Saturday Morning Country: Gillian Welch & Gospel

MattF

Gillian Welsh is great. She tells the story of an old lady who came to one of her concerts and afterwards asked "Were those real songs or did you just make them up?" IMO, they're real.

ndm

My daughter just walked by and said "I didn't know she recorded that." However, as David Rawlings pointed out once on the radio, "Gillian Welch" is a two-person band named "Gillian Welch" - so the correct pronoun is "they." Awesome as is her voice the band would be so much less without his guitar.

They have recently been touring a a two person band named "Dave Rawlings Machine with Gillian Welch." This is not as good as "Gillian Welch" because she only sings lead occasionally and they do too many covers of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, etc. The night I saw them they ended with Gillian Welch telling the sound guy to set the reverb to 11 before launching into "White Rabbit."

The unlikely "story" at that concert was of the guy who beat his wife to death with two banjos.

porkbelly

Gilliam Welch was actually born in the piney woods of Manhattan and raised in the coal country of Brentwood, California (a posh part of Los Angeles where the show biz big money resides). Some pretty amazing reinvention here, no doubt.

ndm

The mention of gospel reminded me of my favourite gospel song - Were you there? by the Soul Stirrers. For their young lead vocalist, the tragic pop-music career of the great Sam Cooke was still a decade away.

This version is interesting because they left in some initial misfires on the song, then after a minute or so the Soul Stirrers fire up with the definitive take 5.

Alex Massie

Porkbelly: Sure, Gillian Welch did not grow up in a "country" town. But so what? The genius of country music is that it is not limited to such narrow-minded thinking. It draws on, and borrows from, and owes much to, many genres and that is the point.

But you know this, I hope. After all, the Bakersfield sound is, well, Californian...

porkbelly

If Gillian Welch were playing non-traditional country, sure. Hell, if she were playing Buck Owens (since you bring up Bakersfield) that would be fine. But her faux-authenticity rings false to me: it sounds like a carefully-crafted act where the nature of country music is that the story the song tells is real, and if it didn't actually happen to the singer it might as well have. Imagine if Loretta Lynn sang "Coal Miner's Daughter" and it turned out her father was a sociology professor...the song would have a very different meaning, wouldn't it? Not to gainsay Gillian Welch's talent as a song-writer but her persona seems fake to me.

ndm

The "country" credentials of Gillian Welch are certainly no worse than those of Kris Kristofferson. As Wikipedia puts it:

Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, to parents Mary Ann (née Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Kristofferson, a U.S. Air Force major general.[1] When Kris was a child, his father pushed his son toward a military career (Kristofferson's paternal grandfather was an officer in the Swedish Army).[2] Like most military brats, he moved around frequently as a youth, finally settling down in San Mateo, California, where he graduated from San Mateo High School. An aspiring writer, Kristofferson enrolled in Pomona College in 1954. He experienced his first dose of fame when he appeared in Sports Illustrated's "Faces In The Crowd" for his achievements in collegiate rugby union, football, and track and field. He and fellow classmates revived the Claremont Colleges Rugby Club in 1958, which has remained a Southern California rugby dynasty. Kristofferson became a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Pomona College, graduating in 1958 with a BA, summa cum laude in Literature.

Kristofferson earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where his college was Merton. While at Oxford he was awarded his blue for boxing and began writing songs.

San Mateo [essentially Silicon Valley], Claremont Colleges and Oxford doesn't make Kristofferson the Coalminers Son. But, so what?

MattF

Welsh and Rawlings are musicians-- and wonderful ones-- highly capable, highly educated, and highly sophisticated in their craft. And that's a good thing. Whatever genre they want to perform in, I'm fine with it.

Bill Breen

Even if Welch is "neo-authentic," her songs are transcendent, especially live, when Rawlings can stretch out on guitar. What's troubling: as ndm notes, Welch has apparently abandoned her songs. She hasn't toured solo or released an album in several years. Her upcoming (East Coast, US) tour w/ the DR Machine and other bands sounds like it will keep her stuff mostly
out of the spotlight. A press release for that tour says she's working on a DR Machine album, "which may never be released." That's tongue-in-cheek, of course. But it begs the question: Why has Gillian Welch apparently stopped performing her own songs?