Iconic Americana maverick Lucinda Williams brings concert 'book' tour to Tucson

Lucinda Williams can’t get the vision of Bob Dylan out of her head.

“Bob Dylan with his kinda long, soft wavy hair. He was wearing jeans and a Triumph Motorcycle T-shirt, looking like a biker and I was smitten,” she said of the album cover of Dylan’s 1965 record “Highway 61 Revisited.” “I think that may have formed my image of what I liked, what I was attracted to as I went through life. I always loved that image.”

That memory will be one of many she shares with her Tucson fans at Rialto Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 1, when she plays her first show here in nine years.

“I can’t wait. I love Tucson,” the 71-year-old singer said in her trademark raspy voice. “I always love playing there. Something about that town, I’ve always been drawn to it. I generally love this part of the country, the Southwest, the people. And (Rialto) is such a great venue. Really cool.”

Her concert is part of her so-called book tour, a multimedia show that recounts Williams’ life through songs, snapshots and home videos. The performance will highlight stories from “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir,” published last year, as well as songs from her extensive catalogue, including her latest album, “Stories From A Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart,” also released in 2023.

She begins the story at age 12, when she first started taking guitar lessons. That also was the year she first discovered Dylan.

“He blew my little 12-year-old mind,” she said during a phone interview from a concert stop last week in Las Vegas. “I didn’t understand all of the lyrics, but somehow his music just spoke to me.”

She’ll play Elizabeth Cotton’s early 20th-century folk song “Freight Train,” the first song she learned on guitar. A member of her band will take the guitar role; since her 2020 stroke, Williams has been unable to play.

She has mostly recovered, she said, but she still has trouble walking, and she admits she sometimes gets fatigued on the road.

“I’m definitely doing better. People who are around me can tell I am doing physically better,” she said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “The physical is the hardest part. At first I couldn’t walk across the room without falling down. Now I can walk, but not like I used to. I couldn’t go for a walk or go for a hike right now; that would be hard.”

At Tuesday’s show, she’ll confess that Dylan and that 1965 album cover had a lasting impact on her life.

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“I’m very honest and I admit to the audience that I was smitten by that photo,” she said. “I was obsessed with him for a long time.”

She’ll also name-drop the 1960s artists — Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot and Judy Collins among them — who influenced her alongside her dad’s Hank Williams records and jazz.

“That time was filled with amazing music,” she recalled of the early 1960s. “It all just inspired me and influenced me.”

Those influences popped up in Williams’s music throughout her 40-plus-year career, going back to her 1979 Folkways Records debut “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” which leaned traditional country, to her breakthrough eponymous third album in 1988 that established her in the Americana space.

“Lucinda Williams” included her self-penned country song “Passionate Kisses,” which Mary Chapin Carpenter covered in 1992. The song earned Williams her first of three career Grammy Awards for best country song in 1994.

Williams will likely share with Tuesday’s audience that she never had a burning desire to write a book. But over the years, people in her life kept pushing her in that direction. When a New York publisher reached out a few years ago and said it was interested in her story, she relented.

“I went home and I had to start writing a book, which I had never done,” she said. “It was terrifying and probably one of the hardest — maybe the hardest — project I was ever involved in because I didn’t have any direction.”

But when she sat down to write it, Williams realized she has spent her whole life telling her story one song at a time, including on “Stories From A Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart.”

“All of my songs are personal. They’re stories of my life and my experiences,” she said.

Tuesday’s all-ages concert at the Rialto, 318 E. Congress St., starts at 8 p.m. Reserved seat tickets are $39.50-$75 through rialtotheatre.com.