// A Nanci interview, a tribute poem...and a little more. 
// ...Enjoy!  [BP]

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Subject: NN: A life in the day
From: "Mike Barrett" (mikebarrettuk@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 16:25:25 +0100

In one of its innumerable supplements, The Sunday Times today has a one page
feature, adorned with an attractive new photograph of Nanci, called "A Life
In The Day," in which she talks about what would be a typical day at home
for her.

It's a really fascinating piece with lots of interesting trivia.  For
instance, the first face she sees when she wakes up is that of Hank - and
before we all start getting jealous, Hank happens to be her miniature
pincher.  The first thing she smells is her Cetaphyl skin cleanser, and the
essentials to start the day are tea and cigarettes. Her passions, apart from
music, are her garden, photography and bird watching (bird watching! The
other major interest of mine!), and she also likes to have at least one
glass of red wine a day (yes, definitely my kind of woman!) There are also
some amusing anecdotes, one about a stalker and one about photographing
birds in her garden.

She's clearly a happy person - that really comes across in the article, as
does the fact that she values her privacy and is something of a loner.  She
ends up saying "That's my day. Pretty reclusive. I guess there's a reason
why people call me the Greta Garbo of the music industry. I don't hang out."

Go to www.sunday-times.co.uk and click on "Magazine:Chanel", which will take

you to the Magazine - down near the bottom of the page, right hand side, 
there's a link to the Nanci item.  There's even a reproduction of the 
article as it appears in the magazine, with that nice photograph I 
mentioned.

Mike Barrett

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Subject: NN: Nanci in The Sunday Times
From: alex.butler1@which.net
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 17:47:16 +0100

The following is an article that appears in today's magazine. The
interview is with Lauren St John, and is part of the weekly "A Life In
The Day" series.

>>>
I wake around 6.30. If I'm at home, the first thing I see is the sweet
face of my miniature pincher, Hank, who thinks the pillow beside mine is
for his head only.  The first thing I smell is the Cetaphil skin
cleanser I wash my face with.

My life has been spent almost totally on the road - and I'm not a road
person.  I don't really like traveling.  I'd rather be at home, working
in my garden.  That's my passion.  Photographing and watching birds is
another passion.  But if I wasn't on the road I wouldn't be able to play
music, and that's the greatest love of my life.

Sometimes I eat breakfast, sometimes I don't, but I need to have my tea
in the morning. After that, I have to have my cigarettes; then I get on
with mv day. I go off and on smoking cigarettes. That's a big weakness
I'm always embarrassed about, but I'm not the only one.  My doctor says
any reprieve I give myself from it is great.  I'm a swimmer.  I have a
pool at home and swim most days. The only pool I've swum in that I
couldn't do more than five laps of is the one at the Grand Hotel in Siem
Reep, Cambodia.  It's twice the length of an Olympic pool.

I got involved with Campaign for a Landmine FreeWorld because my
ex-husband, the Texas singer-songwriter Eric Taylor, was a Vietnam vet,
and my friend Emmylou Harris asked me if I wanted to go to a reception
for Bobby Muller, the founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America
Foundation and one of the winners of the Nobel Peace prize in 1997 for
his work on the landmine campaign. The landmine issue has become my
passion.  It's such a great joy to work on the campaign, to visit
hospitals and go out to the de-mining fields in a place like Cambodia
that's just littered with mines.

Songs come to me at different times of the day.  Sometimes I dream
something and I get up and it's there.  If I don't write it down right
then, it's gone.  One of the great things about the symphony work I've
been doing with the Blue Moon Orchestra for the last five or six years
is learning how to write music. That's been a real saving grace.  In
Vietnam last year, I was in the room next to Bobby Muller and I wanted
to write this song, "Traveling Through This Part of You", about my
ex-husband and being in Vietnam.  I knew if I sang out loud and played
my guitar, I'd wake Bobby up and he'd bang on my door.  So l just wrote
it down musically so I wouldn't lose it.

