Gillian Welch: O Sister, Where Art Thou?

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer, 2001)

When Gillian Welch spoke to the Entertainer in the fall of ’98, she was a big star in a small constellation. Her second album Hell Among the Yearlings (Almo Sounds) had just come out, establishing with its sepia-tinted cover and austere folk balladry her status as America’s foremost bearer of the Western folk-song tradition. Still, the percentage of record buyers who’d heard of that tradition was significantly smaller than the percentage who hadn’t, and, short of a full-scale media blitz (Ken Burns Folk?), no change loomed on the horizon.

Enter O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ film based on Homer’s Odyssey, starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as chain-gang escapees on the lam in Depression-era Mississippi. In addition to demonstrating the cinematic possibilities inherent in mixing myth, slapstick, grim realism, and music, the film contains Welch’s first appearance on the big screen. Wearing a period-piece hat and glasses, she asks a clerk, “Do you have ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ by the Soggy Bottom Boys?” “No, ma’am,” he replies. “We’re all sold out.”

O Brother’s most enduring accomplishment, though, may turn out to be its discovery of a heretofore untapped audience for “old timey” music. As of this writing, its soundtrack has sold over two million copies and topped both Billboard’s “country” and “Internet” charts, a notable feat given the complete absence of contemporary country hitmakers from its nineteen-track program.

Overseen by T Bone Burnett, who also produced Welch’s first two albums, the soundtrack includes two performances by Welch--a duet with Alison Krauss on the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away” and a trio with Krauss and Emmylou Harris on Welch’s own “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” the latter of which is lip-synched in the film by three libidinously languorous “sirens” as part of a successful attempt to entrance and waylay the Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson characters. “Doing ‘Nobody but the Baby’ was good,” recalls Welch, who not only had the thrill of singing it with Harris and Krauss but also, as the song’s composer, found herself in the status-conferring position of teaching it to them.

Not surprisingly, they proved quick on the uptake. “After all,” she points out, “it’s a fairly repetitive song, seeing as it’s one part field holler.” Even repetitive songs, however, can pose challenges. “We had to have a little discussion about who would take the high parts and who would take the low part. I think Emmy is so often asked to sing the very high parts that whenever she has the opportunity, she loves to sing the baritone because no one’s ever asked her to do that. So she pretty much said, ‘I’ll take the baritone,’ and she sounds really great.”

Incidentally, the main reason for Welch’s current spate of interviews is to allow her to promote Time (The Revelator), her excellent, new, self-produced solo album and her first for Acony Records, the label she and her partner David Rawlings established in the wake of Almo Sound’s collapse. But she doesn’t mind discussing her association with the O Brother projects (she appears twice on Down from the Mountain [Lost Highway], a just-released recording of O Brother musicians performing live at the Grand Ol’ Opry’s Ryman Theater). Neither does she mind discussing her recent recordings of “Beulah Land” (on Avalon Blues: A Tribute to the Music of Mississippi John Hurt [Vanguard]) or the folk ballad “Wind and Rain” (on Vanguard’s Songcatcher soundtrack). “I know it from the [Jerry] Garcia Acoustic Band,” she says of the latter. “I’ve sung it around the house for years but never performed it out or recorded it.”

Indeed, aspects of the artistic sensibility at work in Time (The Revelator) emerge even in the discussion of a topic as seemingly unrelated as “Wind and Rain.” For instance, Welch admits that she only heard the Garcia Band’s version (available on 1988’s Almost Acoustic as “Oh the Wind and the Rain”) one time, years ago, and therefore the lyrics she has committed to posterity are not necessarily those sung either by Garcia or by countless other balladeers throughout the centuries. “It’s the kind of song that, you hear it one time, and you remember the story,” she says, “but I couldn’t remember the specific verses, so we had to play fill-in-the-blanks. There’s some stuff in our version that’s never been around, and that’s O.K. Now other people will learn it with weird lyrics.”

She laughs at the irony of such a confession’s coming from her, an exemplar of roots authenticity admitting blithely to falsifying history. Only it turns out that perhaps reports of her fidelity to history may have been exaggerated, that, contrary to expectations often engendered by the very image that she herself has projected, she’d rather use, or even toy with, the past than venerate it.

Consider Time (The Revelator)’s central song, a seven-minute, forty-one-second song split into two tracks titled “April the 14th Part 1” and “Ruination Day Part 2,” and, like the rest of the album, pared down to nothing more than the yearning voices, acoustic guitars, and occasional banjos of Welch and Rawlings. Loosely constructed around events associated with significant and not-so-significant April 14th’s--the sinking of the Titanic, an indie band’s playing to no one at a godforsaken dive, the arrival of a great Oklahoma dust-bowl storm, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But the song never says “Titanic,” referring only to “when the Iceberg hit.” It doesn’t specify the name of the band or why the “Okies” are fleeing. Instead of “Lincoln,” it simply refers to the “Great Emancipator” who takes “a bullet in the head.”

