Gillian Welch and David Rawlings blend songs and stories just as adeptly as they blend melodies and words. In the second set of a July 10 performance at the Station Inn, the duo recounted their experience at a recent post-midnight picking party that included Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Rodney Crowell. The duo had enjoyed the privilege of performing with the three masterful Texas songwriters earlier that evening at Green’s Grocery. Afterward, they all accepted an invitation to visit Doug Dillard’s home and keep the night alive.
Welch told how Van Zandt sat stone quiet, staring into the liquor inside the fruit jar he cradled in his hands. After a couple of hours, he suddenly interrupted the proceedings; the room grew quiet as he started to speak. “There’s only two kinds of music,” Van Zandt proclaimed. “There’s the blues, and there’s ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ ”
As Welch’s outstanding debut album Revival asserts, these two acoustic musicians definitely do not offer “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” With all due respect to songwriters Ray Gilbert and Allie Wrubel and their Academy Award-winning theme to Song of the South, Welch and Rawlings aren’t interested in that kind of upbeat musical entertainment. On Revival, they explore the lives of rural American working people by drawing on folk and mountain balladry. The result is one of the most affecting musical collections of the ’90s, an album that draws on various eras and invokes such strong American traditions as sharecropping, dance-hall girls, V-8 engines, moonshine stills, and fundamentalist Christianity. Musically, their songs are stark hymns, dust-bowl ballads, and Appalachian string tunes set off by a couple of rough folk-rockers. The lyrics are grimly fatalistic, yet enduringly beautiful; they tend to concentrate on life at its most primal, a state in which the harsh realities of survival rub against the natural splendor of the land.
The album has earned plenty of praise, but it has also faced criticism for drawing on old-time music while making few concessions to modernity. But this isn’t even true: “Pass You By,” “Paper Wings,” and “Tear That Stillhouse Down” all feature distortion and harsh sonic accents that are completely of our time.
Still, Welch readily admits that she’s seeking to develop a timeless style—she describes her music as “American primitive,” a term previously used by acoustic guitarist John Fahey. Ultimately, though, what matters is the surety and strength of what she’s created. Music this uncompromising and emotionally accurate doesn’t need to be defended. It stands tall now, just as it would have 50 years ago and just as it will 50 years from today.
In their recent performance, Welch and Rawlings talked about some of their musical influences. Welch mentioned how she wrote “Paper Wings” after listening to Willie Nelson’s box set. And when introducing a new selection with a complex story line, she explained that she’d written it after living with the boxed collection of Johnny Cash—indeed, the song sounded as though it was modeled on such Man in Black classics as “One Piece at a Time” and “A Boy Named Sue.” Rawlings covered Van Zandt’s great “Snowin’ on Raton,” and Welsh sang Joe Ely’s “Indian Cowboy,” which was first recorded by Guy Clark on his 1989 album, Old Friends.
As a second encore for the wildly appreciative Station Inn crowd, the two performed “Long Black Veil,” Welch explaining that it was the first song they’d ever played together. Written by Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill and originally performed by Lefty Frizzell, this classic embodies the duo’s own songwriting aesthetic. With its strong imagery and seemingly predestined tragedy, this story of murder, betrayal, and guilt is just the kind of tale that Welch has mastered in her own writing.
Onstage at Station Inn, Welch looked more like a Depression-era housewife from Kentucky than the child of Hollywood television writers. Clad in a conservative cotton print dress, she wore little makeup, and her hair was pulled hard behind her ears. As with her music, her look was stark, with no concession to glamour. Rawlings looked like a male acoustic troubadour, the collar of his white dress shirt smartly jutting out from a dark, casual suit. He had a friendly yet focused manner reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen. And like Springsteen, whose Nebraska album is certainly another influence on the duo, Rawlings played guitar with his lips pulled back over his teeth in a look that was part-smile, part-grimace. His loose, emotive style played nicely off of Welch’s dry, matter-of-fact presentation.
The pair opened the first of two hour-long sets with “Tear My Stillhouse Down,” one of a handful of harder-driving songs on Revival. It’s a fierce tune about a man’s dying wish to have the bane of his life destroyed after he’s gone. “Put no stone at my head, no flowers on my tomb.... The one thing I want when they lay me in the ground, when I die, tear my stillhouse down.” Other standout cuts from the show included “Barroom Girls,” a slow, touching waltz that opens with a powerfully poetic image: “The night came undone like a party dress and fell at her feet in a beautiful mess. The smoke and whiskey came home in her curls, and they crept through the dreams of the barroom girls.” A highlight of the second set, “By the Mark” demonstrated that even Welch’s spiritual songs are barren rather than uplifting; it turns on the chorus, “I will know my savior by the mark where the nails have been.”
The evening’s most beautiful number was “Acony Bell,” about a delicate mountain flower that heralds the advent of spring. Rawlings explained that Welch drew inspiration for the song from a book of wildflowers shown to them by an Appalachian innkeeper. The host pointed out the Acony Bell page and suggested that Welch write a song about the flower, which blooms early in the year through mountain rocks as the snow begins to melt. “This was unusual,” Rawlings said through a sly smile, “because she doesn’t normally take suggestions very well.”
This is a telling remark, and one that perfectly exemplifies Welch’s determination to go her own way. On album and in concert, she makes it plain that hers is a singular journey. It’s a journey that should prove well worth tracking in years to come.
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