That’s followed by “House Of Earth,” a set of Woody Guthrie lyrics that Lucinda adapted to new music, following the example of Billy Bragg and Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue albums. The lyrics have a prostitute in a Southwestern adobe home telling her client how grateful his wife should be when he brings home all the bedroom tricks the narrator’s going to teach him. Lucinda sings it in a low, husky voice full of proud knowledge and world-weary fate while the two guitarists suggest the prickly fear and excitement of the man being addressed.
“My dad’s text was a poem,” she says, “while Woody’s was meant to be a song, even if the music never survived, so that was somewhat easier, because the words were written that way. I had to come up with the melody and the phrasing, and I did move some words around. Woody’s daughter Nora sent me that one. I had played this music festival in Germany run by Nora’s husband; the four of us sat around discussing socialism and drinking red wine. She felt that if anyone would be able to do that song, maybe I could.”
The album ends with the nearly 13-minute-long “Faith & Grace,” another happy accident. Overby had invited two reggae percussionists into the studio, just to see what would happen. One, Carlton Santa Davis, was wounded when his bandleader Peter Tosh was shot and killed; the other, Ras Michael, leads a Rastafarian church in Los Angeles. Lucinda refused to do the obvious thing and sing a Bob Marley song; instead Overby suggested they do “A Little More Faith” from a gospel album by one of Lucinda’s biggest heroes: Mississippi Fred McDowell.
The band gathered around to hear McDowell’s wife Annie Mae’s nasal alto lead the call-and-response, “Just a little more faith and grace is all that I need.” Each listener put his or her own spin on the original: the drummers adding Jamaican syncopation, Frisell adding the sound of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet on guitar, Sutton adding minimalist Nashville bass and Lucinda adding the ghosts of Highway 20. On and on the song goes, with long, patient guitar solos interspersed with raspy cries of desperation. Faith and grace may be obvious goals, the performance suggests, but they aren’t easily grasped.
“It’s not a jam so much as a mantra,” Lucinda says; “it reminded me of John Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme.’ I don’t really consider myself a Christian. I don’t want to separate one kind of spirituality from other kinds. Both of my grandfathers were Methodist ministers, and I’ve absorbed some of it, but I don’t agree with all of it. I love the music that comes out of it, and the bonding that results from it.
“I don’t go to church, but spirituality is important to me; it always has been. I’ve always been searching for a connection to something beyond myself, to animals, the world. When I’m singing sometime and it all connects with the audience, that’s a certain kind of spirituality. I’ve experienced feelings of a connection with the universe, and that’s what I call God.”
It’s as if God too were just one more ghost tramping down a Georgia highway.