With rhyme and reason

By Steve Hochman

Nov. 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

WHEN Lucinda Williams started writing songs in her early teens, she couldn’t exactly go to her hero, Bob Dylan, for advice.

But she could shout down the hall. Williams grew up with her own resident mentor, her father Miller Williams. He ranks as a leading figure in modern American poetry who, most visibly, was chosen by President Clinton to write and deliver the official poem for his second-term inauguration in 1997 and has served as confidant to folk heroes including Jimmy Carter and Tom T. Hall.

“It was sort of a built-in creative writing school when I was growing up,” Lucinda recalls of her childhood, spent mostly around the South, with side trips to Mexico and Chile, where her father taught at various colleges. “I was able to just show my dad stuff and the same way he would do with his students, he’d become Professor Williams and he would look over them in the literal, creative-writing sense. Of course, it was invaluable.”

Neither daughter nor father remember what he had to say about her first songs -- such as the lilting, Peter, Paul & Mary-styled “The Wind Blows,” which she now sings over the phone. But those early lessons were the start of a fruitful relationship that helped Lucinda become one of the most respected singer-songwriters in American music, known for her emotional directness and verbal economy.

And it continues to this very day, when the two will share the stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall for one in an occasional series of joint appearances they have made the last few years.

“I read a poem, she sings a song, we go back and forth, make remarks to one another in a fatherly-daughterly way and have a lot of fun with that,” says Williams pere, 73, speaking from his home in Fayetteville, Ark., where he has lived since retiring from the faculty of the University of Arkansas.

“We have been impressed ourselves with the degree to which some of her songs seem to re-track the same territory as my poems. We’ve dealt with the same things and come to the same conclusions with our work -- not surprisingly.”

That’s become increasingly so over time. Lucinda’s career -- covering 28 years, seven studio albums and three Grammy Awards -- has seen her songs evolve from heart-broke narratives to almost haiku-like impressionism, particularly in her last two studio albums, 2001’s “Essence” and 2003’s “World Without Tears.”

Her upcoming “West” (due Feb. 13) refines it even further, with her most intimate and revealing work thus far complemented by spare yet multihued settings courtesy of producer Hal Wilner and a cast of musicians including avant-jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.

Most gripping are songs inspired by the death two years ago of her mother. Her parents divorced when she was 11 and she grew up primarily with her father, though they all stayed on good terms, with Miller and his second wife inviting his ex-wife to stay with them during her last months.

In the song “Mama You Sweet,” Lucinda expresses her love in the simplest way, yet never trite nor treacly. And in “Learning How to Live,” her voice raw as if from crying, she looks ahead, again paring down her thoughts and emotions to the barest bones.

“Someone dies, we’re left behind to deal with the pain, the carrying on,” she says. “It’s a personal thing. Dealing with the relationship with my mother and myself. She suffered from mental illness, which I hadn’t talked about before. Still a taboo subject in our society.”

Having completed this album, she’s now applying the same discipline and spark to a newer batch of songs in the wake of another life change, getting engaged.

“She has this in common with the best poets, that there is rarely a word you could take out of one of her songs and not miss it,” Miller says. “The words deserve to be there, demand their presence. Most lyricists and most poets have a bit of linguistic obesity to their work.”

Lucinda gives much credit to her father, who has served as advisor and editor for most of her songs. But she got a shock when she sent him the songs she was writing for “Essence.”

“He said, ‘I don’t have any comments to make,’ ” she says. “I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘No, this is as close to poetry as you’ve come yet.’ I said, ‘Wow! Does this mean I’ve graduated?’ And it really felt like that. But I still look to him for approval.”

MILLER Williams, a native of small Hoxie, Ark., benefited from some impressive mentoring himself. In the ‘50s, he and writer Flannery O’Connor (whose novel “Wise Blood” remains one of the essential titles of modern Southern literature) regularly critiqued each other’s works-in-progress. She also helped get him his first English literature teaching post at Louisiana State University -- he’d been a biology professor before that.

Noted poet John Ciardi also helped him hone his straightforward approach to language. And an encounter with another down-home poet also had a great influence.

“I met Hank Williams in 1952 in Lake Charles, La., just a few weeks before he died and just before Lucinda was born,” he says of a post-concert chat he had with the country music icon over a beer.

So big is that in his personal history that today Miller Williams beams over having been called by one journalist “the Hank Williams of American poetry” as much as for his inaugural honor and his 1995 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

And today he proudly adds another Williams to his list of influences: his daughter.

“She has helped to keep me from sounding overly educated,” says Miller Williams, laughing at the backhandedness of the compliment. “I think you know what I mean. But she has a well-tuned [phoniness] detector.”

And Lucinda’s take on her influence on her father’s work?

“I’ve never been asked before if I had influence on him!” she says. “I would have to ask him that. I’ve never explored that with him before.”

Perhaps she’ll do so tonight.

[email protected]

Poetry Said, Poetry Sung

What: Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams and her father, poet Miller Williams, in concert

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 tonight

Price: $45, $35, $25 (UCLA students, $15)

Info: (310) 825-2101; www.uclalive.org