Gillian Welch

"Welch drifts _inexplicably_ into Steve Miller's "Quicksilver Girl" - itself as much of a virtual "folk song" as anything here."

It's not inexplicable; the lyrics set it up. "Quicksilver Girl" is the song the narrator is listening to while she's losing her virginity.

"Then there's "Red Clay Halo" the only song here whose lyrics have turned up on Welch websites, all about a poor lass who can't get a guy as she has to walk through red clay (why?) to attend the dance. Her gown will only become golden in the afterlife with a red clay halo around her head. This is not comfy Opry fare. "

Well, not exactly. First, it's about a lad, not a lass. "Well the girls all dance with the boys from the city, and they don't care to dance with me." It's about poverty, and a bittersweet fantasy about a heaven for the poor, where those who lived in the dirt have halos and wings made of dirt. As for comfy Opry fare...this song, written by Welch and Rawlings, was originally recorded in 1998 by the Nashville Bluegrass Band. It's a very traditional bluegrass song; poverty, squalor, and sadness are the oldest themes in country and bluegrass music, and have always and will always feature prominently on the Opry. Just a question, and not as pointed as it might appear: Have you ever listened to the Opry? It's easy to imagine what it's like if you haven't, but try listening to it some Saturday on the web. Welch and Rawlings have performed on the Opry a few times, themselves.

"The Opry audience whoops its approval of Rawlings' Scotty Moore licks in the middle. It's only when you realise that the track is extracted from the artfully engineered film "Down from the Mountain" that you understand that the audience is one which has seen "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" So they're all conspiring."

Well, this wasn't performed at the Opry. It was performed at the Ryman Auditorium, which is one of many former homes of the Opry; the Opry is now based, and has been for a long time, at The Grand Ole Opry House in the Disney-like Opryland complex, next to a terrifyingly gigantic shopping mall and chateau-like hotel. It's true that this cut is extracted from the "Down From the Mountain" concert, but it's not true that the audience has seen "O Brother"; the film was still in post-production at the time of the "Down From the Mountain" concert. The concert was simply a gathering of very earnest, straightforward musicians playing very earnest, straightforward music. If there is a hollywood sheen to the film of the concert, it's because the film was made by veteran showbiz documentary filmmakers...the same folks who filmed the Monterery Pop Fest, as well as Bowie's Spiders film and Depeche Mode's 101. Also, audiences whooping approval of guitar/mandolin/dobro/banjo/whatever solos is a bluegrass convention. It's just what's done at bluegrass concerts. I saw Welch and Rawlings recently in Nashville; Rawlings solo'd on every song, and received enthusiastic applause after every solo. He's a damn good guitar player, and deserves every clap. It's not conspiracy, or rebellion. It's all very conventional, traditional, and honest.

The impetus and meaning, incidentally, for "I Want to Sing that Rock N Roll, are here: "The song stems from comments made by Carter Stanley on a live album during the late-'50s' country-music slump, when rock and roll overshadowed everything else." http://www.thestranger.com/2001-12-06/guide2.html

The above link provides an overall excellent historical and interpretational view of this record.

"After that, a meditation on the consequences of wanting to sing that rock and roll. "Elvis Presley Blues." In the chorus it's unclear whether Welch is singing "I was thinking that night about Elvis - the day that he died" or "did he die?" She ponders his sexuality - "he grabbed his wand in the other hand and shook it like a hurricane ... and he shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." At the end of his life, "in long decline" he thinks "how happy John Henry was ... beating his steam drill and he dropped down dead." Welch climaxes with a murmured "bless my soul, what's wrong with me?" A tribute which Freddie Starr will never sing."