I had breast cancer six years ago, and then two years later I was
diagnosed with thyroid cancer, both totally unrelated.  Cancer changed
my perspective on life, that it's something of joy and that there's
something beyond this. Also, my mother is terminally ill.  So for me,
mortality doesn't have meaning any more.  If I walk out here in London
and look the wrong way before I cross the street, I'll die a happy
person.  But there's a lot of things I'd still like to do, and now I do
them.  
Before I had cancer, I don't think I'd have said: "Okay, I'll go hang
around in the jungle for three weeks " I think I'd have said, "I'll be
glad to lend my name to the campaign and raise funds," but I wouldn't
have chosen to go and spend all day holding the hand of a child who's
being fitted with a prosthetic limb.  I want to bring joy into someone's
life. That's what's changed.

I never eat after 5pm. I have the same birthday as the Dalai Lama, and I
read once that he doesn't eat anything after 3pm, so as a good Catholic
girl it's a great compromise. Am I into Buddhism?  I'm into everything
that's about the goodness of humanity, spiritually.  I'm not totally
devoted to Catholicism, as I was all the way through school.  There are
certain issues I can't agree with, the main one being a woman's right to
choose an abortion. I worked for two years with the feminist Gloria
Steinem on the road, on Voters for Choice.  She's a tremendous and very
devoted human being. I never thought I had any enemies until I had to
wade through crowds of people at stage doors wagging rubber fetuses in
the air and calling me "murderer" I didn't know I could have an enemy
I'd never crossed paths with.

I've always taken fame with a grain of salt.  It comes with what I do. 
But I'm a very private person; I'm not flamboyant. I pretty much keep
myself to myself.  I've had a rather humorous stalker - a young man who
thought he was my husband and kept breaking into my house.  It turned
out he was someone who had had mental problems all his life.  He's now
in a secure place, but he was arrested several times in my house and
used to frighten my housekeeper quite a bit. He would always mess up the
stereo system. You know, he couldn't figure out the remote.

I always have at least one glass wine a day.  Occasionally, I'll watch
TV. The end of my day, if I'm at home comes very early, although in the
summer I won't be in bed until 11pm, because I'm out doing my thing with
the birds. I've been lucky this year, in that I have a nest of robins. 
Normally all the eggs don't make it, but this year they all made it and
they all learnt to fly, and now they keep  coming back and landing by my
door. I recently had some beautiful ring-necked doves come up.  I'm such
a fanatic that my house-sitter had to climb on a ladder and hold a
branch down on this huge white pine tree, while I went up to the third
floor and hung out a window to get a shot of the eggs, because otherwise
I wouldn't have the whole series.  I went to my computer to see what I
had, and I  wondered where my house-sitter was. Finally, I heard him
yelling at me. He was afraid to let go of this branch for fear he would
catapult these eggs out of the nest.

Those are my hobbies when I'm at home.  People would be surprise at
that. I very rarely go out.  I've bought a house in downtown Nashville
now, and ride my bicycle everywhere. I bought a new car at the end of
February, and it has 300 miles on it. That's how much I drive.
Everywhere's a bicycle or walking. That's my day.  Pretty reclusive. I
guess there'a a  reason why people call me the Greta Garbo of the music
industry.  I don't hang out.

>>

Alex Butler

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Subject: Re: NN: Re: RE: Pay-To-Play Comes to Austin
From: "Sarah Wrightson" (sarahwrightson@vincebell.com>
Date:  Tue, 16 Oct 2001 22:08:15 -0500

The Kimbros wrote:
> > I have known some acts who are willing to do this for "exposure."  Of
> course, it's important to note that people have died from exposure!

"If I needed exposure I'd drop my pants in Times Square."  Anonymous
attributed to folk musician.

Speaking of exposure...I'd like to put in a reminder that we've a great
band here in NNetland...Mountain Soul.  Last but not least to get the
CD, it is one of five or six that lives in the bookcase by the stereo. 
[Okay, since you didn't ask (g>...three by this guy in the next room,
and the other two vary with what we've just received, and often a 
Bruce Cockburn.]

