Nanci Griffith Archives - chimesfreedom

There are not many times there has been such a collection of talent onstage together since July 21, 1998, when Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Jeff Walker and Eric Taylor appeared together on the Late Show With David Letterman. Griffith had just released the excellent album Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful). And the album featured an all-star version of Guy Clark’s song “Desperados Waiting For a Train.”

Only such an outstanding talent as Griffith could shine even while ceding so much of the song to these other legends of music. On both the album and the Letterman performance, she does not even sing solo until late in the song.

The songwriter Guy Clark starts off the song, and it is clear that the beautiful performance is all about respect. There is Griffith’s respect for Clark’s song and the legendary talent of the other singers. But there is also an amazing amount of respect from those legends for Griffith, coming together for this performance on both the album and on Letterman’s show.

Check out the performance of “Desperados Waiting for a Train” below.

Most who love music of this genre will recognize the big names here for their work as singers and songwriters: Guy Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and Jerry Jeff Walker. But you might or might not recognize Eric Taylor, who is probably the least well-known of the group. Taylor also was a well-respected Texas singer-songwriter, and his songs have been covered by people such as Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. He also was married to Griffith for 1976-1982. So it is also cool to see Griffith invite her ex for this amazing performance. Taylor passed away less than two years after this performance from liver disease.

Of the group on stage that night, we have also lost Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Letterman clearly knew he was hosting a special gathering on his show at the time, but many may have missed it. We were certainly lucky to have the music of these folks, and extra lucky to have them together for this song.

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In light of the recent news about President Obama and Vice-President Biden stating their support for gay marriage, the recent HBO documentary The Loving Story (2011) about a marriage law in the 1950s takes on an added significance.

In 1958, Richard Loving, who was white, and Mildred Jeter, who was black, traveled from their home in Virginia to Washington, D.C. to get married. After their wedding, they returned home to Virginia where after five weeks police roused them from their bed in their home at 2 a.m. and arrested them for violating a law that banned interracial marriages. At the time, twenty-four states had laws banning interracial marriages. In January 1969, a judge accepted their guilty plea for the crime and sentenced them to one year in jail but suspended the sentence if the two left Virginia for 25 years. The Lovings, who wanted to go home, challenged the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which heard the case in Loving v. Virginia.

Although a unanimous Supreme Court eventually ruled for the Lovings in 1967 by finding that the Virginia law violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the Lovings spent roughly nine years as criminals between the time they were arrested and the time they won the case in the Supreme Court. The documentary tells their story during this time.

One of the great things about the documentary is the amount of video footage that was taken of the Lovings and others at the time the events were happening. Among the many images, the film includes never-before-seen footage taken by filmmaker Hope Ryden while the case was pending before the Supreme Court. It is interesting to see the couple meeting with lawyers and hear Mildred Loving explain why they decided not to attend the Supreme Court argument. The documentary is a fascinating portrait about another time period that was not that long ago, and it brings to life the two human beings at the center of one of the great Civil Rights cases of the 1960s.

Nancy Buirski, who made the film, first had the idea to make the documentary after reading Mildred Loving’s obituary in the New York Times in May 2008. In the February 2012 ABA Journal, she explained, “Not only was this an overlooked story but also. . . you read about them . . but you don’t know very much about the people involved.”

Singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith had a similar reaction when she read Mildred Loving’s obituary in the newspaper. Her response was to sit down and write a song, “The Loving Kind,” which became the title track of an album she released in 2009.

They changed the heart of a nation,
With their wedding vows;
From the highest court in the land,
Their union would lawfully stand;
Simply Mildred and Richard,
That’s how they’d be remembered;
They proved that love is truly blind;
They were the loving kind.

Richard and Mildred Loving stayed together until Richard was killed in a car crash in 1975. They had three children and they will forever be linked together. On the fortieth anniversary of the Loving v. Viginia decision in 2007, Mildred released a statement saying that all people, including gay men and lesbians, should be allowed to marry because, “That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.” Decades earlier, Richard summed up the Loving case too. When lawyers explained the various legal theories to the Lovings, Richard simplified the point, “[T]ell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

Conclusion? Check out the film, which is on DVD and on HBO and online for subscribers. While the movie goes at a leisurely pace to let the story unfold in the participants’ own words and you know how the story comes out, it is still an interesting time capsule that reveals the human side of two regular people who quietly stood up to an injustice.