“If any of y’all wanna give me shit about my twang, you can just do it,” Gillian Welch once told a chatty San Francisco crowd in 1994. It was two years before Welch would release her debut Revival,
but the California-bred daughter of two entertainers was already
anticipating the skepticism that would greet her when she rose to
prominence in the mid-to-late ’90s singing about destitute coal miners
and Depression-era whiskey runners with an unsettling familiarity for
someone born in New York City, raised in Los Angeles, and who found
their lifetime musical partner at a conservatory in Boston.
In 1994, Welch’s repertoire consisted largely of a number
of songs that would never find their way onto a record, a handful of
traditional tunes, and some John Prine
covers. For an artist with an aesthetic as carefully and consistently
rendered as Gillian Welch, it’s strange to think of a time when she
wasn’t producing or reproducing that aesthetic, but was, rather,
searching for it herself.
That sense of fresh discovery and wide-eyed experimentation can be heard plainly on Boots No. 1,
Welch’s first archival release that serves as a 20th anniversary
expanded release for her debut LP. The two-disc collection is comprised
of outtakes, demos, and alternate takes culled from the Revival
sessions, a time when Welch and guitarist Dave Rawlings were first
honing in on their precise sound, mood, and style.
...
All of which goes to show that the authenticity scare that surrounded Welch upon her arrival feels, twenty years later,
almost unrecognizably dated. Perhaps it’s because Welch herself, who
would go on to play an integral role in Americana’s big-bang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack just a few years later, has since become the very aesthetic
and artistic paradigm for 21st-century roots singer-songwriters. Or,
perhaps, it’s because the anxieties about Welch’s authentic credentials
were so misguided in the first place.
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