I've started listening to Gillian Welch courtesy of fellow photographer Lariane, with whom Suzanne and I travelled Kangaroo Island with. I decided to begin with Time (The Revelator), with its Louvinesque high harmonies, vintage guitar, and pop/rock ballads with strong narratives--- 'I Dream a Highway' is a 15 minute looping, meandering journey.

Like many others I first came across Welch on the soundtrack to the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons.

Welch seems to have grown up on old country material like The Carter Family, the bluegrass work of the Stanley Brothers, Appalachian music, and the near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music that you find on Smithsonian's Anthology of American Folk Music. Welch and Rawling's debts to these artists of America's past are obvious and they are clearly acknowledged.

Though Welch and Rawlings are often portrayed as defenders of a faith-old-time string musicians, they are not mere revivalists in the old-timey style. They are independent musicians who write their own music--even on the debut Revival.

There are strong songs on Revival, and these go beyond rustic folkiness and nostalgia, for all the stark roots-based simplicity and echos of the past.

As Alec Wilkinson writes in The New Yorker:

The music they play contains pronounced elements of old-time music, string-band music, bluegrass, and early country music, but they diverge from historical models by playing songs that are meticulously arranged and that include influences from R & B, rockabilly, rock and roll, gospel, folk, jazz, punk, and grunge. Welch’s narratives tend to be accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant laborers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people, outlaws, criminals, love-wrecked women, etc.