to God they don’t get. I was sneaking out my window at age 13 to go see my friends. My parents were Nixon conservatives, and I couldn’t be more different from them.”
“I found a lot of friends along the way, and I try to describe those folks in the song. Just because I ended up with some problems with drugs and alcohol doesn’t mean that the people around me weren’t good, kind people. I got the title `Drag Queens' and wrote and wrote and wrote. After writing 12 versions, I realized I should just make it a true story about my growing up.”
She first ran away from home at 15, spent her 16th birthday in a Baton Rouge detox center and her 18th birthday in a Kansas City jail. At 24 she was still “strung out on five or six drugs, working at a dance club and taking philosophy courses at LSU." Through the haze of chemicals, she was still able to get A’s on her school papers, to keep voluminous journals, to devour novels and to soak up records by Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen.
She knew she had a fascination with language and a gift for using it, but by the time the sun went down each day she was so blitzed that she couldn’t pursue it. She was running out of money and out of LSU teachers that interested her, so when someone suggested moving to Boston, she impulsively agreed.
In Boston, she used her hustling skills to convince some investors to let her open a breakfast and lunch take-out joint near Massachusetts General Hospital. It was such a roaring success that the investors offered to send her to the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts before she opened her next restaurant, the Dixie Kitchen, in Boston on July 13, 1990. That night she got arrested for drunk driving.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been arrested, but it was the last time she took a drink or any drugs. It's still her sobriety date, and once her head cleared, she realized she saw herself as a writer, not as a restaurateur. The new restaurant was another big success, but she felt tugged in another direction.
"I’ve always had two powerful urges in me," she admitted, “the destructive and the constructive. I was able to pass philosophy courses at LSU while strung out on drugs. I was able to negotiate with business investors on the same day I got mugged in the projects trying to score some dope. I did my constructive things during the day and my destructive things at night. Once I stopped feeding that destructive urge, the constructive urge flourished.
"I went to an open-mic at Club Passim one night to hear one of my employees sing. It occurred to me that I’d like to do that. I’d always played a little guitar, and I’d always written verse in my journal. But seeing that open-mic night made it seem real and possible. ‘Oh,’ I said to myself, ‘you write a song and then you bring it here. I get it.’ Before I was sober, I didn’t have the focus or confidence to pursue it, but now I was sober.”
So she started writing songs and playing them at open-mics, but she faced three tall hurdles in launching a music career. By 1992, she was already 30, an advanced age in the youth-obsessed world of show biz. She was an unapologetic lesbian in a field that favored heterosexual romantic fantasies. And she was just one of the thousands of acoustic-guitar-strumming folkies in Boston, which was then—as it still is today—singer-songwriter central.
Mary, though, had three big advantages for standing out in the crowd. One, she was an unusually gifted writer. Two, she had plenty of life experience to draw from. And, three, everything she did had a Louisiana flavor.
"I was the only one in Boston who sounded like me," she said with a laugh. “I was the only one with a Southern accent. I was the only one who could reference Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Waylon & Willie and Tom T. Hall. One of the things I did when I was a runaway was work as a housepainter. We’d roll down the windows of my old station wagon and listen to country music on WYNK out of Baton Rouge as we painted. It was either that or preachers yelling at you. Those songs became my songs. It was something else I didn’t value until I didn’t have it anymore. When I got to Boston and couldn’t listen to country radio, I missed it."
So when Mary sat down to write a folk song, Roger Miller leaked into Gordon Lightfoot; Bobbie Gentry leaked into Joan Baez. Her lyrics came not from an English class but from Southern barrooms; her vocal melodies reflected Nashville more than Newport. And when she wrote about her lost years in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, she had material no Berklee or Radcliffe graduate could match.
She named her 1997 debut album after her restaurant and released it on RG Music. “Dixie Kitchen” was very much an apprentice work, but two of the best songs dealt with homosexuality more directly than her later, more universal work. “Ways of the World” was a funny, bouncy autobiographical country shuffle that poked fun at a society that would tolerate a football-playing, jeans-wearing, snake-shooting, dirt-bike-riding tomboy like herself until she reaches puberty but not beyond.
Far more sober was “Goddamn HIV," the world-weary, first-person lament of a gay man isolated by the rejection of his family and the death of so many friends in the first AIDS epidemic. Like so many of Mary's songs, it ended with an indelible visual image: “Sometimes at dusk I walk the train tracks; I walk and I walk like I ain’t coming back."
She sold her restaurant to finance the recording of her second album, released as “Drag Queens in Limousines” by In the Black Records in 1999. It was a great leap forward, not only in the quality of the songwriting but also in the production values and in Mary's confidence as a singer. For years, she would open her shows with “I Drink” and close them with “Drag Queens," two terrific songs that book-ended her set perfectly.
“Different Kind of Gone” touched on a theme she would return to again and again—a restless urge to move on down the highway whenever things got confining or difficult. This time—over a pretty acoustic-guitar figure—she tried to reassure a lover that just because she was hitting the road didn’t mean she was leaving the lover behind. “You’re the one I come back to,” she sang in a placating whisper, “and when I’m there, I’m really there with you." There was a similar hush, spiced by tapping congas and delicate mandolin, on “Our Lady of the Shooting Stars,” the kind of secular prayer that anticipated one of her best known songs, “Mercy Now."
