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Mercier has fiddled, strummed, and sung many a night at Artz Rib House on South Lamar (and so many other places), but tonight, she's there to eat barbecue and talk about a lifetime pursuing that overwhelming music-making compulsion. Guitarist and songwriter Inmon is there to perform, but when musicians cross paths, they can quickly fall into a discussion on their crazy mutual lifestyle.

They can't help it. It's a creative urge to which they are both hopelessly addicted-not that it's a bad thing.

Getting away from that sometimes tortuous lifestyle was something Mercier took a serious stab at just a few years ago. It didn't work. "I moved up to Colorado with this guy I knew in college whose wife had passed away. He was a lawyer; he needed somebody to help with his kids. He was in the Rotary Club and all that." But when a call came to play a gig back in Austin in tribute to another musical peer (the late Blaze Foley), she left the conventional straight life in no more than a heartbeat. "I said, 'Well, drive fourteen hours, sing two songs? Works for me!' I couldn't not do it."

"I played my first gig in Austin in 1966," Inmon says. "You could get a T-bone steak dinner for a dollar seventy-five, rent a house for under a hundred dollars, and bands would play clubs for two (hundred) to four hundred dollars-the same thing they're making now. Except back then you could make a living only playing music. Now, forget about it."

The fever

Mandy Mercier first came to Austin some fourteen years after Inmon, and she came for the same reason: to play. But her story of a life in music didn't start here. It's the rest of that story that she'll sit down and share over barbecue pork ribs.

She grew up in rural Connecticut with two sisters and parents who all had a passion for music. Mercier's own passion developed in pretty traditional ways, singing in the church choir, playing violin and piano in elementary school, and listening to the radio.

"I learned rock 'n' roll and folk music right off the bat. Since it was the sixties, both kinds of music had powerful messages and were a real voice for change and what I saw as righteous, just, and important causes," she says. "So rather than pursue classical music, I made a conscious choice to go after music that was to me more relevant to the times. I was blown away by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and later James Taylor-performing and writing their own stuff-and decided to try to be a songwriter. When I was very young, I heard Peggy Lee sing about 'the blues' on television. It wasn't 'Fever,' it was some other song, although I liked 'Fever,' too-who doesn't? I didn't understand what a lot of it meant but I knew it felt great and seemed important."

She was close enough to New York City to occasionally sneak into Greenwich Village clubs to hear some of the amazing music that was effecting change in America. She saw acts like The Blues Project and protest singer Phil Ochs.

These were the experiences that formulated her sense of justice and her belief that music could-and should-have a social and emotional purpose. It was another Manhattan gig, though (one in a more upscale, uptown joint) that gave her a greater sense of her own music's direction. "I went to a concert once in New York at Town Hall. It was Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Kweskin's Jug Band with Geoff and Maria Muldaur, and the headliner was The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. That just blew my doors off. But what really knocked me out was Maria Muldaur. At the time, I was playing violin in symphonies in high school and wanting to be a rock 'n' roller. Then I hear Muldaur playing blues on the violin, and I went, 'That's it. That's my ticket.'"

Coast to coast

Mercier was a mostly indifferent student, though she loved being in the high school orchestra, band and chorus. She ventured west for college at the faraway University of Colorado, where she lasted one semester before dropping out and heading farther west to the psychedelic San Francisco crossroads of Haight Ashbury.

From then on, Mercier was a full-fledged member of the counterculture, beginning years of a marginal existence, living on the proverbial musicians' sofa circuit, crashing anywhere she could lay her head. She eventually hitchhiked back east to Stamford, Connecticut, where she played in various rock bands.

As her love and talent for music developed, so did her social conscience. She had grown up in a politically-minded family anyway, but the explosive times further sparked her sense of activism and idealism. She was a vocal Vietnam War protestor and civil rights activist (she even once heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a sermon in Stamford). All of this played right into finding her musical and ideological voice.

Then and now, the best place to find all viewpoints, cultures, and music styles was New York City. It was there that she first found Texas, and where Texas music found her. The Lone Star Café in Manhattan was the best place to hear singers and songwriters who otherwise hung out in Austin's great hippie hangout, the Armadillo World Headquarters, where she would one day play.

While in New York, she crossed paths and stages with a wide array of journeyman musicians, like Steve Forbert, The Roches, and Lucinda Williams (who would later become a longtime roommate and major influence). One night, she heard a young man singing a song from an old man's perspective, the story of "Spider John." The singer was Leif Kahal and Mercier was soon deeply involved with him, personally and musically. It wasn't long before they did what musicians often do: move on to find new places to share their songs with the people. New Orleans was a great music town for performers, and the duo got pretty good after awhile, playing six nights a week on Bourbon Street.