Sarah

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Subject: NN: Re: Pay-To-Play Comes to Austin (OT)
From: "The Kimbros" (kimbroj@charter.net>
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 23:08:38 -0400

One more comment on "pay-to-play" because I think it's an important subject,
although off-topic, and because I neglected to post my opinion earlier. This
past Saturday evening we were invited to play in something called a
"ceilidh" which was set to take place after some "Highland Games" in a town
we were to pass through on our way back from a festival in Virginia.  I
thought this might be a fun sort of Celtic/bluegrass fusion jam session and,
since we were in the neighborhood, agreed to participate.  Well, when we
arrived at the venue we found that there was a $7.00 cover charge that also
applied to musicians!  Needless to say I was pissed, especially since I'd
advertised that we'd be there and since I could see only 6 or 7 people
inside listening to someone in deep vibrato singing "The Scotsman."  I
argued with the promoter for a while and when he wouldn't budge, told him
what he could do with his kaylee.  Then we unloaded our instruments, went
across the street and started playing on the sidewalk.  We soon drew a crowd
and the owner of a restaurant down the block came out and invited us inside.
We accepted, took the crowd with us, sold lots of CDs and left town leaving
one pissed off pay-for-play promoter and one pleased-as-punch restaurant
owner, and an open invitation to play again any time.

Warm Regards,
-Shawn  "who has now performed for men in skirts" Kimbro

http://mountainsoul.cjb.net

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Subject: NN: pay to play
From: "Lorrie Chase" (lchase@webshoppe.net>
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 10:18:03 -0500

Sarah- Do you think they would give a damn about a phone call from 
Alabama???  If so, I'll Join the crusade!!  Sick (and who wants to hear 
the kind of music that would bring???? Nantucket meets the upper-class 
privileged).

Hope y'all are well!

Lorrie Chase

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Subject: NN: Nanci Griffith poem
From: "Martin Jack" (gatesuk@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 11:40:57 -0700 (PDT)

Chilled On A Stage-Door Speculating 
Nanci Griffith's Vodka Movements

Expectancy caught our shoulders on a stage-door,
waiting in the chill of relapsed time
for a vodka trace from your lips,
for autographs warm against breast pockets;
skins re-heated with one pointblank rage:
your ire furnishing us like mink.

Your movements are tender-coated speculations.
We watch the cardboard pizza delivered, 
generating an assortment of backstage mosaics:
"Nanci swallows anti-inflammatories in her fashion";
"Nanci needs pineapple pieces
to support frailty against her gravity."

       You keep us in a zone
              of mystery's impatience;
              with security cameras tiptoeing,
              with frowns of pot-bellied management,
              with hums rehearsed in the mean-times

       since you glided off-stage on freedom's wing,
       our hearts tempered like concering microlites.

18.10.01

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Subject: Re: NN: Nanci Griffith poem
From: DvBGardner@genelogic.com
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:59:50 -0400

Martin Jack wrote:

(((( Chilled On A Stage-Door Speculating
Nanci Griffith's Vodka Movements

Expectancy caught our shoulders on a stage-door,
waiting in the chill of relapsed time
for a vodka trace from your lips,
for autographs warm against breast pockets;.>>>>>


Now that is one awesome poem, Martin!     You are clearly love-struck,
arenthcha?

Wish I had been there (just the mention of Vodka will do it to me every
time.......).

Donate "couldn't help myself......" v.B-G.

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Subject: NN: Last of the True Believers: DVD Audio Disc
From: "Mark Wiggins" (M.Wiggins@ftel.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 18:14:44 +0100

Hi,

I haven't noticed any comments about the Last of the True Believers DVDA
disc which has finally been released after many delays.

I can't give much of a review until I find somebody with a DVDA player
;-) but I can tell you this:

There's a 48kHz PCM audio track which plays on standard DVD players.

