Musician, Heal Thyself
Gilian Welch's Revival and Music from the Film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Lauren F. Winner
July 1, 2000
Gillian Welch, Revival (Uni/Almos Sounds, 1996) O Brother, Where Art Thou? Muisc From a Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (Uni/Mercury Nashville, 2000) Jerry, Ralph, and Jan were sitting on the floor of their smallish Manhattan apartment smoking Camels and listening to tunes: Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, and other throaty, Southern-sounding women. Suddenly Jan said, "You know, Gillian really gets it, she just doesn't get that she gets it." What he meant was this: her songs, which sound like they were culled from seventy-year-old Skillet Licker acetates, not written by a twenty-eight-year-old from West L.A., are all about hard-scrabble poor folks and drug addicts. Miserable people. People with problems. And the answer to their problems is also right there in her first CD, Revival—Jesus. In "Annabelle," Welch, in the guise of a poor Southern sharecropper, explains that "We cannot have all things to please us /No matter how we try / Until we've all gone to Jesus / We can only wonder why." And in "By the Mark," Welch proclaims; "When I cross over /I will shout and sing /I will know my saviour / By the mark where the nails have been." So that night, moved by Welch's peaty voice and the gospel message of her lyrics, Jerry Carmichael, Ralph Miser, and Jan Jack became Christians. Later, when the three began regularly holding praise sing-alongs in the parks of New York, Welch's songs took their place alongside the likes of "Lord, I Lift Your Name on High." All of this—from back-room conversion to open-air evangelism—is even more impressive because Welch, at least as rumor has it, is not a Christian. (I did my darndest to verify this, but neither she nor her publicist is talking.) It's a paradox that ...
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