ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Nanci Griffith

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NANCI GRIFFITH performs on the Lakeside stage on Sunday May 11th @ 415pm EST. (See full schedule HERE)

THE STORY: Whether performing her own poetically evocative material or the compositions of her influences, friends, and peers, NANCI GRIFFITH possesses a powerful gift for inhabiting the songs she sings - for communicating unspoken intimacy and heartache through her tender voice and lilting, delicate phrasing. At the outset of a career that has now spanned nearly three decades, Griffith first emerged as a writer of startling depth and subtlety, crafting sparse uncluttered vignettes that revealed a wealth of emotion in even the most humble of characters and settings. With her gifts as a songwriter lending invaluable insight, Griffith has also grown into a formidable interpreter of other people's songs, as demonstrated on such albums as the Grammy® Award-winning Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Her admirers are legion (Bob Dylan specifically requested that she sing “Boots of Spanish Leather” at his historic Madison Square Garden anniversary concert), and her awards appropriately numerous: five Grammy nominations, including a win for her gracious 1993 recording Other Voices, Other Rooms celebrating other songwriters, and two more for her dazzling performances on albums by The Chieftains. She has penned some of country music's most enduring compositions, including Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson's “Gulf Coast Highway,” Kathy Mattea's “Love at the Five and Dime” and “Listen to the Radio,” and Suzy Bogguss's “Outbound Plane.” And Nanci was the first to record Julie Gold's Grammy®-winning classic, “From a Distance.”

Nanci Griffith travels well. Her musical journey has taken her from folk and country roots, to her own brand of "folkabilly"; from Austin’s Hole In The Wall bar to New York’s Carnegie Hall, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and London’s Royal Albert Hall; from an eight-year-old girl in Texas learning to play guitar from a television instructor to a woman of the world, visiting and performing in Vietnam, Cambodia and Kosovo in support of the abolition of landmines. Today, the journey of one of the most admired and acclaimed of singer-songwriters--a career marked by a beautiful voice, brilliant songwriting and uncommon emotional commitment--continues.


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