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Ten little songs
Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey
BY JEFF OUSBORNE

One listen to Gillian Welch’s mountain-gospel masterpiece "I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll," from her 2001 album Time (The Revelator) (Acony), and you might guess that the singer was a long-lost Louvin sister. Yet the song is more than just an artful homage. It alludes to Elvis’s eclipse of country music in the 1950s. It also turns a trite rock-and-roll sentiment into a clever cry for hillbilly salvation — a remarkable achievement for a country song when you consider how deeply entrenched mainstream Nashville is in arena pop.

Welch was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, and her tastes run from alterna-rockers like the Pixies to seminal country legends like the Carter Family. But after a housemate introduced her to the music of bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers, she gave her soul over to old-time music with all the zeal of a convert at a swimming-hole baptism. While attending Berklee, she met a like-minded collaborator in guitarist David Rawlings. The two moved to Nashville in the early ’90s. And though she wasn’t exactly a coal miner’s daughter, her 1996 debut, CD Revival (Acony), proved she could sing and write like one, with its blazing bluegrass backdrops, strip-mine raw harmonies, and forlorn storytelling.

Since then, Welch has distinguished herself from gifted genre mates like Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris with her unassuming restraint and grace. Indeed, she often appears hesitant to assume the mantle of singer-songwriter and vocal stylist — which is exactly what she is. Her voice is sweet and earthy, the perfect instrument for melancholy material, less perfect for expressing joy or ebullience. Just watch her singing trios with Harris and Alison Krauss in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Down from the Mountain. She hangs back, politely, like a junior associate, even though as an associate producer of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (which inspired Down from the Mountain), she was one of the guiding sensibilities behind the concert.

Traditional music hangs heavily on Welch, whereas a natural like Iris DeMent wears it as lightly as a cotton dress. And though her best songs are elegant and effortless-sounding, you get the feeling that they don’t always come easily. Songwriting is more than just an art for her to practice: it’s an inheritance to be reckoned with. On "One Little Song," a gorgeous acoustic meditation-cum-lullaby on her new Soul Journey (Acony), she muses on the compulsion to write music and longs to find "one little note that ain’t been used/One little word that ain’t been abused a thousand times."

That same desire seems to have led Welch and Rawlings (who produced Soul Journey) to loosen up their genre constraints this time around. Time (The Revelator) showed that they had moved beyond around-the-kitchen-table duets. Although there are still fiddles and dobros on the new disc, the drum beats are now more than incidental — they’re a major part of each song. At times, as on "Wayside/Back in Time," the album gives off a bluesy country-rock warmth, like the light of an old radio dial or any of Son Volt’s slower moments. (That band’s bassist, Jim Boquist, is a prominent guest throughout Soul Journey.) Elsewhere, gems like "Lowlands" and "One Monkey" are simple and spare in the vein of vintage acoustic Neil Young, and "I Made a Lover’s Prayer" evokes a lifetime of love ache.

For purists, Welch offers a lilting version of the traditional hard-luck ballad "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" as well as a muted, near a cappella rendition of "I Had a Real Good Mother and Father." The latter may provide the album’s most vulnerable moment, one packed with more faith and resignation than a hundred songs by Jars of Clay. Welch doesn’t so much cover the tune as inhabit it. Likewise, without her sounding the least bit quaint or patronizing, the original "No One Knows My Name" has the dusty sound of a song written in Appalachia circa 1934. Even when she uses archaic expressions ("took me to my rest," "by-and-by"), she pulls them off with enough wit to turn a simple backwoods folk song into a stark meditation on identity. On the harmonized choruses, her voice melts into Rawlings’s so perfectly, you wish there were more opportunities for them to sing together. It’s a minor quibble — too little of a good thing. As an album that makes perfect listening for late nights and rainy days, Soul Journey may not be that rock-and-roll. But if Welch’s desire was merely to proffer "One Little Song," she has generously given us 10 of them.

Read Matt Ashare’s review of Gillian Welch’s FleetBoston Pavilion appearance this past Saturday in "Live and on Record."

Issue Date: July 4 - July 10, 2003
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