Back in 1988, Nanci Griffith unknowingly crossed paths here in Columbia with a big fan who’d eventually become a future country music star — Darius Rucker. A University of South Carolina student who sang with a weekend cover band called Hootie and the Blowfish that was just starting to get popular around campus, he saw Griffith’s performance at Five Points music hall Greenstreets.
 

Nanci Griffith

“He’s talked about that show and how he wanted so badly to get up and sing the duet with me on ‘Gulf Coast Highway’ that night,” Griffith revealed when asked about her first Columbia appearance. The storybook ending to that memory is that many years later when Griffith re-recorded that early favorite, Rucker finally got his wish and sang harmonies on the new version. With his newfound success in country music, one has to wonder if Griffith was at all surprised.

“He is so talented and has such a musical mind; Darius hears a song once and he knows it,” Griffith says. “I’m not surprised in the least that he’s doing country music now, and I’m so proud of him.”

There’s another re-recorded take of an earlier song featured on Griffith’s 2009 album The Loving Kind, “One of These Days.” First released on her critically acclaimed 1984 album Last of the True Believers with Lyle Lovett singing harmony, this time around she tapped Todd Snider to fill in the notes on a recording she says was done as a personal request.

“That is my drummer’s favorite song, and he didn’t get to play on the original so he asked if we could re-do it,” Griffith says.

That song isn’t the only thing that hearkens back to Griffith’s early days. After her last album, a collection of torch song covers, The Loving Kind is a real back-to-basics country-folk record that reintroduces Griffith’s more political side. The title track, for example, addresses the 1967 Supreme Court case of Mildred and Richard Loving that legalized interracial marriage. Griffith was spurred to write it when she learned of the story from Mildred Loving’s 2008 obituary.

“Until I read the obituary in the New York Times, I’d never heard of the case,” Griffith says. “I remember talking to Emmylou Harris about it and she said ‘Why didn’t I know it, I lived there then?’”

“Innocent Enough” is an anti-death penalty song about the case of Phillip Workman, who was convicted and executed despite questionable testimony. Griffith says that it’s about that case and many others like it that continue to occur in our justice system.

“It’s about an accumulation of things that have built up,” she says. “I’m a lifelong abolitionist when it comes to the death penalty, and this story needed to be told. There are other stories besides his of people not [being] innocent enough.”

Though Griffith is well regarded as a songwriter, she also has displayed a talent over the years for choosing great songs from other writers. She was the first to record Julie Gold’s “From a Distance,” later a hit for Bette Midler, and her two Other Voices albums collect a wide range of contemporary and classic songwriters’ material.

“On this record I have two songs by my hero from my teenage years, Dee Moeller,” Griffith says. “She’s retired from writing, and I was missing her music so I called her up to get copies of the songs from her, they’re just perfect.”

Those songs — “Party Girl” and “Tequila After Midnight” — are indeed perfect examples of the kind of Texas dance hall tunes that inspired the younger version of Nanci Griffith to begin writing her own. It’s “Sing,” however, that provides the clearest glimpse of her motivation; it’s one that many musicians, from Darius Rucker to the girl singing in a hotel lounge act, would probably recognize: “In the end I wouldn’t change a thing — I’d sing.” 


The Newberry Opera House is at 1201 McKibben St. in Newberry. Doors open at 8 p.m.; admission is $40. Call 276-6264 or visit newberryoperahouse.com for more information.