(pair of mirrors)

#18 - Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest

“Down Along The Dixie Line” 

2011 was the year that Gillian Welch and her longtime musical partner David Rawlings finally ended her 8-year hiatus. The Harrow & The Harvest, Welch’s latest release, is everything you hope and dream a Gillian Wench work would sound like. The Harrow & The Harvest is pure poetry; it is a collection of beautiful stories unpolluted by production or percussion. The Harrow & The Harvest flows peacefully along a gentle river of sound, supported by not much more than Rawlings’ six-string (and banjo).

In this day and age, this kind of simplicity is stunning. Welch sounds like she belongs in pre-industrial Tennessee, not modern day America. Her songs conjure up visions of farmhouses, humid southern nights, creaky veranda floorboards, straw hats, and lullabies. Welch makes you want to lead a simple life, circa fifty years ago. 

“Banjos are strumming / Horseflies are humming / Ripe melons on the vine” croons Welch in “Down Along The Dixie Line”, and you can just sense what she is singing about. Somehow, if you really listen to the way Welch sings that line, you can detect life, peace, joy, longing, sadness, reconciliation, acceptance, and love. And that’s just one line.

Such narrative energy is present on every one of Welch’s songs on The Harrow & The Harvest, really on every one of Welch’s songs ever  – that’s what makes Gillian Welch so great. However, the narrative is not always about “the river of whisky that flows down in Dixie”, or similarly whimsical subject matter. Sometimes the narrative is pretty hard-hitting. Take, for instance “Way it Goes”. “Becky Johnson bought the farm / Put a needle in her arm” sings Welch, which leads to “And her brother laid her down / In the cold Kentucky ground.” The lesson? Things end, things begin, and that’s the way it goes:

That’s the way,

That’s the way that it goes

Everybody’s buying little baby clothes…

And that’s the way that it ends –

Though there was a time when she and I were friends.

Gillian Welch comes up with pure poetry on The Harrow & The Harvest. If you’re looking for an album to bop along to, chat to, drink tea to, then this isn’t the one for you. This album is so elusive and subtle that, if you’re going to do it justice, you need to sit down and listen it – like a book. 

-L