When they moved on to the mythical music hub of Austin, they knew they were among like-minded artists, the ones who sacrificed money for music, the ones for whom songwriting was more a calling than a profession. The kind that would be doing it anyway.

Third Coast

It wasn't long before Mercier realized that she had found her home. "We got into town late at night, and we sat up all night playing music. The next morning there were these grackles squawking. I had lunch at the Chili Parlor, saw some great music, and fell in love with the place."

When the partnership with Kahal ended, Mercier was suddenly all alone in a new town, and it was time to find her own identity. Fortunately, she was alone in a place crowded with people on the same musical wavelength. "All these unbelievable writers and players were here, as amazing as anything I'd heard in New York, and they were all unknown outside of this magical little planet called Texas." For a time, she joined Ray Wylie Hubbard's band, from whom she would learn much about songwriting and the music business.

Having already made music that was acoustic and electric, rock and country, blues and folk, she was in good company. She did find her own voice in Texas in the eighties, one that had evolved from spending her first three decades witnessing historic political change and experiencing it firsthand. Living on the road as a homeless gypsy musician can do that, lending insight into the soul of how the other half lives. The compassion for those living a desperate existence is what had inspired Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, and so it was with Mercier. But an overwhelming love of life also inspired those guys, and there is no shortage of optimism in Mercier's music.

If forced to put her sound under some categorical umbrella, it would have to be soul, because that's the place she sings from. Her songs come out sounding very much like her own personality: warm, hopeful, sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, always spiritually honest. To know Mandy Mercier's music is to know Mandy Mercier.

With an economy of words, she runs the emotional gamut, from sober pragmatism to idealistic faith. Take, for instance, the soulful ballad, "Beautiful World":

This beautiful world is a garden of flowers,
This beautiful world is a city of pain.
This beautiful world is what you make it,
This beautiful world goes, comes around again.

From such big picture reflections, she can-and does-launch into the raunchy blues of "Live Wire," equally expository but more intimate and certainly more personal:

I think about you and I can't talk,
I think about you and it changed the way I walk.
I think about you but I pretend I don't.
I think about you 'til it's changed my soul.
I'm grabbin' a live wire, I can't let go.

Her powerful voice is her secret weapon in selling the songs. It's a voice of hope and promise that's fragile yet rugged, gritty yet vulnerable, melodic yet broken. In other words, she was and is a blues singer in its most basic definition.

Homeless

As stable as her life had become in Austin (relative to her previously free-spirited gypsy life, anyway) she still had a strong connection to that world outside the mainstream, so beautifully represented by a larger than life character named Blaze Foley.

Through experience, Mercier has seen life from both sides of the tracks, and in the late eighties, her friend Foley ensured that she would never forget the view from life's other side. Blaze Foley was a gifted songwriter and colorful figure, a musician who refused to hold a day job. All that mattered was the craft, the creation of the pieces written in his soul and tangled up in blue. To hold a day job was to sell out, in his view.

"When I met him he was living on the street," Mercier says. "And he was very scornful of people who, in his words, didn't have the courage to do that. He knew I was afraid to do that, but then I'd think, 'Wait, I have done that. I've done it for years, been on the couch circuit, struggled my way through life to be an artist.'" Foley slept in dumpsters and played gigs to support addictions to his art and alcohol, a lifestyle that got him killed in 1989 under mysterious circumstances.

He often chided his friend Mercier for holding down a day job, and even now, when asked about her day job at a large law firm, she responds almost apologetically, remembering his willingness to embrace homelessness for the sake of the song.

Holding a steady day job has made her smarter over the years, but not harder. "Homeless," perhaps her best song, sprang from her disbelief and shock at the "anti-camping" ordinance that Austin's City Council championed in the late-nineties. Making homelessness illegal represented an irony that she could only clearly address in song. With the strong influence of her late friend, she approached the subject with his sense of dignity, reminding her listener that most of us are no more than a few paychecks away from falling through society's cracks ourselves. Mercier doesn't live the way Foley did, but it's safe to say that he would approve of her powerfully empathetic song:

Gardeners, laborers, waiters,
and engineers,
Downsized, laid off, the angry,
the sick, and the weird,
Battered mothers, children
with nothing to eat,
Vietnam veterans from both
sides of the street,
Lots of them homeless.

Singing for supper

As our dinner conversation has taken us all over the North American map and its indigenous musical styles, Mercier interrupts herself to listen intently as John Inmon sings from his soul in the restaurant, doing the thing that dedicated musicians can't not do.

