Lucinda Williams: Happy Woman Blues

THE DAUGHTER of an English lit professor, Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and spent most of her youth moving from college town to college town in the American South and South America: Atlanta, Macon, Vicksburg, Jackson, Santiago (Chile), Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Mexico City. It was a household in which the heart and the head counted equally: The academic influence was strong, but Lucinda's father was also an unreconstructed Hank Williams fan, and the earliest music she remembers hearing was the Methodist hymns of her kinfolk.