Patty Griffin @ Gruene Hall

Last night, Patty Griffin opened a brief tour in support of her new album children running through at the beautiful and ancient Gruene Hall. It was a rare cold and rainy night here in South Texas that amplified the warmth and beauty of Patty's voice. The roughly three to four hundred people crammed into the hall soaked up every note, screaming for two encores. Unfortunately, I was not among them. Despite the fact that Gruene Hall is only two miles from my house I was unable to score tickets to the concert. But that didn't stop me from listening to the entire show, standing on the lawn outside the venue, in what turned out to be one of the neatest concerts I've been to.

Built on a bluff overlooking the Guadalupe River sometime in the 1880's, Gruene Hall looks as if every piece of wood in the place is original to the structure. On warm nights large wooden shutters are opened and standing out on the lawn you can see in through the chicken wire that covers the open windows and watch the show going on inside. When it's cold and rainy like last night they close the shutters but the building is so rustic and porous that in addition to hearing the music at concert decibels, occasionaly through large gaps you can see parts of the stage. In a rare stroke of bad luck, a speaker blocked my view last night so that all I could see on the times I tried were the bass player and Patty's mic stand. But, I was not there for the view, I was there for the music and it was outstanding. Unless you have one of those quirky college stations in your town you will never hear Patty Griffin on the radio despite the fact that she is the greatest female singer on the planet right now. Slightly raspy, melancholic, lyrical, angelic - Jen describes her voice in the following way, "I can see her singing on a dirty street, and fitting in there, yet somehow rising above, transcending it." A brilliant songwriter, she has written songs covered by the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Martina Mcbride and several others. And I can attest, her voice in person loses none of the power that comes through in her recordings.

I love the roar of the crowd when the first notes of an old favorite begin to play. Standing outside, a large grin slowly spreading replaced a scream when I heard favorites like Making Pies, Kite Song, Truth No. 2, and Top of the World. She sang a few from her new album including the brilliant, Heavenly Day and one I'd never heard before Re: Mary, that I looked for but couldn't find on iTunes when I got home. In the beginning I was joined by a couple slow dancing in the rain, but they left after a few songs and I was alone until the first encore when I was joined by a carpenter from San Antonio who was recently turned on to Patty Griffin by a friend, and a tennis instructor from South Africa (living in Texas) who had a couple of CD jackets he was hoping to get autographed. We had a great conversation about our mutual love for Patty's voice before somehow the conversation turned to Bob Dylan. All in all it was a great night, spent alone and then with fellow diehards listening to one of the special voices of our time in a truly historic setting. It will be a long time before I forget, if ever, standing outside under the water tower watching smoke curl up from the chimney of that old wooden dance hall into a night sky heavy with mist as an angelic voice sang out "strange how hard it rains now, rows and rows of big dark clouds, when I'm still alive underneath this shroud, rain." Alive, yes, very much so.