The Cahn Auditorium on the campus of Northwestern University seemed like the perfect venue for two of the most lauded folk musicians of our time. It has a “not exactly new, not exactly old” feel to it. It’s cozy. It feels like the type of auditorium that was made for attentive audiences. You could imagine seeing Bob Dylan at a place like this circa 1963.
Folk music exists in a long continuum. The songs are meant to speak to any place and any time. They are passed through the ages, tinkered with, lost and found, reimagined, and yet meant to be immediate in how they speak to the human condition. They are meant to be sung in people’s homes and on front porches and union halls and intimate college auditoriums like this one.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have always played music that seems ancient and timeless. They both seem to carry themselves as quiet, contemplative vessels of this sacred material. I watched a piece that was recorded for the NPR show “World Cafe” and what is striking about them in interview is how slow and deliberate they answer questions. They take beats to consider the question and contemplate it for a moment, before answering authentically and thoughtfully. They themselves seem of another time. There’s a regularness about them and an earnestness about them that make them seem like appropriate descendants of Woody Guthrie, but also somehow, ancient characters that Woody wrote about. There is a gravitas about them that comes not from arrogance or being larger than life, but rather from clearly being humble craftspeople who inherited this holy lineage.
For when they speak, they are quiet and deliberate, but when they sing and play, there is an intensity and heartbreaking beauty to the sounds they are able to produce. They are the sounds of masters of their craft, but also sounds of those who are in awe of the creative process and the act of sharing art that arises out of a long tradition.
It’s a strange thing to be at a concert these days where the audience is silent in rapt attention. But that was the case with this show. In between songs after the applause died down, you could hear a pin drop as the audience waited for more.
The evening was a hypnotic journey through the American folk landscape, courtesy of mostly original material written by Rawlings and Welch over the years. And of course, the material tilted heavily toward their latest release Woodland.
I’ve already talked quite a bit about how much I love this album. Hearing these songs played live was an emotional experience. I’m not sure how two voices can meld so well together, especially when the people aren’t related. Blood harmony is the beautiful harmony that people who are related are often able to produce, given their similar vocal patterns and genetic similarities and probably just similar influences and shared lexicon of phrases and patterns.
But sometimes two people, unrelated, can achieve this otherworldly sound with their blended voices. But with Rawlings and Welch it doesn’t stop there. Their voices meld with their instruments and their instruments meld with one another. David Rawlings’s distinctive guitar sound is a foil to Gillian Welch’s rich alto voice. David Rawlings at times takes on a Neil Young-esque falsetto that is supported and blended with Gillian’s acoustic guitar or banjo picking.
They make it look so easy. And they seemed to be locked in at all times. As an audience, you can’t help but to lock in with what they’re doing too. The quiet of the audience is because they’ve transported us. They’ve synced us up to their frequencies that are older than time itself, and are bound to last long after time is a construct anymore.
“Hashtag” is one of those rare Welch/Rawlings compositions that references something specific to our current times. It’s a nod to how Gillian found out that her friend, the great Guy Clark, had died. She saw the hashtag and knew something was wrong. Here’s the line from the song:
You laughed and said the news would be bad
If I ever saw your name with a hashtag
Mm, singers like you and I are only news when we die
It’s an ironic acknowledgment of what happens when you live in the territory of making art that isn’t meant to live in any one spot in time. Your time acknowledges you, but only when you’re gone. But then again the likes of Guy Clark, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings don’t make art for the legions of adoring fans or the bright lights of fame. They make it because it lives inside of them and all around them. And maybe the life of truck stops, highways, and cheap motels that they know can only be known by their community of artists and reverent followers of this type of music. Maybe it was never meant to be known outside of this. There’s only room enough in any given time for the likes of Taylor Swift and the Swifties.
There were no “Clarkies” and Guy knew it, but wasn’t worried about it. His job was to put on his boots, pack up his guitar, and head off to the next town with his song bag in tow. You live, you work, you pass your wisdom to anyone who’ll hear it.
Gillian and David are part of that lineage. They make the type of art that comes out of stopping to listen and notice what is going on outside of you and how that affects what’s going on inside of you. It almost seems too simple to be true. Receive, process, give. But that’s how humans have always been doing it in some form or another. And I’ve got to think there will always be people writing songs like this as long as there are still humans around to do so.
It’s simple but it’s not. Being that tuned to your surroundings and your own feelings and sense of empathy for other people, past and present, real and fictional, is truly remarkable. But artists know it’s why they are here, so they do everything in their power to hone their ability to ready themselves to deliver more stories within the long human narrative.
Besides hearing the songs off of Woodland live, there were a few other high points for me. They led with “Elvis Presley Blues”, which is a brilliant, understated tribute to Elvis and his country roots. It’s always been a favorite of mine.
“Ruby” is another phenomenal song they played early in the first set. This song is off of one of the Dave Rawlings Machine albums and is stunningly beautiful. Rawlings and Welch are at their breathtaking best when it comes to the harmonies on this one. I got a bit teary hearing them sing these harmonies live and in person.
“Time (The Revelator)” is one of my favorite songs off the album of the same name, which is the album that started my Gillian Welch fandom. It was released in 2001, so you do the math. Hearing this song live was decades in the making and a truly thrilling experience.
And to take it back to the folk tradition, they finished with the old song, “I’ll Fly Away”, a song written in the late ‘20s that has found its way into the canon of folk and country standards. It was a sing-a-long, as it should be, that connects your voice to the voices of the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Appalachian church choirs, southern gospel singers, and anyone whoever learned to play and sing at the Old Town School of Folk Music a few miles south of Evanston, in my home neighborhood of Lincoln Square. It’s a song of hope. It’s a song of redemption. It’s a song that acknowledges the suffering of human days, but calls you to sing out anyway.
It was a beautiful moment of connection to different people, different times, collective sorrows, and collective hopes. It was a fitting cap to a night of gloriously transporting music that spoke directly to all that the human condition is, was, and might one day be.
I couldn’t distill all of that down to a hashtag if I tried!