Mary Gauthier

Mary Gauthier, a Grammy-nominated American folk singer and songwriter who also writes books, crafts shadowy soundscapes and stories centered on outsiders, drawing directly from her history of addiction and recovery along with her experience growing up gay in Southern Louisiana. Her breakthrough arrived in 1999 after the self-released second album Drag Queens in Limousines prompted reviewers to equate her self-described “country noir” with the work of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, John Prine, and Lucinda Williams. Strong sales for that record opened festival main stages across the United States and later around the globe, which in turn supported a steady sequence of well-regarded studio albums.

One of those releases, the 2018 set Rifles & Rosary Beads, earned widespread praise for songs she created with military veterans and their families; two years later came the memoir Saved by a Song. Her eleventh studio album, Dark Enough to See the Stars, followed in 2022. Critics, folk listeners, and No Depression supporters have embraced the candid warmth she brings to marginal characters, an approach that steers clear of both sentimentality and cold exploitation. The people in her songs reflect lives she encountered after leaving her Louisiana high school, taking the family car at fifteen, entering detox at sixteen, and landing in jail in Kansas City at eighteen. That path eventually led her through culinary school and into ownership of the successful Boston Back Bay restaurant Dixie Kitchen, which she sold once her music career gained traction.

Gurf Morlix, a onetime Lucinda Williams collaborator, produced her third album, Filth & Fire, issued in July 2002. Lost Highway released Mercy Now in 2005, while the Joe Henry-produced Between Daylight and Dark appeared in 2007. Razor & Tie Records put out the autobiographical The Foundling, produced by Mike Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, in 2010; that record achieved international recognition and marked a career breakthrough. After a profound personal loss, Gauthier composed material during her period of grief yet set those songs aside as overly dark. She then wrote new ones “through the darkness to get to the truth,” assembled a small band at Nashville’s Skaggs Place Studio, and tracked them live to tape. The result, Trouble & Love, came out in June 2014.

Gauthier toured extensively over the next three years while becoming involved with Songwriting with Soldiers, a noted nonprofit that employs songwriting to spark positive change. Participants gain a distinctive method for recounting their stories, rebuilding trust, releasing pain, and forming new connections. At SWS retreats and workshops, service members pair with professional songwriters to shape songs about their experiences, often addressing combat and the return home. Through these songs the participants rediscover creativity and reconnect with family, friends, and communities. The finished works circulate via recordings, concerts, and social media to close the distance between military and civilian worlds and to increase awareness of challenges faced by returning service members. Gauthier co-wrote ten songs with project members as well as Beth Nielsen Chapman, Ashley Cleveland, and Georgia Middleman. Working with producer and drummer Neilson Hubbard plus a group of seasoned players that included Will Kimbrough, Chapman, Kris Donegan, and Odetta Settles, she recorded the tracks that became Rifles & Rosary Beads, issued by Thirty Tigers in collaboration with SWS in January 2018. The album earned Gauthier her first Grammy nomination. Later that year she published a moving memoir, Saved by a Song, and in 2022 she released her eleventh long-player, Dark Enough to See the Stars, which combined upbeat songs about new love and contentment with tales of heartache informed by the losses of friends and contemporaries John Prine, Nanci Griffith, and David Olney.