50 Americana Albums You Should Hear Before You Die - Car Wheels On a Gravel Road

 

Lucinda Williams was always going to feature here but which album?

I've got pretty much all of the 15 albums that she has released from her original Blues albums through Americanand then back to a mixture of both.

Her albums and songs are always of a high quality and yet she probably doesn't have that stand out album  or go to song that most artists have. Her most famous song is probably Passionate Kisses but then probably via the version by Mary Chapin Carpenter as opposed to her original version.

I've gone for her 5th album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road from 1998 on the Mercury label as this is round about where I came in

I'm just reading that in was her first album to go gold and remains her biggest selling album. It was voted best album of 1998 in The Village Voice annual Pazz and Jop critics poll and received a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, so it doesn't look as if I am alone in my admiration.

In 2003 Rolling Stone magazine called it an alternative country masterpiece and ranked it as 305 on their list of 500 Greatest Albums of all time.

Again no one track necessarily stands out  as better than the rest but for me the run of tracks from 4 to 6 are hard to beat.

Drunken Angel is about Austin singer songwriter Blaze Foley who was shot and killed in 1989 defending a fried from theie violent son.

Lake Charles is about Clyde Woodward a former boyfriend who died  long after they split up

Lucinda Williams - Drunken Angel

Lucinda Williams - Concrete and Barbed Wire

Lucinda Williams - Lake Charles

We are off on holiday for two weeks so nothing to see here apart for the next two in this series