I kind of like your sexual interpretation here, but I'm afraid it's groundless. Although sexuality does play in here, it's not the point of the song. First, he's "Grabbing ONE in the other hand," not his wand; she's talking about the fusion of racial musical genres; black R&B with white country music. And John Henry is not "Beating his steam drill"...he did, however, defeat ("beat") a steam drill in a race to build a railroad, after which John Henry fell down dead. This is also the source of the lyric, "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand." For more on John Henry, look here: http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/

"Bless my soul, what's wrong with me" is a brilliantly truncated extract from the Elvis track, "I'm all shook up." The entire lyric, which Welch has added to the song in live performance, is "Bless my soul, what's wrong with me/ I'm itchin like a bear on a fuzzy tree."

"It says fuck you far more fervently than Eminem taking the piss out of Steve Berman. "

Now THAT I can agree with!

"This is popular music which defies the undertaking. This is miles ahead. "

Thing is, though, this isn't popular music. It's pretty underground, by most American standard. The only Gillian you'll really hear on the radio is "I'll Fly Away" from the O Brother soundtrack. This music is miles and miles and miles behind, and miles ahead, and right on time. It overlaps old-time music with Woody Guthrie with Bob Dylan with The Stanley Brothers with Elvis with Blind Willie Johnson with Dead Kennedys with Kitty Wells with everything else. It's basically the whole history of RCA Studio B (Where it was recorded) all coming through at once. It's kind of ultimate postmodernism with all its machine noise turned down, so that the only noise is the noise of analogue tape, and yes, of fingers clicking on the strings.

I just wanted to add one little note for posterity's sake. The association of John in "I Dream a Highway" with John Henry is wrong. Like many of the other characters in this song, she's refering to a singer -- here Johnny Cash. Back when Johnny Cash was really screwed up on drugs and alcohol, he wreaked a little hell at the Grand Old Opry. At this show, he walked around the stage and kicked out the stage lights. The audience and the powers that be at the Grand Old Opry freaked and Mr. Cash was banned from the Grand Old Opry for many years.

She does go on to tie Johnny Cash in with John Henry in her reference to the hammer, but her initial reference is explicitly referring to the former.

Nothing as erudite as all the musings upthread. Just wanted to note that Gillian & David's cover of Black Star is excellent.

Yeah, they did that when I saw them live and it was quite striking

No album in four years though and no current tours.

lazy zing x 1000, and yet...

http://media.npr.org/images/podcasts/primary/npr_music_image_300.jpg

thanks for the pointer to the WFUV - Bonnaroo interview. Sounds like they are at least starting to pull together some new material.

I love Soul Journey as a deliberate full album, how the final lines rhyme "mall" (mall!) and "ball" and refer to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and how they've got electric guitars for the first time in this song, and it feels like the end of a two-album or maybe four-album song cycle.

Also I love how each of her records sets up particular conventions in the first minute or two that define the parameters of what we'll hear: the dissonant opening to Time, the drums on Soul Journey.

I mean, there are plenty of other pleasures in this music, but their structure as full albums is part of it.

Revelator is conceptually brilliant.

WHAT DO I PLAY TO SEDUCE CORNY FOLK FUCK

For me, it's been downhill since Revival, and her reference to Gram Parsons pretty much takes all the fun out of ODing in a cheap motel room with a groupie.

i think revelator is the only record where she figured out how to do something wholly her own. still shows all her obvious debts and influences, and still indulges in some po-faced po'-folks stuff, but the musical and lyrical reference points are farther flung and more mysterious than on the other albums. i think it's really a great record. the songs stand up individually but also cohere into something greater, mystical, apocalyptic (and/or rapturous, if there's a difference).

on another note, anyone heard tim and mollie o'brien's cover of "wichita"? that's one of my favorite non-revelator gil songs, but she hasn't released a version of it herself as far as i know. the o'briens version is great.

Yeah, I totally agree about Revelator, and Soul Journey was a bit of a letdown in that regard - I mean not that she went backward or anything, but the album didn't add up to much for me.

I also really like the Nowhere Man/Whiskey Girl song for similar reasons (does something her own, loses the po-faced schtick)

All the talk of Red Clay upthread reminded me of this story

I guess taste is taste, but I can't help but think that people who use the "NPR music" zing are more interested in stylistic than qualitative distinctions.

