Musical California kids have long been attracted to traditional country and bluegrass music, which cultivated the obsessive and the apocalyptic long before punk reared its intentionally ugly head. The latest L.A. to Nashville transplant is Gillian Welch, flavor of the month for the growing radio format called Americana, daughter of two staff rangers for The Carol Burnett Show. She found bluegrass high harmony at a live-music pizza parlor called Sluggo's while a student at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and like Gram Parsons before her, set out both to master traditional styles and to find ways of merging them with contemporary rock and roll.
It is as a songwriter that Welch has made her deepest studies. Her debut CD, Revival, offers some fine, rigorous exercises in country traditionalism. "By the Mark" could be recorded proudly by any Bible-belt bluegrass ensemble:
By the mark where the nails have been,
By the mark on His precious skin.
I will know my Savior when I come to Him
By the mark where the nails have been.
Welch and her performing and songwriting partner, David Rawlings, accomplich attractive two-part harmonies, and many songs feature only acoustic instruments. And she produces a decent facsimile of bluegrass poetry's curious existential quality, its sense of universal tragedy divorced from any specific time or place.
Other songs add electric guitars and various rock ideas. On the CD, producer T-Bone Burnett (a former Dylan sideman and long a creative force in roots rock) keeps things very spare and effectively integrates the electric numbers into the sonic world of the disc as a whole. He classicizes sonorities of the electric guitar in a way that carries no hint of nostalgia. We'll see whether Welch's live show can deliver the same innovative acoustic/electric framework.
Whether or not it does, her songwriting strengths are apparent in her rock-inflected pieces as well. The anti-alcohol "Tear My Stillhouse Down" delivers traditional moralism to a weird half-blues, half-march beat that could have been laid down by the Doors:
Put no stone at my head,
No flowers on my tomb,
No gold plated sign
In a marble pillar room.
The one thing I want
When they lay me in the ground -
When I die,
Tear my stillhouse down.
Welch's vocals are uninspiring -- somewhere between little-girl modern rock and watered-down Wynonna Judd. And her music lacks the instrumental virtuosity that marks real bluegrass. Traditionalists won't be satisfied. But Welch has the makings of a real innovator, and just as Emmylou Harris listened to Gram Parsons, musicians from within the country community are listening to Welch now as they look for ways to shape the next round of new traditionalism. Catch this rising star if she comes your way.