Gillian Welch

The black and white cover is of a woman in a slightly frayed polka-dot dress sitting on a bench in front of a decaying building, her medium-length dark hair pulled back simply over her ears. Peering over her shoulder to something out of the frame, the woman’s face shows mild concern. The photograph looks as though it might have been taken by Dorthea Lange as she documented the ravages of the depression and the dustbowl years that hardened the heartland. She might be a farmwife, contemplating the dirt-choked crops. She might be a migrant worker, peering into the unforeseeable future, hoping for better times. She might be, but she isn’t. She is Gillian Welch, So-Cal girl and daughter of the husband and wife team that scored the Carol Burnett show.

Gillian Welch burst onto the scene when she sent some demos of songs to Emmylou Harris, hoping she would choose one to perform on an upcoming album. She did – a version of this track appears on her Daniel Lanois-produced “comeback” album Wrecking Ball. Welch and her partner, guitarist David Rawlings, had been honing their chops at open mike nights around the country and, about the same time Emmylou went into the studio to record her version of Orphan Girl, they were spotted in Nashville by famed producer T-Bone Burnett, who helped them land a recording contract. He went into the studio with them and produced her first album, the wondrous Revival.

The name of the album tells you all you need to know. Gillian Welch is all about reviving the past, revisiting style of songs that haven’t been popular in more than half a century, with especial fondness for the first faltering steps of country music. Orphan Girl is a deceptively simple song, its harmonies heart-breakingly beautiful, its words frayed and worn, a perfect balance of artless poetry and humble confession. It’s impossible to not be affected by its simple strength and pure honesty of performance. Even knowing where – and when – she came from, it’s hard not thinking of her as barefoot bride from some small hard-luck hamlet in the south, wandering down off the mountain to sing in a studio, a life too full of pain and truth, a voice as pure and fragile and sweet as a dusty brown rose pressed between the yellowing leaves of the family bible.

The rest of the album is great too, and explores different moods and idioms, though all of them sound like old relics caught in amber and carefully revived. Tear My Stillhouse Down is a powerful, driving song about the evils of moonshine and a life wasted swilling that poisonous brew. Paper Wings is a breathlessly fragile ballad, gorgeous and sweetly heartbreaking. All in all, a spectacular debut.

Then she recorded her follow-up, Hell Among the Yearlings, which featured more of her carefully crafted reproductions of folk music styles. A brief appearance in the film (and soundtrack) for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, and she became the posterchild for the American Folk revival of the late ‘90s. By the time her third album came out, 2001’s Time (The Revelator), I couldn’t listen to her anymore.

It’s one thing to pay tribute to the past, but she fetishizes it, trying too hard to get just the right tone, wear just the right clothes, have just the right pictures on her album covers. I’m not saying that because she’s from Southern California that she has to sound like the Beach Boys, but she is so slavishly devoted to the distant folk past that I start to mistrust her. Why doesn’t she use her undeniable songwriting skills to sing about more contemporary subjects? I mean, stillhouses? What the hell does she know about that? And all these songs about going to meet her maker? Even if she is devoutly Christian, her choice of words and phrases are distinctly anachronistic in this day and age and I have trouble not seeing her as a poseur. One album, fantastic. Two albums, okay. But she’s gone to the well too many times. Her songs ring of truth, but I can no longer believe they are her truths, her words, her feelings. Maybe she is just a woman out of time, but I’ve run out of patience for her picture perfect, Dorthea Lange, romantic myth of noble suffering.