Like so many recording artists, Grace Pettis comes from a musical family of which her dad, Pierce Pettis, is a well-known country music performer. Similarly, she was raised in the small town of Mentone, Alabama and has wound up in Nashville. It’s the lived experiences and recordings between those brackets that make her unique. She has four albums and one EP on her resume, including 2024’s transfixing MPress Records release “Down to the Letter” which chronicles the end of a marriage and the reclamation of self after betrayal, codependency, and loss with heartbreaking detail. The lyrics deftly toe the line between personal pain and universal catharsis. This is a collection of quintessential American stories that rank as her most inspired work to date.
Pettis is the winner of many of the nation’s most prestigious songwriting contests, including NPR’s Mountain Stage New Song Contest, and has received grants from the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation. Her songs have been recorded by esteemed artists, including Sara Hickman and Ruthie Foster. She also is a member, along with Rebecca Loebe and Betty Soo (James McMurtry), of the Americana/folk-pop trio Nobody’s Girl.
She often tours with Robby Hecht, who is singing background vocals in the video, which was made in their friend Phil’s home in Austin. Pettis is playing a Gallagher guitar that she won in 2010 at the Wildflower Songwriting Contest in Richardson, TX. Gallagher guitars are handmade in Wartrace, TN. “I’ve been playing it ever since,” she said. “Doc Watson used to play one. It’s got a great, percussive bottom end and is good for rhythm guitar playing.”
Pettis wrote all three songs in her exclusive AUK mini-gig. One she didn’t play is ‘The Year of Losing Things,’ co-written with Tom Prasada-Rao. The original version on her record is wonderful however, you can go to YouTube and hear her solo acoustic version from the Folk All Y’all Listening Room at The Green Room in Memphis. She sings and plays guitar with confidence, which wasn’t always easy for her until she realised that the people in the audience were supportive and wanted to see her flourish. You can find out more about Pettis by reading her interview in Americana UK from last year. But you came here for the mini-gig, so these are the songs she plays with notes from the artist.
- I Take Care of Me Now: This song is the first single from my album, “Down to the Letter.” It’s my anti-codependency anthem. I wrote it for myself as a kind of mantra to grow into during my separation and eventual divorce. I was on my own during that time for the first time in fourteen years. Self-love is hard, but I am learning to prioritize loving thoughts and actions towards my own care.
- Horses: ‘Horses’ is the second single from “Down to the Letter.” When I play this song, I think of my grandmother, Bobby Harper, who sent me care packages all through my early childhood years when I had chronic pain. Because I couldn’t do much physical activity as a child, I was an indoors kid. I constantly sang songs, drew pictures, read books and wrote stories. I especially loved drawing horses. My grandmother embroidered one of my drawings onto a pillow, which I’ve kept with me since.
- Rain: I wrote ‘Rain’ right after leaving Texas, where I’d lived with my former husband for many years, to spend half a year in Ireland with my mom outside Limerick, being sad, writing songs, and finally deciding to get divorced. I went there in November, which is a month in Ireland with very little daylight and a whole lot of rain. Before getting on the plane, I’d recently been challenged by a friend of a friend in the publishing industry to try and write a song with the word “sunshine” in it since there are apparently many hit songs with “sunshine” in the lyrics. It was a well-intended suggestion, and I really tried to complete the assignment. But I was in the wrong state of mind for sunshine songs, for obvious reasons, and in the wrong country at the wrong time of year. So I wrote ‘Rain’ instead. Ireland is the best place in the world to be sad and to heal.
- Joy: ‘Joy’ is about learning to tap into gratitude and peace, even in the midst of hard times. Joy can be a defiant and resilient act. That’s the kind of joy I’m singing about in this song. When I’m able to lean into joy, I remember that I’m very lucky to be alive and living the life I get to live, full of music and loved ones and beauty in everything.