I mean i remember that xhucx kept calling her "schoolmarm folk," and I can hardly accuse him of being deaf to qualitative distinctions, but I don't hear schoolmarm folk in Gillian Welch at all.

well there is something a little antiseptic about her, although in a somewhat complicated way (as marcello's first post does a good job of illuminating: "too impeccable to be real; not enough dirt on her boots, not enough creases in his suit. But then that's the point.")

i understand complaints about her humorlessness, even though i think she's funny sometimes, and as far as neo-authenticity goes she can be a big offender. but that's one reason i think revelator is her best record, because it kind of moved beyond a lot of that. a few songs aside (including "red clay halo," which i like a lot anyway because it's a good tune), it's not particularly mannered or self-consciously rootsy.

"npr music" though is just as dumb as any other dumb tag. bob dylan is npr music too. so is ella fitzgerald. and?

I always thought "Red Clay Halo" was a cover - it sounds like some kind of traditional song that's filtered down over the years into the martyr complex of mainstream country (and a lot of rural, or wannabe rural, white people - them big city elites are making fun of us!).

guess I missed the secret sign that "npr music" was supposed to be trenchant criticism. ok, you've convinced me that she's crap. will stop listening to her and all other npr crap immediately.

Can we agree on a definition - "NPR Rock" ??

ROFFLE:

somewhere between crowded house and wilco.

-- stockholm cindy (winter version) (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:12 (1 year ago) Link
...there lies obsession.

-- Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 20 January 2006 05:32 (1 year ago) Link

This thread reminds me of what Tom Smucker (quoted by Xgau) said about Woodstock:
"I left one thing out of my Woodstock article. I left out how boring it was."

No album in four years though and no current tours.

― Hurting 2, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:09 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark

What is up with that?

weirder is that there kind of were tours, right? like a bunch of american shows a year ago, maybe. she's got really good new songs, too.

I am watching this right now: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074qnh/BBC_Four_Sessions_Gillian_Welch/

(which that Youtube is from)

yeah funny that it's been so long since her last record! i interviewed her in 2005, i think, and at the time she hinted that a new record was imminent. guess not! she did say that she liked having her own label because it allowed her to go by her own timeline. have heard one amazing new song "the way it will be" that they play live. though calling it new at this point is silly, i think I heard them do it in 2003 ...

saw her in brooklyn last year and she was grrr8

website lists a bunch of albums that she and david rawlings have "appeared" on, no tour dates

I kind of assumed after Everything Is Free and Wrecking Ball that she'd just never bother recording for public release again.

New album due next year according to metacritic; no release date as yet.

I saw her play summer before last and she was superb. They are a uniquely mesmerising live act. That song "Throw Me A Rope" has been hanging around at least since near the time of Soul Journey. Hope it's on any new album that comes out.

^It should be; it's been a staple of the live set for a while. In an NPR interview at Newport this year she said she & Dave were in the midst of recording a new album. Said it doesn't take them all that long to record them, just to start recording.

And YOW! that initial post! Well done, Marcello. Though I would argue vociferously with many of your transcriptions ("every word seen in the data"?) and quibble with your interpretations, you capture the SPIRIT of the record extremely well. It's an album that calls for interpretation, explication, exegesis. Repeated listening as a whole artifact, complete immersion, fear and trembling. It has some kind of special power that she'll probably never tap again (and the timing of the album was accidentally impeccable; it had a weight that seemed to capture the whole circa-911 American underground zeitgeist perfectly). For a long, long time I've wanted to write a fairly lengthy piece about this album but have felt - have been - unequal to it. Yours will do instead. Kudos.

have just been blown away by this album, having not played it in years. there's not one wasted moment. great writing upthread too.

Six years without a record. Weird.

don't think she's toured in a very long time either

Doesn't she guest on a track on the Dark Was The Night compilation?

Maybe she is gone off the net because of me.

Man, I loved Soul Journey at the time, I might dig it out again this evening.

