FOUNDERS KEEPERS: 25 Years of Mary Gauthier’s ‘Drag Queens In Limousines’

Twenty-five years ago Mary Gauthier was a singing chef — a novelty from Baton Rouge, who was trying to find her voice and hold on to her sobriety in deepest Boston — gambling there might be an audience willing to listen to an album of hard-won songs titled Drag Queens In Limousines. Now an established, celebrated songwriter, her second album has finally been pressed onto vinyl by the resurgent Kill Rock Stars label (riot grrrl, Elliott Smith, Decemberists). The reissue has been neither remastered nor remixed and comes with no bonus tracks; it does arrive with a new-made black-and-white video for the title track.

Offered without apology or amendment, then, it is what it is. And that’s plenty.

In its original moment, September 13, 1999, when Gauthier still made her living as a restauranteur, no small amount of millennial concern circulated that the world was about to come to an end, that our computers would fail, that planes might fall from the sky.

Four tracks into Drag Queens — which is a long way to travel for a professional listener, accustomed to disappointment — “I Drink” landed for the first time.

Landed hard.

The author was nine years sober, pushing forty. (The co-author and producer, Crit Harmon, styled himself more teacher than anything grander, but he has an ear for apt students.)

“I Drink” is the kind of song which seems possible to write only after long hours staring blankly into a badly lit mirror: “Yes I know what I am/No I don’t give a damn.” It is a short story and an exorcism and if you don’t know that person — if you are not that person — you are either in denial or very, very lucky.

She has a hard voice, singing, and a steady gaze in person. Her singing and writing voice is neither pretty, nor decorative. Instead, the entirely ordinary qualities of her voice assert the privilege of being heard in the company of male artists like, say, Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, or Lou Reed — remarkable songwriters whose singing competes for style points not beauty.

“I Drink” is a hard song. Gauthier worried and fussed with it and despaired until, numberless drafts later, it fell reluctantly into place. It is not quite the best thing she has written, but it remains extraordinary, even from this distance.

Gauthier had tried to sound like a country singer for her first album, 1997’s Dixie Kitchen, released as a hedging cross-promotion for the restaurant she then co-owned and recorded before she’d ever played a full set in public. The album came with a coupon for a free dessert and the recipe for her bourbon bread pudding. Even that supposes an alternative world in which a song titled “Goddamn HIV” might be considered country. Regardless, Gauthier leaned into her accent; she was from Baton Rouge, where she grew up with country music and punk, which are the same thing — just different vehicles for the underclass to drive home their sadness and alienation. The songs were just good enough to hope for better the next time out, to remember her name.

In hindsight one can hear Gauthier finding her voice throughout Drag Queens, and sense producer Crit Harmon experimenting with settings for that voice, which made sense (Some of them are plainly country, some not). The title track opens confident, simple, freshly comfortable with the space Gauthier leaves around words and what the words have to say. And, yes, it’s about a career outsider discovering community in places most wouldn’t trouble themselves to look. Gauthier’s characters are exotic dancers (“Evangeline”), junkies (“Karla Faye”, and lovers (“Different Kind of Gone,” “Slip of the Tongue”). “When I said I loved you/It was just a slip of the tongue,” she sings, and if her voice is rough around the edges it’s also tender and sad. And strong.

And there Gauthier is: Tender and sad and strong. But never lurid or unkind — unless to the flawed version of herself she presents in song.

Gauthier’s third album, Filth & Fire, was produced down in Austin by Gurf Morlix and released by Signature Sounds. Gurf also produced Lost Highway’s Mercy Now, where “I Drink” settled into a more public place, although it was released without the verse Guy Clark sang.

Mary Gauthier has gone on writing and singing about the hard things: the women who broke her heart (especially Trouble & Love), the adopted family who couldn’t snap her will (both iterations of The Foundling), and to cut Rifles & Rosary Beads, a much-decorated album co-written with combat veterans. Drag Queens in Limousines serves, still, as Gauthier’s statement of purpose — who she is, where she came from. And why she has always mattered.