The video output comprises a screen showing the title of the current
track.

The manufacturers of this disc seem to think that Nanci is spelt Nancy.
Argh. The disc sleeve and booklet are fine but the disc itself says
"Nancy Griffith", the video screen mentioned above says "Nancy
Griffith". Oh, and St Olav's Gate is displayed as St. Olav's Place and
Banks of the Pontchartrain becomes Banks of the Pontehatrain, IIRC.  :-(

As I've said, I haven't listened to the main audio track (24bit, 96kHz)
but I hope they took more care over that than they did with the other
little details.

BTW, standard CDs are 16bit, 44.1kHz.

BTW2, I got the disc from Digital Eyes in the US -
              http://www.digitaleyesdvd.com/
I'm not sure I'd exactly recommend them but the price was OK and the
disc got here.

Regards,
Mark

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Subject: NN: Song search (NNC)
From: "Ken Stiffler" (ksmsc@kmsx.net>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 22:37:52 -0400

Nancinetters have come through for me before, so here's another request to
identify a song that a small piece of just won't quite leave me alone.

Sometime around 1970 give or take a bit, there was a song out, I think by
Freddy Weller, but I'm not sure, that had a few lines like:

  Does a chicken have lips?
  Does a rattlesnake have hips?
  Can an elephant whistle Dixie through the hmm hmm on this nose?

Or something like that.

Can anybody identify this song and who recorded it?

Of course, this also reminds me of the way Tom Rush use to perform Duncan
and Brady live, with a long tale that filled in the details the song was
missing. Something about a general store that sold potato chips and chicken
lips and guitar picks and on and on and something about a
pearl-handled-hair-trigger-colt-44. Would LOVE to have a recording of Tom
doing that version of the song.

Ken

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Subject: NN: NN Cardiff concert on BBC
From: ConorMG@aol.com
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 17:11:06 EDT

Nanci was on Mike Harding's wonderful folk programme on BBC Radio 2 on Oct
10th. We heard five songs from her Cardiff concert, and her introductions
were fascinating.  Here is what she said about 'Clock Without Hands', though it
gives no sense of her excellent delivery.  (By the way, I enjoyed 'Where
Would I Be' for the first time in this rendition, and 'Travelling Through' and
'Clock WH' seemed better than on the cd, while  'Gulf CH', and 'Two for the Road'
were as good as ever.) 

...Now I don't think this is quite fair, because you guys all have beer out
there and we didn't get any....what's up with that now? 
This next song is the title song from my new cd and it's a song that was
inspired by a novel written by one of my favourite American novelists. It
was her last novel written and it was called 'Clock Without Hands' and it's all
about atrophy of the human heart and emotion, when people give up and you no
longer take risks and you don't go step off that cliff and fall in love and
get broken and climb back up and do it again, you just start hiding out, you
don't extend yourself out into the world any more, you stop being productive, you
sit away on the couch and watch the tv.  Obviously none of you in this room have
that ailment, but if you know someone who does, take the chorus of this song
over to their house, fix them a cup of tea, sing it to them, and then take
them out to a disco, take them out to sing karaoke, get out there and start
living, give them back the hands for their clock. 

Conor (now listening to breathtaking new version of Maddy Prior's 'Lark in
the Morning' and teetering on cliff)

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Subject:  NN: NN what bird is N?
From: ConorMG@aol.com 
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 18:28:49 EDT

I just got a copy of 'Poet in my Window' and wonder why the heck all you
people out there haven't let on how good this cd is.  Most of her records have
grown on me gradually but this one I loved straightaway. 
I saw a goldcrest for the first time the other day, and was mesmerised by
its speed and paradoxically self-effacing distinctiveness, as it raced up and
down branches after insects.  I know NNers didn't wildly relate to seeing her as 
an animal recently, and that NG doesn't chase bugs etc, but wonder if others
see her as a goldcrest, a swan, a swallow or what?

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