From the top of her head to the tips of her sensible shoes, there is something very reassuring about Gillian Welch. Accompanied throughout by the equally stolid David Rawlings, Welch proceeded to lay waste to assumptions regarding the redundancy of country music. What we heard on Saturday night was music with spine, bile, and despair delivered in an almost goofy manner by one of the most talented figures contemporary country music has to offer. Like Patsy Cline with a death wish, it's as if Garth Brooks never happened.
Hunched over her guitar and banjo like a pernickety spinster attending to a particularly knotty piece of knitting, Welch studiously avoided eye contact throughout. Rawlings rotated his guitar as if attempting to burrow a hole in cyberspace. Despite the occasional jokes, this was not a night in the company of self-appreciation. "The dry ice and costume changes come later," Rawlings drawled.
The music, of course, was sparse and beautiful. Playing material culled mostly from her two albums, Revival and Hell Among The Yearlings, Welch began with Tear My Stillhouse Down, a song about the evils of alcohol, from the former. It set the tone for the remainder of the evening - songs with archetypal country precepts skewed by a sense of viciousness both realistic and commonplace.
Singing death 'n' despair songs might seem like a curious way to make a living, and an even stranger way to entertain people, but Welch and Rawlings draw on reserves above and beyond mere morbidity of the soul. In two words: life affirming.
