Mary Gauthier keeps it real in a way few others have ever dared to do in her autobiographical coming-of-age song Drag Queens In Limousines.

This song is such a heartbreakingly soul-baring account of growing up gay in the American south that it can bring me to tears. Because it’s all true. Mary Gauthier (pronounced ‘Go-SHAY’) tells it like it is, against a backing that draws on traditions of folk and country noir.

Lyrically, her literate, literary style is influenced not just by songwriters like Bobbie Gentry, whose Ode To Billie Joe sits in the same category as this, but also by Southern Gothic novelists like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.

She (and they) is in the same blue-collar tradition of American authors that stretches from Raymond Carver to Willy Vlautin (who also tells his stories in song, with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines).

Like them, Gauthier has an affinity with marginalised people, writing grittily real songs about addiction and poverty and not fitting into conventional society – and in this case, about finding her people after leaving home for New Orleans.

The title tells you what you’re going to get – Drag Queens In Limousines – and Gauthier joins the dots with miniature pen portraits of every one of her friends.

The characters in the song are real people she met after dropping out of her Louisiana high school and stealing the family car at the age of 15, only to find herself in detox at 16 and jailed in Kansas City at 18.

Her own wayward path led her to culinary school and, eventually, she opened a successful restaurant – Dixie Kitchen – and only sold it after her music career began to take off.

I would urge anyone who shares an interest in the writes mentioned above to listen to her music. There is much more to it than autobiography: she wrote her acclaimed album Rifles & Rosary Beads with military veterans and their families.