Dwight Thurston: Close Enough

Close Enough
Folk, Blues, Roots, Alternative Country, etc....
By Dwight Thurston

TOO COUNTRY FOR NASHVILLE?
SOME NON-HAT ACTS FROM MUSIC CITY
(#1 of a series) : Bulldy Miller and Gillian Welch

Buddy Miller, Poison Love
(Hightone)

My definition of country music is about as easy to articulate as my definition of folk music – I know it when I hear it – and the artists in this series are country through and through. One way I Buddy know I'm hearing country is that I'm driven to sing along in hard, old-time tenor harmony with most of the songs, and that my voice automatically acquires either a twang or an Appalachian hillbilly sound. Buddy Miller's Poison Love, his second Hightone release, starts somewhat deceptively with "Nothing can Stop Me." The song has the surface sound of Nashville, but upon a closer look, there's straw in the cuffs, dust on the boots, and one or two degrees of twang beyond the Gnashville red-line.

Nine of the thirteen songs on Poison Love are written or co-written by Miller and wife Julie, and his choice of cover songs, including Mrs. Elmer Laird's "Poison Love," clearly points to the old country traditions he's chosen as the base of his own writing. "Poison Love" has old country harmony, unschooled, simple, hillbilly lyrics, and hoe-down style fiddling. Vocal harmony is by Steve Earle, the fiddling by Sam Bush. Track two, "100 Million Little Bombs," (written and recorded well before the death of Princess Diana) is a damning indictment, from which the U.S. does not escape, of the global plague of land mines "with chips from Motorola, Made in the USA." Not exactly Nashville-friendly lyrics.

Footfall of a soldier
Footfall of a child
They don't know the difference
They're blind and mean and wild.

Like Appalachian folk songs, Miller's songs sometimes deal with subject matter that might be considered strange, perverse, or morbid. This stuff has always gone with the territory. "Baby Don't Let Me Down" is one of those, and a fine example at that. It begins:

Start up the engine and get back home
Hurry go tell mother
Johnny got a gun to shoot a squirrel
And he put down your brother

The teller of this horrific tale expresses an eerie, but hardly surprising, inability to process this experience the way more "delicate" sensibilities would be expected to. Father is nowhere to be found, it's past midnight, Mother is off crying; but, the storyteller has lust and drinking on his mind, saying "this place is slow and I just gotta go/ find myself in an all night town." Try that on your local social worker or psychotherapist. Miller is also capable of working the rollicking, upbeat side of country music. "Nothing can Stop Me" and "Love Snuck Up" are solid, unabashed country romps, full of the exaggeration and borderline goofiness such country songs are known for.

Female vocal harmonies are provided by two of the best voices around for hard, edgy harmony, Emmylou Harris, and Miller's wife Julie. (Buddy Miller is lead guitarist in Harris's touring band lately, and Julie Miller has provided harmony and writing talent on both of Buddy's recordings, as well as having her own Hightone debut recording Blue Pony.) Personnel on Poison Love include Gurf Morlix, bass, Donald Lindley, drums, Tammy Rogers, fiddle and mandolin, Emmylou Harris, guitar and vocals, Sam Bush, fiddle, and Steve Earle, vocals on the title track. If you've any inclination towards old country music that has some rough edges and doesn't avoid hillbilly elements, Buddy Miller's two Hightone releases, Your Love and Other Lies (1995), and his new Poison Love are essential listening. This music doesn't get any better than this.

Gillian Welch Revival
ALMO

This summer, as I drove to the Newport Folk Festival site anticipating my interview with Gillian Welch and her writing and touring partner David Rawlings, I was imagining something like this: the spirit or soul of a kind of music can choose to become incarnate in a particular person, anytime, anywhere. If this is possible, then Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have been chosen. I struggled from the start of the interview to describe the kind of time and place I felt I was being taken to in their music. Welch protested that the songs were simply devoid of references to particular times and places, and – even though a certain song might be seen as set in Appalachia, the Dustbowl era, or southern California, for example – they were contemporary songs that weren't limited to any particular time and space.

