HEALING NOTES Allison Moorer with her dog, Willie, at her home in Nashville.
ALLISON MOORER IS BAREFOOT ON THE GRASS OF HER Nashville front yard, holding up a water hose and spraying the hell out of a struggling fern. “I am determined to keep this little thing alive,” she announces, her eyes fixed on the trembling plant. Moorer moves with a fierce determination across the yard to hand the hose to her nine-year-old son, John Henry, who is delighted to take over. She is that rare kind of person who always seems as if she has somewhere important to go but somehow still manages to appear unhurried.
The first thing one recognizes about her is her keen intelligence. She is a contradiction—memorably polite but never willing to be a pushover, simultaneously elegant and down-home, a quiet observer who also throws her head back with a wonderfully deep laugh. In the space of a few minutes, she can expound on the writings of Thomas Merton and Pema Chödrön, the struggle to raise a perfect tomato, a recent documentary about Molly Ivins, why the rhythm found in sewing calms her, and the mystery of faith: “God is in rosemary,” she says, reaching down to slide the fragrant plant between two fingers. “I mean, look at it.”
The singer-songwriter, who turned forty-seven last summer, is so lithe and luminous in her navy-blue sundress that it is easy to picture her as a fourteen-year-old girl back in southern Alabama, on an August morning when
