JoCarol Pierce
Yesterday we lost an Austin treasure, the incomparable JoCarol Pierce.
I feel so lucky, so incredibly blessed to have crossed paths with her in this life. When I came to town in 1985 to work with Jaston Williams, he told about this group called Big State Productions. (Now I am the world’s worst dreamer—I dream about things like waiting in line at Wal-Mart—but when I met this crew of Big State folks who were getting started on this thing called In the West, I recognized them from a dream.) So it felt like a sign that I was supposed to stick around out here in Texas, and although I was not of the West, be part of this amazing tribe of In the West.
In the West had some of the most talented folks in Austin (or anywhere) and one of them was JoCarol Pierce. She made words do things I’d never heard them do before. She wrote stuff that had its feet in love and sex and cowboys and its head up in the West Texas sky with angels and heavenly hosts. Her song “Has God Got Us by the Twat or What?” is fine example of that.
JoCarol was like Old Faithful or the Northern Lights, some sort of natural phenomenon you just stand back and experience with a sense of wonder. She relished all the ways we humans show up on the planet, with our scars and quirks and broken hearts. She wanted to take those dreary black-and-white photos in Richard Avedon’s book In the American West and bring those hopeless souls to life, charge them with color and life and stories and a little bit of God. Remind us that the dust on their boots was stardust. That they themselves were stardust. That the lonesome West Texas landscape wasn’t some bleak inevitability but a canvas of infinite possibility. That in their heart of hearts, they were “angels unawares.” And I think In the West did that.
Despite being the queen of “Bad Girls Upset by the Truth,” JoCarol was herself somehow in every way, “good.” And I don’t mean in a moral, philosophical, conventional sense. More like as in “and God saw it was good.” Or some fourth dimensional combination of bad and good. JoCarol was a creature, like all God’s creatures. She used her senses to live and love and describe this beautiful, mixed-up old world. She reveled in it, all of it.
When she threw her head back with that mass of curly red hair to laugh at some crazy human thing, she was not judging, but delighting in the place where the saint and the sinner meet, the call girl and the Virgin Mary, the light and the dark. That was JoCarol territory. Her world. All of us lucky enough to know her had our world expanded and enriched by her immense soul and talent.
I am evermore grateful for our late-night heart-to-hearts in diners like the Stars Café where one of us in our tribe always had a good cry. Janelle used to have a map of Austin with pins at all the places one of us had cried. It was a bunch.
There are a lot of us crying out here for the loss of JoCarol. It helps just a little, but not much, to remember that tears are just love with no place to go. I am so grateful to have experienced this wild being of JoCarol Pierce. Wherever she is now, you can bet she’s livening things up. If it’s heaven, I hope God has a sense of humor. And if it’s the other place, I’m sure she’s dancing with the devil.