GILLIAN WELCH

Gillian Welch's TIME THE REVELATOR,

i think will pretty much stay on my top ten list...

THE GHOSTLY ONES

How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

rediscovered country music.

by Alec Wilkinson

Gillian Welch is a singer and songwriter whose music is not easily classified-it is at once innovative and reminiscent of past rural forms-and David Rawlings is her partner. They were in Asheville, North Carolina, making a brief tour from Nashville, where they live. The next day, the writer accompanied them to their next gig, in Carrboro, NC. He asked Rawlings about his childhood and background as they had breakfast at Denny’s. Rawlings grew up in Slatersville, Rhode Island, and began playing guitar when he was 15. He tends to brood, and there’s a mournful cast to his thinking. Welch is tall and slender. She has a long, narrow face, a sharp chin, and a toothy smile. She’s 36 and adopted. Onstage, she bends her head over her guitar, like a figure in a religious painting. Rawlings says almost nothing onstage and plays with his eyes closed. Their music is deceptively complex, despite its simple components of two voices, two guitars. The broadest category into which it fits is country music. Welch and Rawlings are portrayed as defenders of a faith-old-time string musicians. The music they play contains pronounced elements of old-time music, string-band music, bluegrass, and early country music, but they diverge from historical models by playing songs that are meticulously arranged and that include influences from R & B, rockabilly, rock and roll, gospel, folk, jazz, punk, and grunge. Welch’s narratives tend to be accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant laborers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people, outlaws, criminals, love-wrecked women, etc. Her imagination is sympathetic to outcasts who appeal to God and a number of her songs are written from the male point of view. She admires the troubadour songwriters Bob Dylan and Hank Williams. She was born in New York in 1967. Mentions her adopted parents, Ken and Mitzie Welch, who were also musicians. Welch and Rawlings appear often at the Grand Ole Opry. They also perform in small clubs around the country. They play very quietly and audiences attend them closely. Welch’s range is not wide and her voice has a mournful, vernacular quality. She conveys emotions through dynamics and absorption with the narrative. At Carrboro, they played a club called Cat’s Cradle and, as on many occasions, they shared the bill with the Old Crow Medicine Show. Rawling recounted Welch’s experimental college days. Welch says that when she discovered bluegrass music, it was “like an electric shock…” When Welch and Rawlings sing together, their voices fit so tightly that they seem welded. Rawlings does not always match Welch’s phrasing-he’s a strikingly inventive guitarist. Welch began dating Rawlings at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. After school, they both moved to Nashville and Welch began to make the weekly rounds of songwriters’ nights at the local clubs. In 1995, they were signed to a recording contract by Almo Sounds. Welch showed the writer some of the clubs where she and Rawlings had played Writer’s Nights in the early 1990s. Some critics claim that, as the daughter of L.A. musicians, Welch doesn’t have the right to play music reserved for poor people or laborers. In response, she has wondered whose blood runs through her veins. The writer accompanied Welch and Rawlings to an ice-cream place in Nashville. One of Welch’s former teachers said Welch didn’t “sing notes; she sang feelings and ideas.”