GILLIAN WELCH is not a prolific musician. She has made only five solo studio albums of original material and none since “The Harrow & the Harvest” , a quietly devastating masterpiece. Nonetheless, she is one of the outstanding American music-makers of the last quarter-century. She has, in her discreet way, made radical use of two of America’s oldest popular styles, bluegrass and Appalachian.
She issued her first album, the aptly titled “Revival”, 24 years ago. It is her most traditional record by some distance and it has that haunted, plaintive, eerie quality that marks out its sources. Ms Welch had not yet developed the lyrical shrewdness with which she would later refashion this music for the 21st century, yet something set it apart from mere pastiche.
The America Ms Welch depicts across the body of her work is often distinctly contemporary. Sharecropping and moonshine are replaced by minimum-wage shiftwork and heroin . Melancholy becomes depression . Depression-era drifters are replaced by more up-to-date vagabonds, although their fates—isolation, addiction, prostitution—may be identical. When she does look back, she takes full advantage of that hindsight.
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