Lucinda Williams' memoir "Don't Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You" recycles many of the stories already covered in her distinctive songs.
The influential singer-songwriter doesn't leave many secrets untold, from an unstable childhood to her many love affairs with the motorcycle poets to whom she's attracted. The title comes from one of her pleas to an abusive paramour.
As the memoir recounts, she often draws upon her life for her songs. She refuses her music's categorization as "Americana."
In her records and performances, she has carved a unique pathway, setting the stage for new generations of women performers who transcend country, pop and rock boundaries.
The 70-year-old singer-songwriter has found peace in a stable marriage to Tom Overby, now her manager. Her relationship with Overby is quickly summarized at the book's close.
Although a serious stroke in late 2020 left Williams unable to play the guitar, she's released albums and embarked on tours, along with publishing her revealing book, written with Sam Stephenson.
With bawdy humor and hard-won wisdom, Williams in the memoir recalls her long, grueling battle to gain stardom. After years playing in small clubs, struggling to land record deals and supporting herself with blue collar jobs, Williams received critical acclaim for her albums "Lucinda Williams" in 1988 and "Sweet Old World" in 1998.
But the 1998 album "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" was her major commercial breakthrough, earning a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
She had earlier received a songwriting Grammy for "Passionate Kisses," a 1992 hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter. After buying a new dress, Williams was too riddled with self-doubt to attend the ceremony.
The book gives a familiar story of women artists fighting for respect in the male-dominated music industry. Williams' songs were considered "too country for rock, and too rock for country."
At last recording for smaller labels, she fiercely refused to compromise her artistic vision, earning what she calls an unfair reputation for strident perfectionism. She points out that exacting male artists like Bruce Springsteen escape such labels.
The daughter of renowned poet Miller Williams, Lucinda Williams grew up amid her father's literary friends, who gathered at his raucous parties to swap stories, start affairs and drink copious amounts of alcohol. In an amusing aside, she says she's found writers more decadent than musicians.
Before receiving tenure and stability at the University of Arkansas, Miller Williams led his family on an itinerant academic odyssey, from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge to Jackson, Miss., from Santiago to Mexico City.
Miller Williams, who died of Alzheimer's disease in 2015 at age 84, was a major influence on his daughter's songwriting. He told her about meeting Hank Williams as a young man, and as a girl she accompanied her father on a visit to Flannery O'Connor at her home in Milledgeville, Ga., where Lucinda played with the writer's famous peacocks.
Hank Williams and Flannery O'Connor are touchstones of Lucinda Williams' songs, many of them autobiographical. Her childhood journeys to small Southern cities laid the foundation for her work.
Lucinda's mother, Lucille Fern Day, was the daughter of a conservative Baptist preacher. She battled mental problems that led to several commitments to psychiatric hospitals.
Williams discloses her discovery that her mother was sexually abused as a child by her father and other male relatives. A talented musician, Lucille recognized her daughter's talent and introduced her to a range of musical genres.
After divorcing Lucinda's mother, Miller Williams married one of his students, Jordan Hall. who was 20 years younger than him. Jordan was 19 and Lucinda 12 at the time of the marriage. Called "Mama Jordan" by Lucinda and her younger sister and brother, the young woman proved a supportive stepmother.
"Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You" after a promising start begins to feel hurried and slapdash.
Yet Williams' voice rings true on the book's pages, without reaching her songs' power.
