‘Griffin sang with breath-taking purity’

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Folk, gospel, and Americana singer-songwriter Patty Griffin performed an intimate set last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s Southbank Centre. After a few precarious years – she temporarily lost her voice during her battle with breast cancer – Griffin is currently touring the US and Europe with new material.

Joined on stage last night by two multi-instrumentalists – Dave Pulkingham (guitar, piano) and Conrad Choucroun (bass, percussion) – Griffin sang with breath-taking purity. Her voice, even if huskier and a touch less nimble than before, still has brightness and that honest, storytelling delivery. As a performer she is always centred and poised, channelling the occasional wayward tendency into her stomping left boot and energetic guitar strumming.

Part of the experience of seeing Griffin perform live was the conversational nature of her presentation, sharing her insights and musings with the audience before exploring them further in song. She made her disdain for the current state of US politics clear, remarking that her latest studio album Patty Griffin (2019) – which comprised most of the set – was a message to her fellow Americans. The lyrics carry Griffin’s characteristic wisdom and sense of considered reflection.

She honoured her Irish ancestry with the Celtic-fused ‘Boys from Tralee’. In her preamble, Griffin lamented that America, the once great ‘melting pot’ of different cultures and ethnicities, was ‘done cooking’. On the nostalgic ‘Where I Come From’, she commented on the rife unemployment in her home town of Old Town, Maine as a consequence of deindustrialisation and neglect. The winding and simmering ‘The Wheel’ conveyed Griffin’s despair, with an explicit reference to the brutal murder of Eric Garner. ‘Hourglass’, a number which varied the tone of the set with its jazzy cadences, was Griffin’s ode to blues singer and songwriter Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. She expressed admiration for how Hawkins, unable to realise an opera career (assumedly linked to his status as a black man), made ‘lemonade out of lemons‘ by injecting the dramatic heights of opera into the blues.

The gospel material from Griffin’s previous releases provided some of the night’s best performances. The sparse and airy ‘Standing’ from her 2004 album Impossible Dream had a compelling stillness, aided by Pulkingham and Choucroun’s backing vocals. Her rendition of Dorothy Love Coates & The Gospel Harmonettes’ ‘The Strange Man’, recorded on Griffin’s Downtown Church (2010) album, was celebratory and assured.

For an encore, she performed two of her signature songs – the spiritual ‘Up To The Mountain (MLK Song)’ and beautiful ‘Heavenly Day’.

See the full setlist here

(Image taken from TickX)