Welch likes the label that's been applied to the music of John Fahey: American Primitive. It's probably the best label to be found. The songs are lyrically straightforward and austere, but without being harsh; sometimes delicate, but never merely pretty; pristine, but never precious; bittersweet, but never saccharine. The subject matter of the songs is so quintessentially American that the Welch/Rawlings songbook might someday stand as an essential text in American social history, alongside the musings of Utah Phillips, the historical writing of Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States), and the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The songs deal with orphans, isolation, hard work for little reward, premature death, Ford V-8's, armed robbery, barroom girls, the hope of saving enough money to pay for a ticket back home, firm and simple Christian belief, moonshining, a simple mountain flower, and the "one and only" true love.

"One More Dollar" is the refined essence of every song ever written about the disillusionment and hard luck that's often found after leaving a rural home to seek work in a distant place. You'll go far to find a better song on the subject. My "best" list of these songs would place Townes Van Zandt's great "Tecumseh Valley" next, in the number two spot. Welch's mastery of the simple, pithy lyric is most clear in this song, where the significance of the unchanging chorus shifts after every verse, as the storyteller changes from a naļve, hopeful fruit picker, to a gambler, to a street beggar:

One more dime to show for my day
One more dollar and I'm on my way
When I reach those hills, boys
I'll never roam
One more dollar and I'm going home

"By the Mark" is a masterly expression of the gospel song at its best – simple, and narrowly focused on one arresting image: "I will know my savior/ By the mark where the nails have been." Like many of these songs – especially "Orphan Girl," "One More Dollar," "Tear My Stillhouse Down," and "Only One and Only" – "By the Mark" is delivered in tough old-time country harmony, the kind that raises the hair on the back of the neck. The gospel songs and other songs that contain overtly Christian content or expression have a remarkable quality of being able to inspire even listeners with non-Christian, or anti-Christian beliefs, not necessarily to the specific belief, but to the passion underlying that expression of belief.

"Pass you By" is an ominous story of Ford V-8's, armed robbery, and turning the social class tables. Once again, there's that chorus whose meaning keeps evolving and expanding. The storyteller speaks of his car:

Don't turn no heads
Don't catch no eye
I'm just a wind on the road
Gonna pass you by

The sound of "Pass you by" is heavy with a cranked-up bluesy feeling as Welch beats fuzzy chords out of a Les Paul Special. The musical styles of these songs can vary widely, but they all share a direct, unvarnished quality with Welch's lyric writing. "Paper Wings" is a torchy ballad that Patsy Cline would have done anything to sing. Emmy Lou Harris, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and Tim and Molly O'Brien have already covered some of Welch's songs. Both Welch and Rawlings sing in utterly convincing, honest old-fashioned rural voices. Welch's guitar playing is solid, but never more complicated than the song asks, and Rawlings guitar playing is delicately picked on an old – none-too-expensive, I would guess – acoustic thing with f-holes and the high, thin sound one expects from such a machine. The late Roy Huskey, Jr. plays acoustic bass, and the production by T-Bone Burnett is brilliant, but never flashy, always allowing the songs to stand on their own. Four of the tracks are recorded in mono with old tube equipment. Welch and Rawlings have created something very special on Revival – honest, powerful, uniquely American rural music that no one could have dreamed would surface in the last decade of this millenium. Revival is one of the recorded treasures of our decade, maybe of our century. - Dwight Thurston

Next Month: David Olney, Darrell Scott

Read the current edition of Close Enough

Dwight Thurston hosts an American Roots music program called "In the Weeds" on Fridays from 1-4:00pm on WWUH-FM 91.3, West Hartford. The "Blue Monday" blues show airs Monday nights from 9-midnight. Folk and roots music shows air from 6-9am on weekdays, as well as "UH Radio Bluegrass" on Saturday from 9:00am to 1:00pm. WWUH is also available in realaudio in real time on the Worldwide Web at http://uhavax.hartford.edu/~wwuh/wwuhreal.html. Responses to this column are welcome at [email protected]