Video: Nanci Griffith – “Love at the Five and Dime” (live)
From Austin City Limits, 1989.
Sophomore year of college, a pal and I had both wanted singles, but signed up as roommates in a double and put our names on the waitlist if a single opened up. During the week or so we shared that room we pillaged each other’s small CD collections and dubbed the stuff we didn’t have onto cassette. That’s how it worked in 1990.
One of Casper’s discs I was drawn to was a live album recorded in a tiny club by a country singer with an adorable voice. One Fair Summer Evening blew my mind wide open. At the time I would have said I hated country music. I was a teenager with a bad attitude about anything I didn’t think was cool. And country was definitely not cool. Casper must have described her to me as a folk singer. That would’ve been way more acceptable to me. I mean, I liked the Indigo Girls, right? And of course I loved Donovan. So folk music was okay. Country though? Not yet.
Every song on One Fair Summer Evening tells a story. And every story is beautiful. Beautifully sad, beautifully uplifting, sometimes just beautiful sounding. The lead song, “Once in a Very Blue Moon,” is a nostalgic look back at a lost love. It employs one of my favorite narrative techniques: the one where our unreliable narrator downplays their feelings. Like “I’m Not in Love” by 10cc where the singer is clearly in love. Or in “God Only Knows” where Brian Wilson says, “I may not always love you” (only as “long as there are stars above you”). In this case, Griffith claims to only still miss her ex, “just once…in a very blue moon.” It killed me back then and it still does.
My favorite song, though, was “Love at the Five and Dime” which starts off with a charming story about the connection between Woolworth elevators and guitar harmonics, and goes on to run the course of a long-term relationship that survives its ups and downs (including infidelity and arthritis) and ultimately has a happy ending. Happy enough anyway.