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Nanci Griffith opened her April 4 concert with a John Prine song and played an acoustic set every bit as lean and long as her presence: shimmering, with a sequined black velvet jacket and flared, embroidered jeans. The iconic singer and songwriter sang about love and war, despair and redemption, trains and rivers. The packed crowd in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts drank from the beer mug of country twang and sorrow, the goblet of moody folk. Fans clapped and whooped and gave her a standing ovation.
But if you ask me, Griffith never got better than in that first mournful song, "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness." She just walked onstage without fanfare and sang. Simple. Extraordinary.
Her fans will probably argue the point, but the poignancy of those first few moments never quite returned, not when she sang her hits, or extolled the possibility of peace, or welcomed onstage Bill Pelke of Journey of Hope, an organization dedicated to abolishing the death penalty.
Not that I didn't enjoy hearing her political convictions or cracks about Tom Delay and Ted Stevens or the stories behind the songs or the music itself. It's just that the emotional ride slowed rather than accelerated, hovered rather than elevated. I felt let down rather than hoisted up.
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And yet her skill as a songwriter clearly showed in songs like "Walking in Corners" and "Love in the Five and Dime," a Grammy-nominated hit for Kathy Mattea. Griffith herself owns a few Grammys and plenty more nominations, for her talent is in shaping melody and lyric, amply demonstrated in her 2005 release, "Hearts in Mind."
When she sang "Heart of Indo-chine," she took the Discovery Theatre crowd to Vietnam and led it into imagining the lost souls of war floating free and peacefully in the Saigon River.- When she finished, the lines that stuck with me were those that captured how the past catches up with the present: "My friend Bobby Muller is sitting with me/ This traffic is maddening/ In his wheelchair he's napping/ I wonder at times, does he walk in his dreams?"
Her songs often hold a lyric like that for the tiniest moment, but the moment is enough.
Though billed as a solo show, Griffith played with Bruce McCray on guitar during the second half of the set. He added a layer and depth to the sound but didn't overwhelm Griffith's own acoustic work.
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Thanks to Whistling Swan Pro-ductions, the show opened with an emerging folk singer, Natalia Zukerman, who has a dynamic style on guitar. She plucked, thumped and strummed her instrument while singing sweet, rambling songs about unconditional love gone wrong and other wistful longings. She even did a folksy lounge song that made people laugh out loud.
The humor worked well as a warm-up to Griffith, who has a goofy way onstage, a kind of unassuming charm that lightens up the earnestness. Griffith may have talked about the futility of war and the preciousness of life, but she also bantered about romantic foibles and soap operas -- you know, the stuff of country songs.
After all, laughter and sorrow offer balance to any hard-luck song, which is why that first Prine song got to me the most. The tall, elegant Griffith picked up her guitar and took a tickling observation to its painful realization, an itch to its sorrow: "It's a mighty mean and a dreadful sorrow/ It's crossed an evil line today/ How can you ask about tomorrow/ We ain't got one word to say."
If you ask me, moments like that are enough.
Daily News arts reporter Dawnell Smith can be reached at 257-4587 or dsmith@adn.com.
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