“I just feel that music and song can be so much more than entertainment, and maybe that’s really what it’s supposed to be about.”
Mary Gauthier is a very unique contemporary artist whose music has proven what she says in her performances, her recordings, and placements of her music in the soundtracks of TV shows like Yellowstone on Paramount Plus, ABC’s Nashville, Masterpiece Theatre’s Case Histories, Showtime’s Banshee, and HBO’s Injustice.
Mary’s early life in orphanages where she became an alcoholic and drug addict before entering her teens has given her a unique view of the world in music that’s won her awards with its genre-bending glimpses of life often in the underbelly of society.
“It is this thing that happens that I call empathy which puts us into the experience of another person, and we can wear their shoes for three and a half minutes and become them in a way that’s profound, and we will leave that experience with an understanding of something we didn’t have before that.”
Mary co-wrote the Grammy-nominated Rifles & Rosary Beads in 2019 with wounded Iraq war veterans and their families, arising out of her involvement with the Songwriting with Soldiers program for the last 18 years. While I personally never saw combat as a Vietnam veteran, I can tell you that combat vets by and large don’t like sharing their memories. They are too traumatic. As a baby, Mary was given up to an orphanage by her mother. She became a drug addict and alcoholic before entering her teens. The trauma of those early experiences has given her empathy for these veterans and broken through their code of silence.
“I’m old enough to be their mother or father.” She’s 62. “So, what was stunning to me is just the age of the people that I was recording with. They were just quite young to have been through so much. There is no one standout story. They all stand out. Every person that I’ve written with has an incredible story. The challenge to write with the veterans is to make it safe for them to speak their heart, and I think I’ve been given that gift. That’s something I can do.
“I use my body language to let them know that they are safe with me. I don’t sit in judgment of anything. I’m just a witness that is trying to help them articulate something that’s really hard to put into words, but it can be put into music.
“In Songwriters with Soldiers we go in, three songwriters, and work with six or seven veterans at a retreat center. We help them to articulate whatever it is that they need to articulate into a song and so what I’ve done is I’ve been writing. I’ve been a witness to these incredibly powerful stories and transcribed them into music. Then I’ve gone out and played this all over the world.
“People are on the ground fighting, and we’ve probably got a thousand songs out of this program at this point. People were very interested in these stories, and I felt like I was very receptive at the time. I don’t know if it could have happened at any other time, but that was the right time to tell the stories. I wrote with some Vietnam veterans, but most of them had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of the stories I told are from their perspective.”
“Mercy Now” could easily be called Mary’s signature song. “They put ‘Mercy Now’ on Yellowstone’s closing scene of season one. It gave me a huge check that put me through the pandemic. They played almost four minutes, which is a huge amount of time for a television show. I had to split with the record company, and it still got me through the pandemic. So, that was a real big deal with Kevin Costner. He has so many things he wants to do. He has so many passions. He’s a Renaissance man. He does so many things.”
Mary’s experiences have prepared her for making music in this time of turmoil. “I don’t have any answers (in the field of politics), but I’m a troubadour, and I can win over an audience because I bypass (politics). I deal in feelings. When you work with songwriters, you want your songs to be in feelings and what things sound like. And the range of emotions is the same in all humans.”
In my day we’d have called her countercultural, but her material touches emotional hot spots that impact everyone who hears her.
She plays The Grand Ole Opry frequently but admits it makes her nervous. “I’m really not a country artist. I’m a folk singer. My politics don’t align with the majority of the audience. I don’t go there to sing about politics, but they take one look at me, and they know I’m a little different than them, and I know that what I can do is win them over. I can generate empathy from a large audience using the song as a large weapon of love of convictions. So, it’s like a magic trick that I can go out there and do, but it makes me a nervous wreck. I like it because it challenges me.”
Her background reads like a horror movie, but with a happy ending. “I was a gay kid, and back then, that just didn’t fly. Back then, gay kids were beat up, abused, some ended up taking their own lives. It was horrible, and I just wanted to get away.” She spent several years in drug rehabilitation and halfway houses living with friends. She spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell. She was 28 before she became a musician.
Her eventual acceptance as an artist of enormous abilities fills an eye-popping resume. In 2000, Drag Queens in Limousines won Best Folk/Singer-Songwriter Song at the first Independent Music Awards. She was nominated for Best New Artist at the Boston Music Awards, and also for three Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards (GLAMAs), winning best country artist. By 2015 she was nominated for the Outstanding Music Artist of the Year at the 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards.
Rifles & Rosary Beads earned Mary her first Grammy nomination in the category of Best Folk Album and won Album of the Year at The International Folk Music Awards. Artists recording her songs, include Bettye LaVette, Jimmy Buffett, Amy Helm, Kathy Mattea, and Tim McGraw. In 2021 she wrote a memoir called Saved by A Song, and her songs are taught at several universities.
I told Mary I couldn’t imagine living an entire life on a career and livelihood dependent on something as ethereal as landing a song on a TV show. “That’s what you do when you sign up to be an artist,” she said. “You sign up to be ethereal. You don’t have who or what or when or where or how you’re going to make your next paycheck, but there it is. It comes. It’s a timing thing in the arts business, and you can’t make timing. Timing happens in and of itself. So, in my ripe old age of 62 I realize my job is to just keep making art and sometimes it winds up with the right song at the right time.”
