Many Lives in Song
by Eric Fine
Forget music. Before Mary Gauthier could figure out what she wanted from her life, she had a few things to put behind her. Gauthier's problems with drugs and alcohol landed her in jail cells, detox centers, and a few other dreary places before she finally embraced sobriety. A cross-country move to Boston in 1986 provided the flash point. After establishing herself as a successful restaurant owner in Beantown, this quintessential late-bloomer discovered her muse. Her old habits now inspire her largely autobiographical songs.
"It sure gave me enough stories to write about, I'll tell yuh," said Gauthier [who pronounces her name "Go-shay"]. "I'm glad I've been through it... My life has been rich in a whole lotta different experiences that I wouldn't have had if I wasn't out there acting like a nut case. I think it [music] was all pent up inside of me, and if I wouldn't have been drinking, it would have happened sooner.
"I should have been writing songs all along," the Louisiana native said. "I'm just glad that I found it in me to put that down so that this could come out."
Her two self-released CDs feature spare narratives that skirt the edges of folk and country music. "Rock and Roll Lies," from Dixie Kitchen, Gauthier's 1997 debut, has to be the all-time twangiest homage to beat writer Jack Kerouac. "Drag Queens In Limousines," the title track from her sophomore effort, celebrates her rebellious youth with a chorus that chronicles the wayward characters who become part of her life after she runs away from home: "Drag queens in limousines, nuns in blue jeans/ dreamers with big dreams, poets and AWOL marines/ actors and barflies, writers with dark eyes/ drunks that philosophize, these are my friends."
But to call Gauthier a folkie or a singer/songwriter is misleading. Sure, she sings her own material; but the presence of fiddle and mandolin that frequently flesh out the sound on her two albums point straight to Nashville, where she planned to move at the end of the summer.
"In Boston they call it country and in Nashville they call it folk," she said, her Southern accent still quite prominent. "I'm not able to classify it. It's somewhere in between, I think.… I guess maybe the music sounds country, but the words sound folk."
However, Gauthier's brand of Americana bears no resemblance to the slick, empty material that dominates the country charts — redneck odes to pickup trucks and canned beer, middle-of-the-road love songs that give Nashville's Music Row its well-deserved reputation for being an assembly line. "Evangeline," a love song about a stripper, puts the singer-songwriter miles away from this mindless mob. As the first-person narrative suggests, Gauthier is a lesbian. But she makes it a point to steer clear of sexual politics. Opening for Janis Ian last winter at the Appel Farm Arts & Music Center in New Jersey, she joked with the audience about winning a Gay and Lesbian American Music Award (GLAMA) for country music. "I got to tell y'all," she drawled. "The competition was unbelievable."
This is an excerpt from issue #96.
