Artist Spotlight - Lyle Lovett

The late, great Austin-born singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith passed away a year ago this month. Griffith’s longtime friend Lyle Lovett recently spoke with us about how she helped him gain sea legs as a performer and guided his early journey in music.

“Nanci Griffith didn’t play to the audience,” Lovett says. “She said things in her songs and performed in a way that she felt compelled to do regardless how the audience would receive her. That was a valuable thing for me as a performer to see.”

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Love at the Five and Dime: The Songwriting Legacy of Nanci Griffith (Texas A&M University Press, tentatively scheduled for a spring 2024 release).

Alt-Country Specialty Chart: Explain how you met Nanci.

Lyle Lovett: I got to know Nanci by interviewing her for the (College Station, Texas) daily paper The Battalion and then opening for her in 1978. The Basement was a part of the student union and had a scheduled open mike. Two or three times a year we had enough budget to bring in regional professional performers. We brought in Nanci that year when I was a journalism student. My regular beat was the Bryan city council, but we all drew straws for music and entertainment.

Describe Nanci’s stage presence early on.

Nanci always came across as confident. I was writing songs at the time and wanted to perform and had been playing for money for a couple years in hamburger and pizza joints. I remember viewing Nanci as a well established performer when she came to town in 1978. Her personality was such that her confidence and command of the room as she performed spoke to that. Nanci was a thoughtful, deliberate performer. She knew how to impact an audience and was great at it from the first time I saw her.

Explain how important the Kerrville Folk Festival was in your development.

I did the New Folk competition in 1980 and started getting invited to play the main stage after that. Nanci already was established as a main stage performer at Kerrville when I started playing there. Kerrville was my favorite when it was one, long, five-day festival. You could go for the entire thing. You didn’t want to miss any of it.

The festival celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this year. How has it lasted?

Kerrville was and is a great way to be around your favorite performers in a social setting. Performers actually camped at Kerrville in those days. Performers zip in and out of festivals today and leave the camping to the audience, which is one reason Kerrville is fifty years old this year. There’s a genuine quality of enthusiasm among everybody. I don’t know any other festival like that. You’re hit in the face with ambition these days navigating social media, but think about it. Kerrville in 1980 was not that far removed from Woodstock and that cultural ethic where it was about sincerity more than ambition.

Like (the Houston folk club) Anderson Fair where you and Nanci started out.

Anderson Fair is a serious listening room. You just didn’t speak when you were in the listening room. I saw the owners politely go up to the uninitiated and offer them their money back. Things would even be quiet in the bar part where you would buy beer and wine. Anderson Fair was folk music church.

Art over commerce for sure. 

Yes. There was an overriding ethic in art in those days in the same way that performers wouldn’t dare do a jingle for a commercial product because it would damage artistic credibility. That’s how artists worked then. I remember being offered $25,000 to do a Burger King jingle when my first record came out in 1986, which was huge money. I had met David Wylde who did a nice piece on us for Rolling Stone so I called him and said, “What do you think?” “Well,” he said, “do you want to be known as the Burger King guy?” “Okay, good enough.”

Brian T. Atkinson