Such respect at suppertime brings to mind the most meaningful professional experience of Mercier's life, courtesy of the most naturally-gifted player she ever encountered, the late Champ Hood.

Some of the first people she had met when she first hit town were in Uncle Walt's Band, at the time, one of Austin's hottest draws, and deservedly so. The trio consisted of David Ball, Walter Hyatt, and Champ Hood, an all-acoustic harmonic convergence of soaring melodies that owed as much to The Beatles and The Everly Brothers as it did to Bob Wills and The Carter Family. Each member wrote, sang, and played with understated passion and sweet musical magic.

During those first Austin years, she would befriend talents destined for greatness like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Townes Van Zandt, but none would strike her like the three boys who'd come from South Carolina. When Uncle Walt's Band broke up, the soft-spoken Hood stayed in Austin, to emerge as the city's most respected fiddler and guitarist. Aside from being in Toni Price's band, he was a session player for dozens of others, a sideman mostly out of the spotlight. Once a week, however, he hosted his own thing, the famed Sittin' and Singin' for Supper Sessions at Threadgill's Restaurant every Wednesday.

Hood and his Troubadours brought the house down every week at suppertime, with a cavalcade of spontaneous guests and not one rehearsal in their dozen years there. Each week, at the end of the night, Hood would call his friend Mercier up to the stage to close out the festivities. "He insisted on not only validating me," she says, "but putting me up there. And he didn't have to, at the crowning moment of the whole night. Not one night that I went out there did he not call me up."

Ever the tasteful sideman (even at his own gig), Hood knew what he was doing. Mercier would deliver, capping off a three-hour Americana jam session with a powerful blues that would've made Janis Joplin proud (often times, it was Joplin's own "Turtle Blues," into which Mercier would inject a passionate solo on Hood's borrowed fiddle). In fact, Joplin represents a historic connection in the Wednesday night Threadgill's tradition. During her Austin years in the sixties Joplin would join Kenneth Threadgill onstage to sing her heart out (before her superstardom).

Like Joplin, Mercier sings with confidence and strength in all the right places, but she's no impersonator. "Champ would say, 'Why don't you do a Janis Joplin song?' He was always trying to get me to do '(Me and) Bobby McGee,' but I would do 'Turtle Blues' because she wrote it. I wouldn't do her singing a Big Mama Thornton song, trying to sound like her. I would do her song trying to sound like me."

Champ Hood was simply the greatest musical champion, mentor, and friend that Mercier ever had in her rich creative life, and Uncle Walt's Band had always been her favorite band. When Walter Hyatt perished in the 1996 ValuJet crash, the personal and inspirational loss was immeasurable. When lung cancer took Hood in 2001, the loss was unspeakable.

But Mandy Mercier lives on, and through her, so does their music. In fact, her love affair with Texas music, of which she is now such an integral part, can be described in a small world story with a beautiful twist of fate. That "Spider John" song that she'd first heard in New York City had been written by Willis Alan Ramsey, the enigmatic songwriter who had first lured Uncle Walt's Band to Texas. "Last Friday, I sang on Willis Alan's album," she says, "which has (Hood's song) 'Bayou Girl' as a tribute to Champ. (Ramsey) had me come out and sing. I told him that story, full circle, from 1977 to now."

Get there

It's a week since that plate of barbecue, and another of the city's best, Jimmy LaFave, is playing an afternoon gig at The Pier on Lake Austin. It's a blistering set in the blazing heat of Austin's first hundred-degree day of the year.

LaFave and band offer no complaints of the temperature from the stage. They came to play, answering that calling about which John Inmon had so eloquently spoken.

Mandy Mercier is there in the audience, supporting her fellow musicians and listening. Like Champ Hood on a Wednesday night, LaFave decides to call Mercier up for a song near the end of his set.

She elects to rock 'n' roll with her usual energy on an upbeat original called "Get There" (from her upcoming CD), which had been born from a moment of great sorrow. "I was driving from Austin to Nashville, to Walter (Hyatt's) funeral. That song was kind of channeled. I was driving, so I had to memorize the words, I couldn't write them down."

Mercier takes those sad memories and transforms them into a powerful message of hope.

All of the memories, all of the years,
Tearin' through my heart like salty tears,
He was a good man, better than me,
Don't understand why it had to be,
But I'll try-'til I get there.

In something of an ironic twist, she had actually paid fifteen bucks to get into the LaFave gig at which she would perform. But that's okay with Mandy Mercier. When it comes to making music, she was gonna be doing it anyway.

Rush Evans wouldn't trade for anything the Wednesday night Threadgill's Supper Sessions that he attended throughout the nineties. You may e-mail Rush at revans@goodlifemag.com.