Mornings with Gillian

A good friend of mine introduced me to Gillian Welch when I was in college and I was completely blown away at the time though I might not have known why.  This is the same girl that had re-acquainted me with Steve Earle who I had turned my back on in an effort to disassociate myself from my “redneck” past. She also turned me on to Yonder Mountain and String Cheese – she was a bit of a hippie.  Oddly, I never held that against her.  Lucia had incredible musical tastes (especially for a white girl from DeSoto County!) and I’m forever grateful for the conversations we had about music.  As life sometimes unfortunately goes, I lost touch with her and completely forgot about Gillian Welch as well.  Recently, someone’s random facebook post reminded me of her music and I’ve been rediscovering it since.

Saturday mornings are sometimes a struggle for me.  On Friday afternoons I shut it down mentally at 5:00 and have a few Beer Friday drinks with my coworkers.  It’s a long standing tradition in the firm and one that I have embraced since the beginning.  There is always that one thing (or a hundred) I didn’t get done during the week though.  I don’t think about it again until Saturday morning when I usually sit straight up in bed at or around 6:00 AM panicked about what ball I might have let drop.  Sunday mornings are worse as I see Monday’s ugly mug peering around the corner and I know I will have to deal with whatever it was that I didn’t last week.

Until recently, there was no antidote for this madness – and it is madness that I’m obsessing about work on a weekend morning.  I’ve often wondered if my career is indeed pressure-filled as I perceive it to be or if I intentionally (unintentionally) fill it with pressure, not that I would change it if one or the other were true.  Either way, I’ve stumbled into the perfect cure in the form of Gillian Welch for the past several weekends. 

Everything that I’m obsessed with is wiped away; every mistake I’ve made is righted when I hear her sing The Way it Goes or even Look at Miss Ohio.  These are the harmonies I heard growing up in church man.  My every sin is forgiven and tears are dried when she performs possibly the best cover ever of The Band classic The Weight.  That song has always hit me but not like it does when I see Gillian perform it. 

She was born and abandoned by her birth mother in NYC, adopted by a comedian / musician couple and grew up in Santa Monica.  She has to have roots elsewhere – the soul that she displays in her music is not indigenous to Southern California. 

I have always leaned on music.  It’s been the one constant in my life.  There is a quietness that Gillian conveys through her music and performance though that is different.  What she is, doesn’t usually suit my mood.  More often, the Clash or Social Distortion are appropriate – but not in the morning; and certainly not on a morning like yesterday with the howling wind and rain and hail beating on my window pane.  There is something so very comforting in her sound.  As dark and mournful as much of her work is, I find that it's soothing, almost therapeutic to me – I find light in that darkness.  As a bonus, her voice is the only sound that chills my dogs during a thunderstorm.  I think Belle’s favorite is Hard Times. 

Her music isn’t bluegrass, or even newgrass, or folk, or punk or country or Americana but it’s the best bit of all of those genres distilled into a new / old pure art - stripped down to the very essence of the thing.  Each song exists in its own galaxy on its own terms and doesn’t have to feel like or sound like or be like the one before.  That is an awesome feat for a musician to accomplish and she does it seemingly effortlessly.

I’ve said before that “my favorite song” changes on the daily if not on the hour or minute.  My favorite this morning is Annabelle. 

It reminds me of my mother and my grandmother – not the story so much as the setting.  Mom was born and raised in the foothills of the Cumberlands in a little town called Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee.  She might tell you it was Celina, but I’ve always thought of where she grew up as Red Boiling Springs probably because of the time we visited my great aunt Nina there when I was a teenager.  I’ve also always referred to this little part of the world as “Crowder Mountain” and have had many a conversation with my brother about this single afternoon trip we took a hundred years ago and what it means to have roots in Appalachia.  I remember coming down the mountain in his red RX-7 listening to The Smithereens and silently thinking about the obvious dichotomy.  It seems weird that I remember that now.  I remember sitting on Nina’s porch swing with cousins I might not have seen since.  That’s a shitty deal right there.  Nate’s a grown ass man now with a family and all that but what I will always remember about that kid is him telling me that I was “a big retarded hernia…just walking around”.

The Crowders were Welsh immigrants and had been minstrels in their native country.  I’m not sure if that last part is true or if that is something I’ve always told myself to justify my love of and interest in Appalachian history and music. Regardless, this song takes me back to that time in the mountains that I never knew.  I never had occasion to break bread with Pappy Fox, I never met my great uncle Gay or saw the hand-made fiddles he was famous for crafting, but I’ve always felt a strong connection to the “mountain” music and heritage they helped create.  I do remember once hearing Grandma speak about the hell of being married to a sharecropper – of course she would have never used that sort of language.   Shamefully, my primary education on this subject has been public television.  So how can a girl who grew up in So Cal, channel the spirit of Appalachia as clearly and perfectly as she does?  It’s astounding.

It could be that Gillian Welch reminds me of a segment of my familial history that I should be more aware of.  It could be guilt that draws me to her: the guilt of having not taken advantage of the wealth of knowledge my elders had to offer when they were alive.  If that is true, I don’t see how it should give me comfort.  I think it is that her music is a surrogate for the conversations I should have had with my Grandma but never did because I was a dumb kid.  At least I’m having them now even if in my own weird way.  Her music feels like home to me for whatever that might mean this morning.

Outside of whatever historical connection I might attach to this music, in particular this song there is a pure truth in the defining lyric that I find inescapable…

“…we can not have all things to please us,
No matter how we try.
Until we've all gone to Jesus,
We can only wonder why…”

           Call me what you will, but I wouldn’t trade my mornings with Gillian for anything.