Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir

by Lucinda Williams

The listening experience was very serious, almost religious. We’d put on one album and everybody would sit there and listen to the whole thing and not say a word until the side was over. Rock music was everything to most of the kids there, but I had my acoustic blues and folk and roots background and I introduced that element into the mix. There was a schism in New Orleans at that time. And maybe there still is today, and not just in New Orleans. This was the 1960s and there was Vietnam and the assassinations and integration. Everything was polarized. You had the group that hated the counterculture—the conservative business and civic leaders and the churchgoing types—and you had the group that embraced it. We were of course in the group that embraced it.