Mary+Veronica+Gauthier



By: Georgiashea Victor =**Biography:**= Mary Gauthier was born on March 11th, 1962 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was born to a woman she never knew and was left at St. Vincent’s Woman Infants Asylum. Mary was then adopted by an Italian couple and at 15 she ran away. She struggled with hat and spent the next couples of years in rehab, jail, halfway houses, and living with friends. She enrolled at LSU as a Philosophy Major and dropped out. Wanting to become a cook she attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and opened a Cajun restaurant in the Black Bay neighborhood Dixie Kitchen. She owned and worked there for 11 years and has been sober since its opening night when she was arrested for drunk driving. Mary wanted to start writing songs so that she wouldn’t turn back to drugs and alcohol. She finished her first song at age 35. She ran into another bumpy patch when her fiancé left her for a man. She almost turned back to her old ways but instead she just decided to keep writing music. She moved to Nashville, Tennessee, then she secured a record deal with Lost Highway, a division of Universal Music, in 2003. Her songs have been used in several TV shows, including Nashville on ABC, Masterpiece Theatre's Case Histories, Showtime's Banshee, and HBO's Injustice. Her 6th studio record The Foundling and was released by Razor & Tie Records in 2010, and was named the No. 3 Record of the Year by Los Angeles Times. She was nominated in 2015 for the GLAAD Outstanding Music Artist of the Year at the 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards, held in L.A.

**These are my friends**
**Song Analysis:** This is one of Gauthier’s first songs produced and it was the first song she ever wrote. She wrote it for a gig that she was doing in New York City. You can tell it was one of her younger works because she rhymes all of the last words of each two sentence together. Even though lyrically this isn’t her strongest piece I can really connect with it. You see my tenth grade year I went to a private school and I didn’t really fit in I like girls, I’m mixed, and my family isn’t extremely wealthy. The first couple of months were really bad and I fell into a deeper depression than I had in years, it also didn’t help that my parents were mad at me for coming out to my family. I was gone for about a week and when I came back the ‘gothic’ boy who wore guy liner came up and started talking to me he said that he saw me leave my psychologist and he told me we went to the same one. He is gay and he took me under his wing. He was eighteen and the first time we really got to know each other was when we were at transgender pride. His boyfriend at the time was a drag king (which is a female that dresses as a male for stage performances) and we hung out all night kings and queens talking about what we were hoping to become ‘when we grew up’. For me, I have always found acceptance among those who, like me, did not fit into socially acceptable roles. The artists, gays, rebels, geeks these were the people who accepted and loved me. They took me in when my family tossed me out. And because of that I really connected with this song.

=Sources:= Kim Reick Kunoff. " Artist Biography". allmusic.com. Web. 2016

**The last of the hobo king, the last of the hobo kings**
=**Song Analysis:**= Mary Gauthier wrote this song in a hotel in Amsterdam. The sound of the guitar in this one was so beautiful I had to add it. This song didn’t really seem to have a rhyme scheme which was odd because she was telling the story of the legendary hobo king Maury Graham. Other than the beautiful guitar playing and the haunting way the words fit into the song, I also had another reason for choosing this song. I remember as a child when I would visit my Aunt Lou in Kermit, Texas because she lived fairly close to the railroad tracks that hobo’s would sometimes come by and ask for odd jobs. She didn’t have much but if there was something they could do for her they got a home cooked meal and something to take on their way. I remember their sidewalk markings and the fact that my Aunt was granted the smiling cat drawing for being a kind-hearted women. My Aunt told me that a lot of those men had served in the war and some had a hard time adjusting to life afterwards. I just remember that they would come and fix something in the hot Texas heat while my aunt would make flapjack and they would sing and work. This song really took me back there.

=Sources:= ' Last of The Hobo Kings". Cowboy Lyrics.com. n.p/n.d. web. 2013 Music City Roots. " Mary Gauthier- Last of the Hobo Kings". Online Video Clip.//YouTube.// YouTube, 22 Apr. 2006. web. 17 Jul. 2011

**There’s Mercy in the sky**


=Song Analysis:= This is a song that explores homicide, redemption, vengeance, soul sickness and murder– played out to their fullest in the life and death of Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas woman executed by lethal injection in 1998. Look her up you will want to know about this woman. The rhyming is back in this song which I think is very fitting because this is the sad tale of Karla Faye and it just added to the story for the song to rhyme. Also she repeated some word like pray she really wanted these words to pop out at us and they do. Mary Gauthier wrote this song to memorialize not the murderer she was but the redeemed woman that Karla became through sobriety and religion. This song is a reminder to me of how important it is to forgive. To bring the light to our own hearts so we can see the light in others. I haven’t always forgiven, I don’t know that I can, it’s difficult to put aside the dark of another human being when they are still in it creating torment for others without remorse. Karla was different and should have been treated as so, those afraid of standing alone live in an even darker place.

=Sources:= NeoSentence1. " Forevermore- Karla Faye Tucker (HD) (Full Movie)". Online Video Clip. //YouTube.// YouTube, 22 Apr. 2006. Web. 17 Apr. 2011 Gauthier,Mary. "Mary Gauthier- Karla Faye". Song Lyrics.com. Crittunes, n.d. Web.

Song Analysis:
This was another one of Gauthier’s first songs. There is a lot of repetition which I think matches well with the theme of the song which is a drunk thinking about their drinking. In their minds there would lots of rhyming and repetition. Gauthier wrote this song about how her father was a drunk and then so was she. This is the last number she played in her set when I went to see her live. She sang it so beautifully and with so much emotion that I cried. After she got off stage she looked around the restaurant and saw me crying she came over to me and gave me a hug we talked about what I was doing to harm myself and she told me if I kept ignoring the problem I would never stop. Thanks to her and my significant other I have come so far. For me this song’s haunting but beautiful lyrics strike a chord on a deep and emotional level. Most especially when I need to be reminded of how far I’ve come. It’s been 1 year 3 months and 11 days but who’s counting.

**Sources:**
" I Drink- Lyrics". //Metro Lyrics//. CBS Interactive Inc, 2016. Web.