Back to her roots

Being adopted has inspired Mary Gauthier like no artist before her

Over 13 years and six albums, singing in that cracked voice that channels Johnny Cash’s last days, Mary Gauthier has established a reputation as one of the finest American songwriters around. Although tracks such as I Drink, Mercy Now and Different Kind of Gone are snapshots of a life laid bare, nothing prepares you for the searing honesty of her new album, The Foundling — a song cycle about adoption.

Most female songwriters — even those for whom soul-baring, self-loathing, angst and unrequited or broken love affairs are sources of inspiration — have skirted round the subject. One might think that being abandoned at birth would prove fertile ground for creativity, but perhaps this is too raw an emotion to expose. While Gauthier has tackled the pain head on, other adoptee songwriters — Diana Jones, Gillian Welch, Sarah McLachlan — have been more oblique.

In literature, the foundling has always been a popular subject. Read the Old Testament, fairy tales, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, novels and comic books, and you will find Moses, Snow White, Oedipus, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Tom Jones and Superman. Because life likes to imitate art, reuniting adopted children with their birth mother is a popular media story — especially if, like Clare Short or Joni Mitchell, the mother has a high profile — with an upbeat message.

In fiction, the foundling is a blank slate on which to create a life unburdened by the past. In reality, says Gauthier, “it feels like you’re falling through space eternally”. More than 40 years after she was left in St Vincent’s Women’s and Infants’ Asylum in New Orleans, she tracked down her birth mother. That first stilted, apologetic conversation is recounted in March 11, 1962, the emotional centre of both the album and her current live shows. In the third verse, the lyrics hit you like a slow-motion car crash: “You say that I’m a secret nobody knowsyou can’t talk about it nowyou really gotta go.”

Yet the question that had dogged Gauthier all her life — “Who am I?” — had in part been answered. “I had found my birth mother. It wasn’t what I wanted to find, but there’s not a question mark any more. The little kid in me is gonna be dealing with abandonment until my last breath. I’m driven to write songs as a way of making sense of my life.

Most songwriters — like most people — have a family and know where they come from. Adoptees can lack that sense of place. Raised in an emotionally troubled family, Gauthier always felt she “didn’t belong”. “I always knew I was gay. I was an alcoholic from my first drink. There was just a hole. I had to get sober and start to heal from addiction before I could create art,” she explains.

“The interesting thing about being adopted,” says the singer-songwriter Diana Jones, “is, potentially, you could be from anywhere, from any kind of family, any kind of background. I grew up having all these fantasy families in my head. All my childhood, I had a sense of longing for home, a need to belong. I had to find me before I could figure out what I wanted to write, and that took time.”

Growing up just outside New York listening to show tunes, the Stones and the Beatles, Jones had fallen in love with Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison and found herself drawn to roots music. She finally tracked down her mother’s family in Tennessee. Her grandfather Robert Lee Maranville, who had once played with Chet Atkins, had a similar-sounding voice.

“I do believe there is a genetic connection between where I come from and the music I play,” she says. “Finding my biological family explained so much about who I am, but it took me a while to feel like I could claim it.” After her grandfather died in 2000, Jones, who had previously released two indifferent albums, found her voice — My Remembrance of You (2006) and Better Times Will Come (2009) are gems, more roots than country, full of beautifully observed songs set off by the warmth of her voice. Pony, about a Native American child taken from a reservation and placed in a settlement school, and All God’s Children, about kids who leave foster care at 18 with nowhere to go, are songs not just informed but enhanced by her experience. “I’m only interested in true stories,” she says. “For me, it’s to make sense of my story, but also to make sense of it in the context of the world.”

Gillian Welch’s adoptive parents were entertainers who moved to LA to write for The Carol Burnett Show. Her biological mother hailed from the mountains of North Carolina and her father was a drummer. Like Gauthier, she doesn’t do happy, preferring to chronicle the misfortune and torments that befall the disconnected living on society’s edge. Abandonment in all its forms — drug addiction, poverty, the wreckage of love — is the spine that runs through her songs.

Some adoptees, however, have fewer issues. “I got told I was adopted when I was nine, and it was never a big deal to me,” says the Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan. “I met my birth mother when I was 18. It was neat, because so many things I felt started to make sense, but, especially after I became successful, she wanted too much. I have a mother already. The older I become, the more I realise I am more like her through environmental conditioning.”

As Joni Mitchell has discovered, giving up your child for adoption is both a catalyst for creation and a scar that never heals. In 1965, when she was a penniless art student, she handed over her baby girl. She didn’t speak about it publicly for 30 years, but the clues were stamped all over her songs — especially Little Green, from Blue. “It left a hole in me,” she said, “that I didn’t fill until the day I saw her again. In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss.”

When touring with Jones, Gauthier found they had much in common. Both had been adopted into dysfunctional families, left home at 15 and lived rough; and both have adoptive brothers with drug problems. Music was not part of their childhood — “There were no books, no music, no art,” Jones says — and they came to it relatively late. Jones was an artist, Gauthier a chef who wrote her first song at 35.

During their discussions, Jones introduced Gauthier to the work of BJ Lifton, an advocate of adoption reform. “Her books helped me to understand, to the point where I knew I was ready to write this record,” Gauthier says. “I wanted to write it as a song cycle, like Willie Nelson did with Red Headed Stranger; to start at the beginning, work to some sense of redemption and, in the end, come out and say, ‘I still believe in love.’”

“On a good day,” she says, “I believe. On a hard day, I need to believe.”

The Foundling is out now; Mary Gauthier is touring in June