I think she plays at least a few shows every year -- and there's something called the David Rawlings Machine that seems to be playing out from time to time. Not sure what that is, though. Covers? But yeah, the fact that she's made what -- 4 records in 15 years does not suggest someone too concerned with a standard timetable. But anyone who's made a record as flat out brilliant as Revelator has earned her laziness!

http://atruersound.blogspot.com/2007/07/gillian-welch-david-rawlings-revival.html

what happened to that duets album that was meant to come out last year

well, this is out ... Basically a Gillian Welch/David Rawlings record, I gather, with Rawlings fronting the band ...
http://kylepetersen.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/daveraw_cover_select-353x.jpg
Haven't heard it though!

it's okay

yeah, it's sort of amazing it took them 6 years to release what is essentially a stop-gap album ...!

I wish she'd come back. I have strong nostalgic ties to Hell Among The Yearlings and it's always been my go-to album of hers. It came along at one of those times in life when no matter what it was coming along it's going to mean something to you forever. It was kinda funny to seek out other albums that I recognized as being equally good, more or less, and to realize that the sentimental pull I've attributed to the music for so long had a lot more to do with time and place, with me and my own life, than anything else. Which of course isn't to sell her short...

aargh volume 3 is up next, the preview track "Peace in the Valley" is an original rather than the standard, one of her songs of clear-eyed doom which nobody else can touch. Unbelievable it just sat on a tape for two decades.

still holding out for a welch recording of "you just don't love me"... only one i know is heather waters and apparently that's only available on deezer (!!!)

Finally getting to Volume 2. Damn it’s so good. She was mining an endless seam of beautiful tunes.

Biggish NYT profile piece here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/magazine/gillian-welch-david-rawlings.html

Vol. 3 is up today: https://gillianwelch.bandcamp.com/
First listen: first track rides me out of the gate, second straight ahead, number three is stone cold showstopper, throws me into the Kurt Weillian arms of four, five curls me into a delta pallet, but then--well there are several that seem most like vehicles, mainly handy for just the right simple-subtle goosebump performance, yknow that's all it would take, predictable in their way, but handy for sure, and could also imagine buckskin Neil Young bringing out more of the strummy drama of "If I Ain't Goin' To Heaven" and "Peace In The Valley"--but there are also more stone colds crying out to be covered---not strictly necessary, but nice to oblige them by imagining, say, xpost Willie again on "Strangers Again," him and/or Toby Keith, Eric Church on "The Cowboy Rides Away," and the Everly Brothers must come back for "There's a First Time For Everything" and omg "The Streets of St. Paul."
Bold souls will find a way to the disconcerting, possibly post-gospel "Put Your Foot Upon The Path: "You may live another day, you may never laugh again."
"One Little Song" seems like the perfect nightcap lullaby send-off for the whole thing, which will (via her site only) be a box set, vinyl + your choice of MP3, WAV, or FLAC---real purty but the CD version is $30.00 cheaper and I don't have a record player. Though of course bandcamp has all the digital options for each vol., no CDs sold sep., however.

Plenty of momentum in this set, not that there wasn't in the first two, but maybe a sense of being in the homestretch, that they've gotten used to doing all this, know it's all gonna be alright.

This isn't bad at all, but I don't really get as much of a thrill from it. A few of those songs where I feel she's too-obviously putting on a character, asking god for redemption or whatever, which doesn't come across as sincerely as others do.
Also - two previously released songs ("Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor", which is traditional anyway, and "One Little Song") and "Streets of St Paul" is obviously an early version of "Wrecking Ball".

We are so happy to announce our upcoming reissue of Gillian Welch & David Rawlings' All The Good Times on CD.

Previously released in limited handmade editions available only from our webstore, the new version of the CD will be available everywhere on March 5th, 2021.

The first Gillian Welch / David Rawlings collaboration to feature both of their names, All The Good Times is a collection of 10 acoustic covers and has received a 2021 GRAMMY nomination for Best Folk Album.

