{"id":821,"date":"2011-09-27T08:34:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/09\/refracting-the-tradition-with-gillian-welch-and-dave-rawlings.html"},"modified":"2011-09-27T08:34:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T15:34:00","slug":"refracting-the-tradition-with-gillian-welch-and-dave-rawlings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/09\/refracting-the-tradition-with-gillian-welch-and-dave-rawlings.html","title":{"rendered":"Refracting the Tradition with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings"},"content":{"rendered":"

I DON’T think I’ve been this starstruck since I interviewed Martin Scorsese a few years back. Meeting Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings — two of most distinctive and harmonically complex figures in the new acoustic movement — was one of the thrills of the summer.<\/p>\n

My story on the duo — and recent years and a solo album have shown how important Rawlings contribution is — runs today<\/a> in the LA Times. (It precedes their show Thursday at the Henry Fonda Music Box.)<\/p>\n

<\/a>Part of what intrigues me about the two is the way they take the tradition of pre-rock Appalachian brother bands — the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers — and cross them with a more modern harmonic language. It’s all over the new record, The Harrow and the Harvest.<\/p>\n

Rawlings, who is emerging one of the most individual guitarists of his generation, is steeped in old-time mountain music but is also informed by\u00a0Gang of Four\u2019s spiky post-punk, Johnny Marr’s weeping riffs and Richard Thompson\u2019s otherworldly chime. (Check out his recent LP, A Friend of a Friend, as Dave Rawlings Machine. The song “Ruby” and the cover of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer are good places to start.) His 1935 Epiphone archtop, often played with the capo us as high as the 9th or 10th fret, has lately become one of my favorite things to hear.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIf I could compare it sonically to \u2018Time (The Revelator),\u2019 \u201d he said abour Harrow, which he produced, \u201cI\u2019d say this record comes forward out of the speakers, and creates the atmosphere more in the space you\u2019re in,\u201d as opposed to what he calls the shy and \u201cretiring\u201d quality of the earlier album. \u201cThis record is more intimately recorded \u2013 we\u2019re sitting around and gently playing the songs. The way we play when we\u2019re not recording.\u201d<\/span>

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<\/a><\/div>\n

Welch, who grew up on LA’s Westside in the Reagan years and not in 1930s Appalachia, is sensitive about the issue of her authenticity.<\/span>

<\/span>
In one key way, in fact, she had a pre-modern upbringing: While she grew up singing classic folk and country music, she never heard recordings of them: She knew the songs only through an oral tradition. Years later, she attended UC Santa Cruz, and was at first a bit lost, personally and musically \u2013 she sang briefly in front of a psychedelic surf band \u2013 but was exposed to old recordings by a bluegrass deejay housemate.\u00a0<\/span>

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\u201cAnd I have this complete, strange epiphany,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI\u2019m hearing these sounds I\u2019ve never heard before, but they\u2019re the songs I\u2019ve known since I was as kid.\u201d The experience turned her head around. \u201cAnd then presto, we\u2019re done. And then I\u2019m just like every other person who just needed a record player, these records and a door that locked.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I DON’T think I’ve been this starstruck since I interviewed Martin Scorsese a few years back. Meeting Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings — two of most distinctive and harmonically complex figures in the new acoustic movement — was one of the thrills of the summer. My story on the duo — and recent years and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[66,64,40,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-821","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-alt-country","7":"category-folk-music","8":"category-indie","9":"category-west-coast","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}