540 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
Along with singer-song writers Steve Earle and Lucinda Wil-
liams, one of the most infl uential alt.country artists is Gillian
Welch, who brings an unusual pedigree to country music. The
daughter of two television screenwriters, Welch grew up in Los
Angeles and attended the University of California at Santa Cruz,
where she played bass and drums in goth and psychedelic bands.
After studying songwriting at the Berklee College of Music in Bos-
ton, she moved to Nashville in 1992 with her musical collaborator
David Rawlings. There they gained the attention of T-Bone Bur-
nett, a veteran of Bob Dylan’s 1970s Rolling Thunder Revue and
the producer of several successful roots rock and country albums.
Burnett produced Welch’s fi rst two albums, Revival (1996) and Hell
among the Yearlings (1998), and included Welch in his soundtrack
for the Coen brothers fi lm O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). When
a larger corporation bought out Welch’s label, Almo, which also
recorded British electronica artist Imogen Heap and the alter-
native rock band Garbage, Welch formed her own independent
label, Acony, on which she has released her subsequent work.
“Orphan Girl” (LG 22.2) the fi rst track on Welch’s debut album,
exemplifi es her characteristic songwriting, performance, and pro-
duction style. The song’s structure is bone simple, with rudimen-
tary harmonies and a folklike melody sung in an untrained voice with a rural
southern accent. Combined with a Carter-style acoustic guitar and a harmonizing
backup vocal, the effect is of an old-time hillbilly record. Enhancing that effect
is the intentionally low-fi delity audio quality, which Burnett obtained by track-
ing down vintage recording equipment purported to have been used by Hank
Williams. “We wanted the record to sound real and tough,” Welch explained,
“real and small, with everything mashed together and one thing fi ghting through
another. It gives the songs character.”
But the song’s production is deceptively simple-sounding and includes instru-
ments that would have been unfamiliar to the country icons Welch invokes. The
discreet backup one might expect from a second acoustic guitar is played instead
on a six-string bass guitar (essentially an electric guitar tuned one octave lower).
Near the end of the track, a distorted electric guitar seems to beam down from an
alternative rock universe. And throughout, watery organ chords emanate from an
Optigan, an early-1970s electronic keyboard desig ned for amateurs that used prere-
corded optical soundtracks, like those used in motion pictures, to generate sound.
Like its professional counterpart, the Mellotron, the Optigan provides some of the
“vintage synthesizer” sounds prized by present-day electronics antiquarians.
“Orphan Girl” thus evokes the past, but which past is intended: 1930s Carter
Family, 1950s Hank Williams, or 1970s analog synthesizers? The combination of
sonic elements suggests that Welch uses them as costumes for a musical mas-
querade, much like the Depression-era polka-dot dress she wears on the album’s
cover. Even the song’s sacred overtones are part of the act; in one of her gos-
pel songs, “Rock of Ages,” Welch mistakenly refers to the four Gospel writers—
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—as “prophets,” revealing herself as an outsider
in relation to the religious traditions from which Southern white gospel music
springs. Piety, like the rural poverty and deprivation that haunt the characters
in her songs, appears to be just another mask she wears. But to dismiss Welch as
a mere poseur is to miss the point of her postmodernist pastiche. Coming fromK The cover of Revival
(1996) represents Gillian
Welch (b. 1967) as a fi gure
from the Great Depression.LG 22.2172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 540 23/01/13 11:20 AM