Second blessing

Gillian Welch's beautiful tales of trouble

by David Ritchie

"I hope they're not depressing. I don't mean for them to be. I don't think they are." Gillian Welch is a little worried that her new CD, Hell Among the Yearlings, will be less palatable than her Grammy-nominated 1996 release, Revival. There's more violence, more retribution, and a fair amount of damnation, but not by design. "For whatever reason, that's just the kind of material that came out of my head. I don't feel like I had that much control over it."

Indeed, the opening track, "Caleb Meyer," is the story of an attempted rape: "I cried `My God, I am your child. Send your angels down'/Then feelin' with my fingertips, the bottleneck I found/I drew that glass across his neck as fine as any blade."

Welch's songs are hauntingly beautiful, evocative studies of timeless individuals with the most basic of concerns: home, love, meaningful work, money, death, and, of course, morphine addiction. Although neither of her CDs should be called bluegrass, it's not hard to see why bluegrass musicians have taken to Welch. Her songs, much like those of the Louvins and the Stanley Brothers, are as much about a hard life of trouble as they are about the promise of a better world to come. Welch is obviously influenced by the traditional folk songs of such pioneers as the Carter Family. She explains that these are the kinds of songs she was taught to sing since second grade, which she spent at an alternative-education school in southern California: "Truth be told it was run by a bunch of hippies." She grew up thinking that Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" was the pledge of allegiance. Though she learned to sing the tunes at a young age, her epiphany didn't occur until she was 17, and at college. There she first heard the early recordings of songs she knew so well; and she began to play and sing in the style of the originators.

Looking at her record collection, Welch notices the common ground between her rock and roll, blues, and bluegrass records. "I really like the guys who are kind of the first to do something. There's something raw about it." She explains that though Bill Monroe was the father of bluegrass, the music didn't spring fully formed out of one person's head; it was a synthesis of the blues and mountain music he had heard. "Even though it's a fusion of that stuff, it ends up -- because of something in him, something in his vision -- being really pure. And that's what we're shooting for," she says.

"I'd hate to end up seeming like just a mishmash of styles. The hope is that it'll have this sort of singular integrity and be something else."

It was in her last year at Berklee that she began performing with David Rawlings, a native of North Smithfield, Rhode Island. After graduation, they relocated to Nashville where T-Bone Burnett saw them and surprised them with an offer to produce a record. The result, Revival, lost out to Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad for best contemporary folk album. Welch has mixed feelings about being categorized as folk but takes heart in the company of recent Grammy winners: Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan.

Rawlings cowrote all of the songs on the new CD, and his integral contribution on guitar and harmony vocals helps give Welch's music a haunting quality throughout. His guitar, a 1935 Epiphone Olympic, has a sort of mandolin quality as well as sounding strangely resophonic. She explains that it's just a quality of the smaller archtops, very mid-rangy, without a lot of bass or high end.

With the exception of one song featuring piano and organ by producer T-Bone Burnett, Hell Among the Yearlings is a duo recording. They had intended to make the record with the help of Revival bassist Roy Huskey Jr., who died last September after a two-year bout with cancer. She tells me that there was no one who could have stepped into the project and filled his shoes. "He was such a singular, such a unique musical talent." With the absence of Huskey, the new CD is much like their live performances with the occasional addition of a banjo that Welch has picked up since the last record.

In the closing track, "Winter's Come and Gone," the birds of spring are a metaphor for the prospect of better times, though Welch admits it's sort of a dubious brand of optimism. As for whether the CD is depressing, I remind her of a line she wrote in "Miner's Refrain," which, I suggest, could be the thesis of her new record: "Now there's something good in a worried song for the trouble in your soul." She ponders that for a moment and adds "well that's the wonderful thing . . . low-down music makes you feel good. At least it does for me. And then the crazy thing is upbeat music makes you feel good, too." She laughs at the simplicity of what it all boils down to, "Music makes you feel good, even if it's depressing music."

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play at 2 p.m. on July 18 at the Green River Festival, at Greenfield Community College, in Greenfield. Tickets are $15. Call (413) 773-5463.

Green River Festival

Saturday, July 18

12:10 p.m. Maria Sangiolo

1 p.m. Brooks Williams

2 p.m. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

3:20 p.m. Don Walser & The Pure Texas Band

5 p.m. Bap Kennedy

5:25 p.m. Cheri Knight

6:30 p.m. Nathan and The Zydeco Cha Chas

8:10 p.m. Koko Taylor & Her Blues Machine