“I did my first professional gig at the age of 14 on a Thanksgiving evening downtown at the Red Lion Cabaret,” Griffith said in an interview included on the 1993 Paramount concert video. “I made $11. It was a great evening. Nobody came; I was terrible, but I made 11 bucks.”
The interview took place at the former site of Holy Cross, a religious school Griffith attended at the northwest corner of 41st and Red River streets in Hyde Park. (It’s now the site of the Commodore Perry Estate luxury hotel.) “I learned a lot of other people’s songs when I went to school here because I played at the folk mass every week,” she says in the video interview. “I learned a lot of Bob Dylan songs, and a lot of Tom Paxton songs, for folk mass.”
Childhood friend Maggie Graham also attended Holy Cross. In a 1998 email interview published to a Griffith fan site, Graham recalls the two pals hanging out downtown at Vulcan Gas Company, the Paramount Theatre, Woolworth’s and other 1960s-era establishments.
"We did what most people our age did at those places," Graham wrote. "We were wild, at least by our parents' standards, and I suppose I was the wilder of the two of us. Nanci had more sense than I did."