Welch isn’t particularly concerned that listeners, especially younger ones with bad grades in history, might not follow her allusions. “That’s O.K.,” she shrugs. “I mean, that’s the same thing with the word revelator. Someone might not know ‘John the Revelator’ [the gospel song from which Welch became acquainted with the word], but people have a reaction to that word anyway, in a vacuum, in a void. Something about that word has resonance for people, and I think the same thing’s true if you refer to the Great Emancipator. I may have a specific historical instance in mind, but I think it works even if you don’t know that, because it’s a good word.” Even if someone thinks she’s singing, say, about Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X. “I’m not particularly troubled by that. In fact, I’m almost more interested to see how people make their own sense of this stuff. It’s been really interesting so far.”

It could get more interesting. When the Beastie Boys quoted Steve Miller’s 1976 hit “Take the Money and Run” on License to Ill in 1986, millions were in on the joke, but Welch’s quotations from Miller’s 1968 non-hit “Quicksilver Girl” in “My First Lover” will no doubt mystify many a contemporary hipster, as might the verse in “Elvis Presley Blues” likening the King of Rock-and-Roll to the hammer-wielding folk hero John Henry.

The cut most likely to inspire “interesting” interpretations is the semi-title cut “Revelator,” a mysterious song that Welch renders even more so by not including printed lyrics in the CD booklet and by slurring them as she sings, freeing listeners to wonder whether the “fortune lady” in verse two “walked inside” or “walked and sighed,” or whether its last couplet is “clean and face and imitate her,” “cling and phase and imitator,” or something else entirely. One thing about which there’s no question: Welch begins verse four by singing “Leaving the valley, fucking outtasight,” a line as sure to hinder her induction into the Grand Ol’ Opry (which she’s played many times) as it is to accelerate her connection with the South Park generation.

Welch’s love for Time’s elusiveness extends to any discussion of the exact nature of her “partnership” with Rawlings (“Does it matter?,” she asks rhetorically). Yet there is one thing about which she’s adamant: the significance of the fact that Time’s cover is in color. Using black and white for the covers of Revival and Hell Among the Yearlings, she once said, “seemed appropriate” because the songs were “very stark” and “fairly dark in nature.”

Doesn’t she find the songs on Time stark and dark as well? “Give me some of what you’re having,” she sings in a dreamy, almost stoned voice on “I Dream a Highway.” “I’ll take you as a viper into my head, / a knife into my bed, / arsenic when I’m fed.” “Perhaps,” she answers, “but I see them as more colorful. There’s definitely more implied than is actually said, and there are larger musical arrangements implied than are actually there.

"I think there’s a broader palette.”

Gillian Welch: Purgatory, Anyone?

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer, 1998)


When Gillian Welch's first album, Revival (Almo Sounds), appeared in 1996 on a label notorious for being home to the overtly sleazy Garbagewoman Shirley Manson, it hardly seemed hell-bent for controversy. What, after all, could be less controversial than a twenty-eight-year-old woman strumming an acoustic guitar and singing plaintive ballads that went "When He calls me / I will be able / To meet my family / At God's table"?

Nevertheless, Welch ended up starting a rather heated debate in the editorial rooms of America's music magazines: Did a young woman who grew up in Hollywood, who didn't start listening to bluegrass until she was in college, and whose parents actually wrote music for The Carol Burnett Show have the right to pass herself off as some latter-day combination of the Stanley Brothers and Emily Dickinson?

Strange as it now seems, some of the sharpest, freshest, most affecting, and least affected music to shuttle down the major-label pipeline in years was actually on the verge of getting lost in an anemically academic debate--a debate, by the way, that was settled over thirty years ago when Hibbing, Minnesota's Robert Zimmerman moved to New York and emerged as Bob Dylan.

The debate eventually subsided, but not before surfacing once more in the August 9, 1998, issue of the New York Times. In an editorial headlined "So What's All The Fuss About 'Keeping It Real'?," Mark Kemp, MTV's vice-president for music development, paraphrased the central question thus: "Which is more genuine, the artist who is committed to the art of artifice or the one who uses real tragedy to land a hit single?"

Kemp proceeded to argue persuasively that "[s]trictly using the facts of an artist's background as a barometer of his or her honesty not only has become tedious but is also downright lazy thinking." Still, the very idea that he or anyone else has to defend Gillian Welch's music against such charges--especially when "Everyone lies about sex" has become a national mantra--is itself provocative. (Admittedly, "All singer-songwriters lie about their roots" isn't much of a soundbite.)

Perhaps the most ironic twist of the entire fracas is that even the Los Angeles Times's Robert Hilburn, whose reputation rests in large part on the few interviews he has conducted with Bob Dylan over the last twenty years, felt obliged to begin his positive review of Hell Among the Yearlings, Welch's latest album, with the following disclaimer: "Once you get past the fact that Welch is from West L.A. rather than the Appalachia you'd expect...."

