Mary Veronica Gauthier ( ; born March 11, 1962) is a Grammy-nominated American folk singer-songwriter and author, whose songs have been covered by performers including Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, Kathy Mattea, Boy George,Jimmy Buffett, Bettye Lavette, Candi Staton,and Amy Helm. She has won awards from the Americana Music Association, International Folk Music Awards, the Independent Music Awards, the GLAMA Awards, and the UK Americana Association. Mary's songs often deal with marginalization, informed by her experience of adoption, addiction and recovery, and growing up gay in the deep south. Her work demonstrates an "ability to transform her own trauma into a purposeful and communal narrative". Her Grammy nominated 2018 album Rifles & Rosary Beads, co-written with military veterans and their families, has been hailed as a landmark achievement.
Life and career
Early life, addiction and sobriety
Gauthier was born in 1962 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a mother who gave her to St Vincent's Women and Infants Asylum, where she spent the first year of her life. In adulthood, Mary spoke to her biological mother once by phone, but there was no further contact between them. She was adopted by an Italian Catholic couple from Thibodaux, Louisiana. Her father was an alcoholic. Struggling with a variety of issues, Gauthier left home young and abused drugs and alcohol, as did her brother, who was three years younger and also adopted. He was later jailed for armed robbery. Mary says she had drunk herself unconscious on sloe gin by the time she was twelve. When she was fifteen she ran away from home, recalling that "I was a gay kid, and back then, that just didn’t fly. Back then, gay kids were beat up, abused, some ended up taking their own lives. It was horrible, and I just wanted to get away.” Mary spent the next several years in drug rehabilitation, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her eighteenth birthday in a jail cell. These experiences provided fodder for her songwriting later on. Spurred on by friends, she enrolled at Louisiana State University as a philosophy major, dropping out during her senior year. After attending the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and working in an upmarket restaurant, she got financial backing to open a Cajun restaurant in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, calling it Dixie Kitchen. On opening night, 12 July 1990, she was arrested for drunk driving and has been sober ever since. "I eventually got sober when I was twenty seven years old... I started writing songs in earnest at around thirty two years of age", she says. After achieving sobriety from "[mainly] alcohol, cocaine and heroin", Mary continued to manage, and cook at, the restaurant but was increasingly driven to dedicate herself to songwriting.
Music career
Having recorded her debut, Dixie Kitchen, Gauthier sold her share in the restaurant to finance her second album. Drag Queens in Limousines was released in 1998, winning several accolades, and led to appearances at eleven major folk festivals, including Newport. After moving to Nashville in 2001, she secured a publishing deal with Harlan Howard Songs, followed by her third album, Filth and Fire, in 2002. Two years later, she landed a record deal with Lost Highway, a division of Universal Music, and released the first of two albums with them.
Mercy Now won widespread acclaim and propelled Mary into the spotlight, making the Top Ten Albums list in many publications. A second album for Lost Highway, Between Daylight and Dark, followed in 2007. Gauthier's next studio record, The Foundling (2010), was released by Razor & Tie Records. She then made the first of several albums for In The Black Records, LIVE at Blue Rock (2013), her first live album which was recorded at a ranch outside of Austin, Texas. Mary's eighth studio album, Trouble and Love (2014), demonstrated her now familiar "brutal honesty balanced by rough-hewn tenderness" to great effect. The following year, Gauthier featured on Eight 30 Records' Cold and Bitter Tears: The Songs of Ted Hawkins, contributing her take on the late Los Angeles busker's signature song, Sorry You're Sick.