Larry Schwartz
It’s 70 years since a New York talent scout arrived in a small town on the border of Virginia and Tennessee and made the first recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.
Interest in country music has waxed and waned since then but little has captured the ambience of backwoods Appalachia as effectively as the Nashville-based singer-songwriter Gillian (pronounced with a hard ‘G’) Welch.
Her evocative debut a few years back was nominated for a Grammy. Recent work is even starker, with tales of murder, attempted rape, possession, addiction and death. Welch says Hell Among The Yearlings is “darker and more aggressive,” than the first album, Revival. She attributes it partly to the “mountain” or “sawmill” minor keys used while writing several of the new songs.
Playing mostly as a duet with guitarist partner, David Rawlings, she sings in a way that suggests she has been discovered in some rural backwater. But any notion of regional borders in music was long ago blurred. Welch was raised in California where her parents wrote music for The Carol
Burnett Show; she grew up listening to the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and, later, singer-songwriters Richard Thompson, James Taylor and Bob Dylan. Now she’s into the Harry Smith’s three-CD, Folkways compilation of American folk music from the Smithsonian Institution and listening to long-gone artists such as banjo player, Doc Boggs.
“The older I got, the more I started tracing the music backwards,” she says. “So these days pretty much everybody I listen to is dead. It was like a map I was following. Just trying to get to stuff that really tickled my ears and really sounded right to me.”
Welch dismisses a suggestion that she has succumbed to the kind of infatuation that inspired fellow Californian John Fogerty to draw on the music of the distant bayou. “I don’t really think of it as any sort of appropriation of anyone else’s music,” she says. “I know all this music off records and it was mine and I had a very profound reaction to it … It never ever occurred to me that someone would challenge my right to play this kind of music because I seem so suited for it.”
The first music she heard was the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family in primary school and she says the alternating bass and rhythm of this style of guitar suits her. “The first time I ever heard the singing, I just loved it … I knew that that’s what my voice did.”
The new album takes its title from an old fiddle song that used an expression common among cowboys when driving cattle. “If they were going to get any trouble, it would usually come from the yearlings,” she says. “They were kind of feistier and more trouble.”
She and Rawlings met while studying at Boston’s jazz-oriented Berklee College of Music, when they auditioned (successfully) for an old-time country band that played Merle Haggard, Hank Williams and Buck Owens. They started out trying to sound like the Stanley Brothers but soon went
on to their own material.
“As much as I’m a real, real fan of that music and have listened to a fair amount of it,” she says, “I definitely think that what David and I are doing is contemporary. We’re certainly not trying to recreate stuff.”
Rawlings has had an increasing role. “There are a couple of songs on the first record that I wrote by myself. Annabelle and Orphan Girl and Tear My Stillhouse Down were just me. The relationship evolved over the years. It’s just so natural … that David would start getting involved sooner and
sooner in the process. At first he just accompanied me. Then we started arranging the songs together and singing together. And then we started writing together.”
Welch acknowledges that her career was boosted when Emmylou Harris covered Orphan Girl on the acclaimed Daniel Lanois-produced Wrecking Ball, before Revival was released.
She feels at home in Nashville, the home of country music. “There’s are at least two different Nashvilles,” Welch says. “There’s the Nashville of Country Music TV and Top 40 Country and then there’s the Nashville that I’m a part of, which is Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams and Buddy
and Julie Miller … and this whole legacy of bluegrass. This whole other side.”
She has valued the insights of T-Bone Burnett, who has worked with Bob Dylan and produced albums for the likes of Counting Crows, Elvis Costello and the Wallflowers. “He’s a really musical guy and I trust his ears pretty much more than anyone else on the planet,” she says of Burnette,
who has produced both her albums and plays piano and Hammond B3 organ on Whisky Girl, the only track on the new album featuring another musician.
“We met at a club here in Nashville. David and I were playing and T-Bone just came to hear us on the advice of a friend. He came up and introduced himself at the end of the show and he said, ‘Hey, if you guys ever want to make a record, give me a call.'”
Welch says the next album will feature happier songs but it won’t be a big departure because she and Rawlings will more than likely play without accompaniment.
The freshest face in a long line of country performers that includes ‘Uncle’ Dave Mason, Bob Wills, Lester Flatt and Lefty Frizzell, looks to the Munroe and Delmore Brothers duets. “In their time they were pop music,” she says. “So I’m kind of curious to see how much of this people will take.
If it can be pop music again … All these things go in cycles and phases. I guess I’m just lucky that all this stuff is happening now.”
The Sunday Age, 13th of September 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 