The good news is that neither Welch nor her fans seem to care about her past, not when her present offers more musical riches than one can shake a Grammy-winning Anthology Of American Folk Music at. Like Revival, Hell Among the Yearlings finds Welch, her musical partner David Rawlings, and her producer T Bone Burnett eschewing nearly everything but acoustic guitars and an occasional banjo in their pursuit of that rarest and most delicate of pop-music commodities: a clear vision.

Welch, now thirty-one, began writing songs when she was in junior high. Although she has no plans to record her juvenilia or shop any of it around, she readily defends the relative merits of her precocious work. "They're not bad songs," she says. "They're a little more confessional than what I do now, but they're not terrible." As proof against more charges of revisionist self-history, she has preserved the notebook in which she wrote her early efforts, but, she says, "about the only people who've seen those are my parents."

If only for nudging contemporary songwriting away from confessionality, the music world owes Welch a debt of thanks. Instead of "expressing herself," she expresses something bigger, older, and more important. Just what it is she's hesitant to say. Like so many musicians, she has a hard time categorizing herself, laughingly referring to her work as "whatever genre you want to call what I do."

One reason that tags do not adhere to Welch's music is that all of her songs are co-credited to Rawlings, rendering the term "her songs" somewhat ambiguous. Another is that the tag has yet to be invented for music like Welch's: Ancient-sounding yet new, it's both more and less than the sum of its influences.

Its "folk" elements have made her a favorite at folk festivals around the country, and indeed fans of Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson will hear plenty to like in a songs such as "One Morning" and "Miner's Refrain," as will fans of Nick Drake in "Whiskey Girl." It was, however, the bluegrass and country communities that extended her the warmest welcomes when, after two years at Boston's Berklee College, she moved to Music City.

"When I moved to Nashville, I had about four songs that I would play for people," Welch recalls. "I knew that I needed to spend more time writing." Securing a publishing deal, she was able to stop adding to her growing list of day jobs and "really be a full-time writer."

It wasn't long before her efforts began to bear fruit. Kathy Mattea recorded "Patiently Waiting" and "455 Rocket," Trisha Yearwood recorded "Two Days from Knowing," and Emmylou Harris recorded "Orphan Girl," the song with which Welch would eventually lead off Revival. "That's how a lot of people first heard of me," says Welch of Harris's cover.

Not to be outdone, the bluegrass community also began helping themselves to Welch's expanding output. Tim and Molly O'Brien recorded "Orphan Girl" and "Wichita," Valerie Smith recorded "Red Clay Halo," and the Nashville Bluegrass Band recorded "Red Clay Halo," "One More Dollar," and "Tear My Stillhouse Down," the last two of which, like "Orphan Girl," also turned up on Revival. "I was really embraced by the bluegrass community in Nashville first," she says.

Being embraced by bluegrass musicians was fine with Welch, who describes herself as "a big fan of 'brother-team' music." "The early Monroe Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Stanley Brothers--that stuff had a pretty big impact on me." Especially the Stanley Brothers. "I don't think I'd be doing what I do if I hadn't heard them. Ralph Stanley's singing is probably one of the biggest vocal influences on me."

One of the biggest conceptual influences on her has been bluegrass's frequent exhumation of Scottish, English, and Appalachian ballads. "Most of the best ballads have as their subject a tragic incident," writes E. Talbot Donaldson in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, "often a murder or accidental death, generally involving supernatural elements." Substitute the phrase "Welch's songs" for "best ballads" and you have a perfect description of the songs on Revival and Hell Among The Yearlings.

The tragic incidents on Revival include the death of a child ("Annabelle"), the destruction of a life through gambling ("One More Dollar"), and the destruction of a life through moonshining ("Tear My Stillhouse Down"); on Hell Among the Yearlings there's an attempted rape and a murder in self-defense ("Caleb Meyer") and the destruction of a life through drugs ("My Morphine").

As for supernatural elements, Welch's songs are a primer in old-time religion. References to Christ the Savior, the Devil, heaven, and hell abound. "Till my body gives out / Gonna read the gospel pages" she sings in "Rock Of Ages," "Satan he lives / In my whiskey machine" in "Tear My Stillhouse Down."

"I've definitely listened to a lot of ballads," says Welch, who numbers "She's More to Be Pitied," "Pretty Polly," and "The Butcher's Boy" among her favorites. "The Devil Had a Hold of Me" (Hell Among The Yearlings) even contains a direct reference to the latter, while "Barroom Girls" (Revival) owes an obvious debt to "She's More to Be Pitied."

"They're very archetypal, to use a big word," laughs Welch. "They're very profound stories. They cut very deep, and they touch on some really basic emotions and human responses. That's part of what I respond to in the music, and that's part of why I write the way I do. I'm hoping to touch on that stuff too."

She's also hoping to gradually broaden her palette, and not only sonically. For her next album cover, the former photography major says that she's considering something other than the sepia-tinted black-and-white images that have adorned her first two releases. "That seemed to really suit this collection of songs. They were very stark and fairly dark in nature, but we're actually thinking of using color next time!"

To a music business that already finds Welch controversial, a color cover will probably rank with Dylan's going electric. If it does, Welch will deserve every bit of the ensuing acclaim.