When Mary played the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, in 2000, she wore a black cowgirl shirt with white embroidery and cradled a blue acoustic guitar in her lap. She sat on stage alone—as she almost always does in her live shows—and she compensated for the absence of the musicians who’d played on her records by adding a new harmonica part to “Evangeline” or a new guitar part to “Karla Faye."
“Evangeline” is the story of a teasing, but elusive stripper and the admirer who watches her night after night. To reinforce the implied theme on this night in Austin, Mary segued from that song into the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want."
She reminded the crowd that “Karla Faye” was based on the true story of Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas drug addict who was sentenced to death for a brutal 1983 axe murder during a botched robbery. Even though Tucker sobered up and found religion in prison, then Governor George W. Bush refused to commute her sentence and she became the first woman to be executed by Texas since the 1860s.
"One of the beautiful things about country music is historically it's been the best genre for telling a story," Mary said later. “I feel for people like Karla Faye and Evangeline. They matter to me. The feelings I have for these people I want other people to feel. If you can tell the story in the right way—point blank, here’s the story without any attempts at manipulation—you wind up with an audience that can feel for your character.
"I think that's incredibly political. I don’t sing political songs per se, but if I can get an audience to feel for a woman that's been executed and consider that the death penalty might be problematic, that’s important. It happens on a human level rather than an intellectual level. The characters are the politics.”
One of Mary’s best descriptions of the down-and-out life is “Camelot Motel,” which appeared on her third album, 2002’s “Filth & Fire." Released by Signature Sounds, it was Mary's first nationally distributed disc and the first with a nationally recognized producer. Gurf Morlix's production fleshed out the musical half of the songs in much the same way his arrangements had once done for Lucinda Williams.
At a 2007 show at the Ramshead Tavern in Annapolis, Maryland, Mary played an arresting acoustic-guitar vamp as she introduced the song by telling the story of its creation. After opening two shows for Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at the Bottom Line in New York in 2000, she recounted, she decided to drive home to Boston so she wouldn’t have to pay for a New York hotel room. She got as far as Bridgeport, Connecticut, when she decided her eyelids had drooped one too many times. So she pulled into the Camelot Motel.
In Annapolis, Mary wore a gray vest over a faded paisley shirt and ripped-and-patched jeans. She backed off the mic to shake her head in wonder at the memory of a motel that was anything but Camelot. “When a folk singer has the best car in the parking lot," she cracked, “you know it's not a place you want to bring the family…. For years, I had this rhyme in my notebook, ‘cigarette and kitchenette,’ waiting for a song that it would fit in. I walked into my room at the Camelot Motel and there was a kitchenette with dozens of cigarette burns in the Formica top. It was the kind of room Tom Waits would have loved."
It was the kind of motel room she holed up in too many times during her lost years, so it was easy to populate it with characters from her Louisiana youth: the cheating wife calling her kids from the kitchenette, the gay men who met on the internet skulking past the hallway bug lights and the drug dealers jumping for their guns at every little sound. “[We’ve] got damn good reasons for our sins," she sang; they’ve “all come looking for the grace from which they fell." Just how far they might tumble was measured in another song from “Filth & Fire”: “A Long Way To Fall."
Her best songs, however, relied not on imagination but memory. On “Sugar Cane,” a stomping, harmonica-fueled blues, she evoked her childhood in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where the burning fields produced “dirty air, dirty laundry, dirty money, dirty rain [and] a good job even though." She ran away at 15 and kept moving so often, she sang on “Good-Bye," that “goodbye could have been my family name."
One of the places her rambling took her was the Cow Key Bridge in the Florida Keys, and beneath the overpass she discovered some homeless kids who were determined to celebrate the holidays no matter what their economic circumstances. Just as she did in “Drag Queens in Limousines” and “Camelot Motel," Mary’s “Christmas in Paradise” managed to bring her fellow travelers to life with all their virtues and flaws intact, refusing to turn them into the heroes or villains they never were.
"I tried very hard to present those experiences as I really saw them," she pointed out. “I didn’t see them as these ‘good old days’ and I didn’t see them as this ‘deep, dark hole.’ I tried to take a journalistic approach; just tell the story and let the listeners decide. Don’t moralize about it. Even when I was in that scene, I always felt I was on the ride as an observer. At the time I thought I was protecting myself from killing myself, but in retrospect I recognize it as the natural posture of a writer.”
What’s remarkable about her songs is the way Mary takes seriously both the reasons and the sins, both grace and the fall. She’s willing to explain her former friends but not excuse them; she loves them but she won’t pretend they’re something that they’re not. She thus avoids the twin traps of sentimentality and cynicism when writing about life at the margins. She does, however, have to contend with audiences who miss the nuances of the songs.
"When I wrote ‘I Drink,’” she told the audience in Maryland, “I thought I’d written the saddest country song ever written. But everywhere I go people think the song is funny in the beginning. Many don’t get it at all. I thought I had written a testament to the dangers of alcohol, but drunken people all over the world show up and start shouting, ‘I drink, too! Play that song, Mary."