Singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier doesn’t pull any punches. Life certainly didn’t pull any for her. An adoptee haunted by what she couldn’t know of her family history and alienated from her conservative Catholic community by her sexual orientation, Gauthier ran away from her
Thibodaux, Louisiana, home at age 15, straight into the arms of alcohol and drug addiction, pinballing from rehab center to jail to the kindness of strangers.
Photo by Rodney Burseil.
With the help of friends, she got through several years of college; went to culinary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and opened a successful restaurant, Dixie Kitchen, serving up
Cajun delights to Beantowners for 11 years. She finally got clean and sober at age 35 after 20 years of struggle and found a healing grace in songwriting.
You don’t get straight without cultivating a harrowing honesty and an honest compassion, and both are hallmarks of Gauthier’s songs. She routinely descends into the chthonic desperation of the lost, the damned, the displaced, and the self-destructive, only to retrieve a spark of hope that she blows into the radiant possibility of redemption.
Gauthier will fan that flame this weekend at two fundraising concerts for Peace Talks Radio, in Santa Fe on Friday, sharing the bill with Iraqi oud master and Albuquerque resident Rahim
Alhaj, and in a solo performance on Saturday in Albuquerque. If her latest album, Live at Blue Rock, is any indication, you’d be well advised to bring tissues.