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Griffith was born in Texas and began her career as a folk singer influenced by artists like Carolyn Hester and Odetta. Her music often conveyed political messages about inequality and criticized issues like capitalism, environmental degradation, and laws banning interracial and gay marriage. She remained a steadfast activist throughout her career using her music and performances to spread political and social messages.

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Thu Uyen
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55 views1 page

5

Griffith was born in Texas and began her career as a folk singer influenced by artists like Carolyn Hester and Odetta. Her music often conveyed political messages about inequality and criticized issues like capitalism, environmental degradation, and laws banning interracial and gay marriage. She remained a steadfast activist throughout her career using her music and performances to spread political and social messages.

Uploaded by

Thu Uyen
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Before Other Voices, Other Rooms, Griffith had signed to MCA Records and worked

with people like rock producer Glyn Johns to reconstruct her sound within the realm of
studio gloss.

That didn’t work because Griffith was at heart a traditional folk singer. She continued
the confessional lyrics and political urgency of the Greenwich Village era with a twangy
vocal style and the musical flourishes of traditional country. She was born in Seguin,
Texas, where her father sang in a barbershop quartet and worked as a graphic artist and
her mother sold real estate. After settling in Austin, the family disbanded. Her parents
divorced in 1960 and Griffith, then a teenager, drifted to find solace in the local
coffeehouse circuit and began writing songs.

As a teenager she saw Carolyn Hester perform and became enamored with the Village-
era veteran throughout her life, as she did with Odetta, the black songstress from the
mid-century folk revival. The musical template for both women was simple, almost
sparse, which created room for the raw intensity of their singing, a prescription for
Griffith’s own work.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Griffith’s own work was often bluntly political. She
was an activist, and in her music she frequently conveyed the harshness of living among
those not benefiting from the spoils of capitalism. “We’re living in the age of
communication / Where the only voices heard have money in their hands / Where greed
has become a sophistication,” she sang in 1994’s Time of Inconvenience. “And if you
ain’t got money / You ain’t got nothin’ in this land.” Another song, Hell No (I’m Not
Alright), became an unexpected anthem in 2012 for protesters during the Occupy Wall
Street movement.

That same year she told an interviewer that she was “too radical” for contemporary US
politics. “I was angry about something,” she said about Hell No (I’m Not Alright).
“Apparently everybody else was angry about the same thing.”

Her 2009 album The Loving Kind borrowed its title from Mildred Loving, a black
woman whose 1967 supreme court case overturned laws banning interracial marriage
and the song gestured to the same injustice directed at gay marriage, still a hot-button
issue at the time. The album also skewered the death penalty, environmental
degradation, and George W Bush, but never addressing him by name.

To do so was not Griffith’s style. Her poise, taste in collaborators and material, and the
inviting gentleness in her singing never wavered. She was a singer resolute to the Woody
Guthrie maxim that a guitar and song remained steady weapons to slay the worst of us.

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