Songfacts®:

• When Lucinda Williams was kindergarten age in the late '50s, she and her father, the poet Miller Williams, were invited guests at the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville, Georgia house. A decade later, Williams picked up a few books written by O'Connor and immediately ate her darkly humorous short stories up.
  
  "Her stuff influenced and inspired me," Williams told the Tallahassee Democrat. "I read all of it. I just devoured it. I related to it. It just seemed so real to me. I had seen these people. They were real people to me. ... My song 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' is straight from Flannery O'Connor."
• Williams recalled her fifteen and sixteen-year self devouring Flannery O'Connor's stories to Believer magazine: "Her stuff was so descriptive," she said. "You could just see it—a picture of what she was talking about. I loved that kind of writing, that very descriptive, realistic writing."
  
  "I learned that instead of just saying 'I just left this last town,' why not say the name of the town? Williams added. "Describe the town. Don't just say 'I put my shoes on today,' say 'I put my cracked leather shoes on.'"