Graham Reid | | 1 min read
The Day the Mississippi Died
When we interviewed Gillian Welch 20 years ago it was still relatively early in her career, but she and her partner David Rawlings were already being acclaimed – on the basis of the albums Hell Among the Yearlings and Time (The Revelator) – as being in the vanguard of a deeply rooted Americana.
Their debut – although credited solely to Welch – was the Grammy-winning Revival in which they drilled down into that old time country music from Appalachia and beyond.
Many people assumed they had grown up on this music when they were born into mountain shacks with newspaper wallpaper and momma cookin' up grits in the skillet.
In our piece we had to disabuse people of that notion: both came from much more privileged, middle-class backgrounds and met at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music.
That said, they did increasingly bring a ring of honesty and even in the egalitarian world of Americana, Welch and Rawlings were akin to royalty.
Unlike early Sixties folkies seeking authenticity through replication, Welch and Rawlings – like the young Dylan in that regard – invigorated the traditional through new songs, so notions of past and present blur.
Woodland, Welch's first album of new material since 2011, had a troubled gestation: Covid first, then a tornado ripping the roof off their Nashville studio during torrential rain.
Out of adversity the songs and imagery came: a freight train silhouetted against a blue sky (Empty Trainload of Sky), the sense of loss which comes with change (the string-enhanced What We Had) and a Rawlings tribute to the modesty, emotional support and songwriting of the late Guy Clark on Hashtag: “Singers like you and I are only news when we die”.
That song sits between North Country (aging and the cold climate, with pedal steel) and the pointed The Day The Mississippi Died: “We've brokŠµn what we never knew could break”.
Moving harmonies, superb playing and songs like Rawlings' Dylanesque Turf the Gambler which may have always existed but required royalty to pluck them from the air.
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We interviewed Gillian Rawlings again in 2016. See here.
You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.
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