Griffin honed her guitar skills (she’d bought her first one for $50 when she was 16) with a teacher named John Curtis. She would have other creative mentors over the years, but Curtis was one of the first and arguably the most important.
“I was so shy when I met him that I didn’t really know how I was going to get up and do what I knew I wanted to do,” she recalled. “I would show up once a week for my guitar lesson and play him a song that I’d learned or a song that I’d written, and he would encourage me.
“I don’t think I ever would have had a gig if left to my own devices,” she said with a chuckle. “But one day when I showed up for my lesson he said, ‘Well, you know, the club next door is looking for small acoustic acts. And if you want to play there, I’ll play with you onstage.’ Which is what I had hoped would happen, but I didn’t really think he would make the offer. But he did, and if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to do it by myself.”
Flash Forward — Austin, September 28, 2002. Patty Griffin is front and center, dwarfed by the big stage as she sings to thousands of people thronged across Zilker Park near the end of the first day of the inaugural Austin City Limits Music Festival. Tiny yet poised, Griffin is chanting now, the defiant and incantatory chorus from the title song of her second album: “Flaming red…flaming red…flaming red,” she shouts, as the breeze flairs her own mane of auburn locks behind her head, and the sun, setting behind her, turns her hair into a revolutionary crimson banner. “Me and my red shoes,” she sings, “Nothing can please us.” It’s a moment of impossible drama, and she cups it in the palm of her hand.
“Shy!”
Shawn Colvin is responding to a question about her first impression of fellow Austinite and kindred spirit Griffin. “But she’d get out there, and she’s not,” she adds.
It’s worth noting that Griffin played the flute in the school band, but, upon reflection, came to realize she wished she’d chosen the saxophone instead. Perhaps that informs her perspective when she is asked about the seemingly counterintuitive notion of a shy person performing for strangers.
“There’s a little more illusion to that,” she answers. “It’s not you, exactly, the person that gets out of bed in the morning. You’re up on a stage, creating something for people to experience — not so one-on-one as a conversation.
“I think some parts of performing are intimate, but in a more general way; sort of like reading a book or looking at a painting. To me, that’s the same kind of intimacy as you’re creating onstage. It’s not person-to-person; it’s give-and-take on a different level.”
Colvin’s observations about Griffin’s stage persona would seem to bear that out. “It’s bizarre, because you see that shyness and you wonder how she gets out there,” Colvin says. “But she sings loud. And she can play loud. And her body moves when she plays. She sings and plays with her whole body. She is painfully shy, and yet she’d get out there and just kill ya.”
Unbeknownst to each other, both Colvin and Emmylou Harris use the same phrase in describing their initial reaction to Griffin’s music: “fully-formed.” Colvin, upon hearing a bootleg mix of Griffin’s first album: “It was just one of those rare occurrences where you go, whoa! This is fully-formed.” Harris, after spending some time with Griffin in Nashville: “I was just fascinated. She was fully-formed. It wasn’t like, here’s someone that going to be good someday. She came out of the womb fully-formed, and as good as anyone I’d ever heard. She’s very rare.”
Griffin has her influences, of course: church music (she was shushed when she tried to spontaneously sing along with the choir as a child), the Patsy Cline songs her mom sang while doing housework, the French songs her grandparents handed down, and the figures she plucked from the pop music pantheon such as the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Rickie Lee Jones.
To some extent, those influences linger. Some early songs, such as “Mad Mission” and “Let Him Fly” from Living With Ghosts, echo Jones and Bonnie Raitt. She covered Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” to haunting effect on 1000 Kisses, and contributed “Faded Love” to the recent Remembering Patsy Cline tribute album. She also performed an old Acadian song, “Pa Janvier, Laisse Moi M’en Aller”, on Evangeline Made, a 2002 compilation of Cajun music.
(Today, you see a lot of women down in the Atchafalaya Basin with Griffin’s long, elegant neck and clean, angular profile. Her grandparents were French Canadians whose ancestors joined the 1755 diaspora from Nova Scotia down to South Louisiana).
One musical incarnation she did not embrace, her girl-with-a-guitar persona in Boston in the early ’90s notwithstanding, was that of “folk singer.”
“I always felt like I wrote rock songs,” Griffin wrote in her online bio. “It was all I listened to. I used to think, ‘Don’t call me a folk singer.’ I used to get really insulted by that. I thought it kind of stuck me out in the field with all the daisies.”
Now, though, with her own body of work firmly established, a loyal and growing audience, and the acceptance of her musical peers, she is not nearly so adamant (though the irony of 1000 Kisses being nominated for a 2003 Best Contemporary Folk Album Grammy is not lost on her).
“The thing is, I don’t really care anymore,” she said between bites of chorizo. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, what they were calling folk music in Boston was definitely something I didn’t want to be a part of. I played solo there, but those were the gigs that were available to me at the time. It was a way for me to get up there and do my stuff.
“But as I look at what’s being called folk music now, now that I’m getting older and have some distance from the scene, it’s not a bad label.”
The misconception, if one wishes to call it that, was furthered in 1996 when Griffin’s first album, Living With Ghosts, was released. It was a solo acoustic album that wasn’t supposed to be.
A&M Records signed Griffin in 1995 on the basis of a collection of self-recorded demos. Under the label’s auspices, she entered Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio in New Orleans’ French Quarter for a month to try to flesh out the skeletal demos as fully orchestrated album tracks, with the assistance of producer/engineer/musician Malcolm Burn.