After a devastating tornado ravaged Nashville in the Spring of 2020 making their studio unusable, immediately followed by a global pandemic shutting down their community and touring livelihood, Welch and Rawlings were able to find the inspiration to set up recording equipment in their home living room and record 10 performances on their reel-to-reel of some of their favorite songs from the likes of John Prine (“Hello In There”), Bob Dylan (“Abandoned Love”), Norman Blake (“Ginseng Sullivan”), and more.
A vinyl reissue is coming later this year - more details to come!

didn't know anybody still uses reel-to-reel---advantages?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TQonl6exhNU/maxresdefault.jpg

Advantage - those amazing 70s memories taping music off the radio. Otherwise shrug

Tape loops

Congratulations to Gillian Welch & David Rawlings for winning Best Folk Album at the 63rd annual GRAMMY awards last night for All The Good Times!

All The Good Times is now available on compact disc worldwide, as well as on streaming and digital download services.

A vinyl reissue is coming later this year - more details to come!
Why this and not Boots 02? Maybe the latter was rec. too long ago or some other Grammys rules/logic

It's been a while since anyone said it so: the Boots series is just extraordinary.

This is probably challopsy but I've had a few so: the thing that eventually makes me turn Welch off is Rawlings: his tone is rich and beautiful but his runs can get a bit samey and busy. I'll get my coat.

Co-sign the love for the Boots series. It’s an interesting compare / contrast with Miranda Lambert’s Marfa Tapes. But also love Rawlings guitar work…

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/gillian-welch-time-the-revelator-1203615/

It's highs are not as high as Time (The Revelator), but Harrow and the Harvest has been like a slow burn for the past 12 years or whatever since it came out, just slowly but perpetually rising in my esteem and my heart. I go back and forth on whether I can say it's my favorite.

Anyway, I was just listening to "Hard Times" and searching to see if "we're supping on tears, we're supping on wine" was their own construction. It is, I think, but I was pleased to see that it is an allusion to the original "Hard Times" (Come Again No More), which features the line

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor

Nice little Easter egg, made me smile.

Also, as incredible as the Boots comps are and as gorgeous as their covers can be, I would really love to hear some new original music from these folks!

Harrow & Harvest was just rereleased on vinyl after selling for $$ on discogs for a while.

Listened to Soul Journey for the first time last night and I liked it more than expected. The cover and title aren’t very compelling, but it’s pretty good.

Also, as incredible as the Boots comps are and as gorgeous as their covers can be, I would really love to hear some new original music from these folks!

Don't sleep on Poor David's Almanack from a few years back. It's credited to Rawlings, but there are several co-writes with Welch and she sings and plays on it as well.

Thanks for the endorsement. There are a few songs I love dearly from his first couple but as full albums they are a clear cut below the ones in her name. Can't remember if I ever gave that new(er) one a listen though.

Xpost Hard Times. There’s a great fan-made video set against clips of Paper Moon.

And it’s worth hearing Chris Thile’s super fast version on mandolin. I prefer Gillian’s version but ymmv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiija5dBBIw

Last night's spangles and yesterday's pearls
Are the bright morning stars of the barroom girls

OTM

(maaaan)Anybody jonesing for Gillian and Dave should check out Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert:
https://kanegellert.bandcamp.com/album/the-flowers-that-bloom-in-spring

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3960809645_16.jpg

This is superb, thank you dow. Love the art, too.

You're welcome! I like the art on the Bandcamp page too. This is something I just came across on there, still need to check the two previous duet albs they've posted. Every time I listen, it hits me a little harder, in that-low key way.

What the folk https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel/

“Oh cool, I’ll pay $75 for thaWHAAAAAAAAAAA

You underrate the value of the deluxe slipcase and custom tape boxes.

All I wanted was Revelator on vinyl.

Red Clay Halo is just the best

They're still alive! Newport Folk Festival, July 27th (sold out already)

http://gillianwelch.com/tour/

! Moar dates please